Meta Connect 2024 preview: budget VR, AR glasses, and heavy AI pushes

Meta is getting ready to host its annual Connect developer conference on September 25th and 26th, and Mark Zuckerberg's keynote looks packed with cheaper headsets, secret AR glasses, and a mountain of AI features.

Here is what is on the table, what leaked, and why Meta's playbook is suddenly looking very sharp.

A $300 Quest and a glimpse at Orion

The marquee device is almost certainly the Quest 3S. While the Quest 3 launched at $500 and left some underwhelmed by its grainy passthrough, leaked pricing puts the 3S at $299.99, slotting right above the aging $200 Quest 2.

Meta is also expected to offer a teaser of its Orion augmented reality glasses. Snap recently showed off its own developer-only AR Spectacles, which a former engineer bluntly called obviously bad, so the bar is wide open for Meta to show what real AR glasses could look like.

On the audio-visual side, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are ripe for an iterative hardware touch-up alongside fresh Meta AI conversational features. Meanwhile, reports suggest Meta put its 2027 pro-level spatial computing headset, dubbed La Jolla, on ice after Apple struggled to sell the $3,500 Vision Pro, leaving Quest 4 slated for 2026.

Llama takes over software while gaming pivots

On the software side, Meta is sunsetting its legacy AR filter tools in favor of generative AI developer toolkits. Expect heavy demos of Meta AI powered by its newest Llama model and WhatsApp image generation, alongside updates to Horizon Worlds.

The gaming narrative, however, feels split. Meta recently shuttered Ready at Dawn, the studio behind beloved 3D title Echo VR, while pushing casual games like Wordle and launching an app to pipe console games into Quest via HDMI.

Why it matters

Meta seems to have learned the lesson Apple is still learning the hard way: luxury mixed reality is a dead end without a mass audience. Freezing the high-end La Jolla project and launching the Quest 3S at $299.99 shows a company willing to give up vanity specs to capture normal consumers.

For users, a $300 MR headset combined with HDMI console support makes the Quest 3S an impulse-buy portable screen rather than an expensive tech gamble. For developers and rivals, Meta is squeezing the low-end hardware market while embedding its proprietary Llama models across wearable devices.

The clear risk, however, is Meta's gaming identity. Shutting down premiere game studios while promoting Wordle and HDMI inputs suggests Meta still does not know what native VR experiences people actually want to stick with long-term.