Tech companies have gradually invaded the film festival space, but Meta’s secret new project was a perfect fit for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, both because of its entertainment capabilities, and because it feels straight out of a movie. Not far from where I’d soon watch the new Zack Snyder film, a makeshift gallery played host to covert keynote presentations, each with an audience of one, as a well-dressed entertainment executive showed surprising candor.
“We are… self-aware,” she sighed. A strange way to begin a marketing pitch, but a surprisingly welcome one, as she echoed thoughts that have likely been on the mind of anyone who has thus far rejected the industry’s clunky VR-sphere, and its closed-off headsets akin to ski goggles. The Meta Quest (and like it, the Apple Vision Pro) haven’t exactly pivoted society towards Ready Player One, and perhaps we’re better for it. However, the reveal of Meta’s new entertainment-centric gizmo, Meta VR Glasses, arriving this spring, might just be enough of a departure to entice agonistics like myself, starting with the fact that wearing them doesn’t make you feel like you’re in an episode of Black Mirror.
They are, for all intents and purposes, a pair of slick dark glasses. They still have the noticeable bulge of a VR device, but they’re more along the lines of X-Men’s Cyclops than Johnny Mnemonic. These streamlined shades feature a cable leading to a “puck” the size of an iPhone, a battery-and-computer pack you can place in your pocket or handbag, or clip to your belt. Its 45W fast-charging will probably come in handy, since it only holds enough juice for three hours of continuous playback, but the dangling accessory isn’t too obtrusive a trade-off, given the device’s larger, heavier predecessors. The glasses themselves weigh only about a hundred grams — a quarter of a pound — compared to the five to six hundred grams of the Meta Quest.
The biggest upgrade from the Meta Quest, however, is the complete lack of hand-held controllers and the reliance on physical gestures instead. Apple’s equivalent already has this, but the Meta VR Glasses offer the chance to use these flicks and pinches without feeling like you’re in a Saw trap.
The initial adjustments seem pretty easy, between switchable nose pads of different sizes and lenses you can slide left and right to ensure they’re at the correct distance. There’s no official info on what to do if you wear glasses just yet, but some leaks out there suggest prescription lens capability is the plan. Tiny cameras alongside the glasses’ stems capture minor movements, like using your thumb to imitate scrolling on a touch remote, or pinching an invisible button, which in turn trigger and toggle menus affixed to the space around you. The cameras on the front re-create your regular vision, with a bit of a catch. The world around you gets noticeably noisier (as in, filled with digital noise) and the frame rate doesn’t exactly sync up with fluorescent lightbulbs, so you might see a bit of a flicker when looking past the floating UX at actual surfaces.
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