Meta’s Connect keynote on Tuesday laid out a sweeping vision for the company’s next phase: lighter, more capable hardware paired with generative-AI features that will make augmented and virtual experiences feel more immediate and conversational. The centerpiece was a new head-mounted device—named the Quest 4—that Meta says delivers marked gains in comfort, visuals and real-world integration.

“The Quest 4 is designed to be less like a headset you put on and more like a window that opens,” Mark Zuckerberg said on stage, describing improvements Meta credits to refined optics, higher-resolution displays and fresh battery engineering that together shave weight and bulk. The company announced a global launch this fall with a starting price of $499, positioning the device to compete on price and capability with both last-generation standalones and tethered PC headsets.

Meta also debuted an updated line of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, produced with Luxottica, that add a lightweight augmented-reality layer intended for heads-up navigation, contextual information and brief notifications. Priced at $299 and slated for a summer release, the glasses are explicitly pitched as an everyday wearable rather than a headset for full immersion.

Underpinning the new hardware is a suite of software and services. Meta rolled out an upgraded Presence Platform with developer tools aimed at making spatial anchors, mixed-reality overlays and AI-driven scene understanding easier to build and monetize. The company demonstrated live translation, environment-aware assistants and a conversational “Meta AI” avatar that can answer questions about what users see or suggest actions within apps.

Andrew Bosworth, head of Meta Reality Labs, framed the strategy around immediate utility: “We want to remove friction between the physical and digital—helping people get things done without pulling out a phone.” He said many of the AI features will run on-device or in hybrid modes to reduce latency and limit raw data streamed to Meta’s cloud.

Despite Meta’s assurances, the announcements drew scrutiny from privacy advocates and researchers who say even on-device processing can create new vectors for surveillance and commercial profiling. Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, praised the technological leap but warned: “More realistic avatars and ambient AI increase the stakes for consent, identity theft and social manipulation. Those are not engineering problems alone.”

Financial context also framed the event. Reality Labs has been a major investment sink for Meta, and executives signaled that broader adoption is essential to justify continuing losses. The company stressed new commerce features and subscription options intended to help developers earn revenue in virtual spaces, while making a point of rolling out content-moderation improvements and third-party oversight commitments.

Regulators will be watching. Lawmakers have already questioned how biometric and attention data collected by AR devices could be used. Meta said it will publish technical white papers on data handling and offer tools for users to opt out of certain data-sharing modes, but independent audits and stronger legal safeguards will likely be demanded by privacy groups.

For consumers, the announcements bring mixed blessings: more polished, useful mixed-reality tools arriving at lower price points, coupled with renewed concerns about how immersive tech will be governed. Meta’s gamble now is whether developers and the public will embrace the company’s blended hardware-and-AI platform before scrutiny limits its ambitions.