Meta brings holographic avatars to its new VR glasses and Ray-Ban Display

At its Connect conference on September 24, 2026, Meta announced it is bringing holographic avatars to its new VR glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display frames. The company also offered reporters a hands-on preview before the keynote, with one journalist describing the avatars as a notable improvement over what Meta first showed on its Orion prototype.

Setting up an avatar for the display-enabled glasses is done through the Meta AI app, using the phone camera to capture different angles of the face and answering a series of questions to sample the user's voice. Meta says the process takes about five minutes from start to finish. The avatars are powered by Meta's new Muse Realtime Avatar model, which uses the brief training session to approximate the user's facial expressions while speaking.

During a WhatsApp call, the reporter said they initially did not realize they were talking to an avatar, only noticing something unusual when looking more closely at the caller's background. Meta is adding a transparent watermark to all avatar video calls as a clear identifier.

For the new VR glasses, the approach is more ambitious. The device's inward-facing cameras and sensors can understand the wearer's facial expressions directly, so no separate expression training is needed, and the system can create a full-body avatar. The reporter described a call with a full-size hologram of a Meta product manager as more natural-looking than Apple's "persona" avatars, though there was still some distortion near the edges of the virtual figure and the avatars only show a frontal view.

Holographic avatars are in an "early preview" stage, and availability is currently limited to calls between users on the same type of device. Meta said the avatars could help people feel more presence during video calls. Early access for the Meta Ray-Ban Display is expected to arrive in fall 2026.