Meta Connect 2026: The biggest news and announcements

Walking around Meta Connect 2026, everyone’s sporting smart glasses in all sorts of shapes, colors, and sizes. It’s a marked difference here, a tech bubble where “pervert glasses” are not a concern.

Outside Connect, the public backlash against wearable surveillance tech — a catchall term that encompasses not just smart glasses, but also smartwatches and AI pendants — is gaining steam. So it’s incredibly curious timing that this year, the company is launching Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses: smart glasses infused with Meta AI, but with no camera for recording others.

Meta has a new plan to get people to make games for its Horizon social platform. The company today announced two new development tools that will let you create games with AI prompts: Horizon Create, a mobile app, and Horizon Studio, a browser app that offers more granular controls. The apps will be available in early access, and interested users can sign up for a waitlist.

Horizon has struggled as a platform, but Meta has a plan to give these new Horizon games significantly more reach: It’s going to let published games made with Horizon Create and Horizon Studio get recommended on Facebook and Instagram, where they also will be playable.

Meta’s handheld AI gadget, called the Muse Charm, will be able to recognize and interact with other nearby Charms when it launches later this year. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, which includes more details about the device that the company teased during its Meta Connect keynote on Wednesday.

The Muse Charm houses the company’s buzzy Muse AI agent and comes with a built-in 5G modem, meaning you won’t need to connect to Wi-Fi to interact with the AI agent, according to Bloomberg. It will come with a two-inch OLED touchscreen, a new operating system, and a fingerprint sensor you can use to start interacting with Muse AI.

Meta is building a dedicated hardware device for its new Muse AI agent. The product, called Muse Charm, was briefly shown off by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the end of tonight’s Meta Connect presentation. It looks almost like a chunky smartwatch without the strap — just a big screen, plus a little lanyard for carrying the device around.

The Muse Charm has a fingerprint sensor on the top right corner that you can press to activate and begin speaking to the agent. There appears to be a small camera on the device as well, plus what looks like at least three holes for microphones on the front. Zuckerberg said you don’t have to unlock a phone or open an app to use the Charm, but he didn’t share how it’s actually connecting to Meta’s servers.

Meta announced a slate of new wearables during its annual Meta Connect showcase on Wednesday. The star of the event was the new Meta VR Glasses, which pack virtual reality tech into a lightweight smart glasses-style frame with a tethered puck. Meta also announced new pairs of screen-free smart glasses, along with some new AI features and style and frame options.

You can catch up on all the highlights from this year’s Meta Connect below.

Meta is launching new VR hardware: a pair of glasses. The new Meta VR Glasses sit on your ears like a typical pair of glasses instead of being strapped over your head, but they still have immersive displays for watching movies, playing games, and getting work done. Imagine a pair of hefty black sunglasses with blacked-out lenses on the outside, but the components of a typical VR headset distributed between the device on your head and a computing puck in your pocket.

The idea is to give you a way to experience VR in a much lighter and more approachable form factor than Vision Pro or Meta Quest-style headsets. I got to try the VR Glasses at Meta’s campus this week, and as Meta walked me through some familiar VR demos like watching content, playing a game, and working from multiple screens, I was impressed by how much lighter the whole experience felt. Some of that was about the literal weight, as the glasses come in at just 100g, far less than the Quest 3’s 515g. But there was also something lighter in a more intangible way: the glasses form factor made the headset seem like something I could easily jump in and out of instead of being a whole cumbersome commitment with big head straps. It felt like a lightweight Vision Pro, and is perhaps a better execution of some of what Apple wanted to do with that device.

Just a couple of weeks after launching Muse, Meta announced that it’s “working on” bringing the agent to its smart glasses, including the new glasses it unveiled at Meta Connect. Users will be able to activate Muse from their glasses by saying its name and ask it to handle tasks like guiding a workout, logging meals, or helping them shop for products they’re looking at.

Muse is just one of several major updates coming to Meta’s glasses. They’re also getting some new accessibility features, like a Hearing Enhancement feature Meta says is “FDA-cleared software for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss.” It will be available later this year with a Meta One subscription or as a $149 add-on for compatible glasses. Meta AI will also be able to give “more context-rich answers” when users ask the glasses what they’re looking at, potentially making Meta’s glasses more effective for helping blind and low-vision users interpret their surroundings. A new audio customization feature will also allow users to shift their smart glasses’ volume between their left and right ears, including sending all audio to one side.

Meta is quickly iterating on its new Muse AI agent, announcing a bunch of updates today that make the bot more capable and able to chat with you in more ways.

Muse agents are getting their own email addresses that they can use for accomplishing tasks. You’ll also be able to communicate with your Muse agent over the new email addresses, too. In addition, the recently launched Muse Mac app will be getting the ability to use your computer.

It’s time once again for Meta’s annual September product launch event, and The Verge is on the ground in Menlo Park to cover the show live. Meta says that today’s keynote by Mark Zuckerberg will be about how “Meta is building a future for everyone” — something he wrote at length about in a recent essay about AI, smart glasses, and more. That means we can expect more news from Zuckerberg and his team on those topics; perhaps we’ll hear more about Meta’s recently launched Muse AI agent and new glasses hardware.

Whatever Zuckerberg and Meta have to say about smart glasses will be particularly notable. The company is dealing with an outpouring of privacy and harassment concerns stemming from the product line’s built-in camera, which has led to them being derided as “pervert glasses.” Meta has already tried to tackle that reputation with recent privacy fixes and a new marketing campaign, but it could introduce more updates on the Connect stage.

Modern life comes with an unending, auto-populating to-do list.

It never ceases to amaze me how I can be doing nothing at all, minding my own business, and suddenly something needs to be taken care of. You’re telling me a tree branch fell in the backyard and now I have to figure out what to do with it? The tree just assigned me homework? Oh, our trash collection company canceled our account out of nowhere and now I have to send email about it? Repeatedly? Totally unfair.