Meta’s New Virtual Reality Glasses: Some First Thoughts

Well, I was going to write my next blogpost about how I am using Claude AI and Undermind to research my OER textbook on the metaverse, but then I lay down on the sofa and pulled up Google News on my trusty iPad, only to see much hullabaloo about Meta’s new lightweight VR glasses, so I guess I’m gonna be talking about that today:

You gotta hand it to Meta; they do know how to grab attention (and they have deep enough pockets from vacuuming up and selling every shred of personal data of its 3 billion users to pay for this news media onslaught!) CEO Mark Zuckerberg probably found the money in his couch cushions. 😉

Now, before I say anything else, I am going to preface this by saying that, when it comes to Meta and their line of virtual reality headsets, I am sorely conflicted. The hardware (particularly the Meta Quest 3) is amazing for the price. It’s the surveillance capitalism that underlying this amazing hardware that’s the problem.

It’s enough money that Mark Zuckerberg can afford to drop billions of dollars on what ultimately became the utter failure of social VR platforms Horizon Worlds, and Horizon Workrooms. Proof positive that deep pockets and executive fiat cannot force the populace to accept something that looked and felt like it was constructed by handsomely-compensated engineers being directed by even-more-handsomely-compensated executive committees. Horizon Worlds (which still limps along on a last-minute reprieve, although it is on life support), and Horizon Workrooms (the dog which Meta thankfully took out behind the shed and shot earlier this year) somehow managed to be both dreadfully cartoonish and utterly soulless at the same time.

Meta lost me back in the days when they bought out Oculus, and then insisted that users of Oculus VR headsets (I owned an Oculus Rift at the time) had to get a Facebook account in order to continue use the devices. I responded by binning my Rift and switching to a Valve Index (which I use at home) and a Vive Pro 2 (which currently sits collecting dust at work while I am on my research and study leave). Frankly, I don’t use PCVR (i.e. a tethered VR headset attached to a high-end gaming PC) nearly as much as I used to.

Partly it’s because I am still enamoured with my Apple Vision Pro, and partly it’s because I finally understand something fundamental about the first generation of social VR: nobody wants to wear something on their face. Both Philip Rosedale (High Fidelity, now long shuttered) and Linden Lab (Sansar, miraculously still limping along after being sold) bet the farm that hundreds of thousands of people would take up PCVR and visit their metaverse platforms—a bet which they lost, badly.

Which brings me back to Meta and their announcement of lightweight virtual reality glasses, which apparently was announced this evening, while I was engaged in research-related chatter with Claude and Undermind:

The teaser video for Meta VR Glasses (coming soon!)

The link in this video for the product called simply Meta VR Glasses takes you to the following page, where you can sign up if you really want to be spammed to death because you didn’t bother to read Meta’s eye-wateringly detailed 5,474-word Terms of Service and their 6,611-word Privacy Policy, before blithely agreeing to part with your name and email address:

How do I know this? Well, Meta smartly won’t let you paste those two web pages into a word counter website (something I am sure many commenters have tried before me!):

But they can’t stop me from cutting and pasting the entire text into Microsoft Word, and getting a word count from there:

Meta’s Terms of Service document (approsimately 5,500 words)
Meta’s Privacy Policy (weighing in at over 6,500 words) might just be heavier than its new VR glasses 😂

Most people, rather than dig through approximately 12,000 words of legalese, would simply shrug and let Meta monitor them. I’m not going to bother (and I’m quite aware that, even though I haven’t touched Facebook in many years, they still have some sort of profile on me anyways). But I’m damned if I’m going to deliberately add to that treasure trove of data points, sliced and diced and sold to the highest bidder.

Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is already in deep, deep trouble with various countries over deliberately making its products addictive to both children and adults. And that colours how I look at whatever hardware Meta is trumpeting. But hey, let’s take a quick look at it anyways. I am only going to cite one source in this blogpost; I will probably come back ’round and write more later.

David Heaney of UploadVR reports:

Meta VR Glasses were just officially announced. Priced at $1300*, they have 2.4K micro-OLED displays, weigh 100 grams, and are powered by a tethered puck with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset.

The puck runs the same operating system as Quest 3, and supports all the same content, rendered at notably higher resolution thanks to a combination of the more powerful chipset (essentially an XR2 Gen 3 by a different name) and eye-tracked foveated rendering. It features 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and there’s a microSD slot in the puck to expand it.

Foveated rendering is essentially this: the headset tracks where your eyes are looking and puts more pixels there, while pulling them away from where you’re not looking. It’s a bit of sleight of hand.

Also, that 100-gram weight is probably just the glasses themselves, which are doing what Apple did with the Apple Vision Pro, and diverting a lot of the weight of this device via a cable snaking down to what they are calling a puck in your pants pocket (a puck? really?!?? how many rectangular pucks have you seen???).

David continues:

The stark difference between Meta VR Glasses and any Quest, however, is the split architecture, and the dramatic reduction in weight and bulk this enables.

Meta VR Glasses have no onboard computing, not even a tracking coprocessor, and thus entirely rely on the puck, which provides both power and data over a thin and flexible fiber optic cable.

The visor has an open-periphery design, so you naturally see the real world to your sides and below you. It’s built with a magnesium alloy that minimizes weight while also enabling a fanless, passively cooled design that weighs “around” 100 grams.

Even David is using quotation marks. As the British like to say, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” and it will be interesting to see how closely they adhere to this promise (these glasses will not be shipping to consumers until spring of 2027).

The field of view of these glasses is also noticeably constrained (70° × 66°) compared to the Meta Quest 3 it replaces (110° × 96°). To compare, Claude AI tells me that “Apple has never published an official field of view for the Vision Pro, so all the numbers come from third-party measurements and optical modeling,” giving estimates of horizontal FOV as somewhere between 100-110°. While Apple hasn’t published any information themselves on the vertical FOV, two different sources cited by Claude give the varying figures of 77-90°, which shows you just how much these tech companies guard the details of their products! Which, of course, makes the VR YouTubers dig even harder!!

When prompted, Claude AI gives two rather different figures for the Apple Vision Pro’s vertical field of view.

But I digress. David finishes his report by stating:

Meta VR Glasses will also feature the first implementation of Hologram, the company’s productization of its Codec Avatars research. Similar to Apple Vision Pro’s Personas, it will let you join flatscreen WhatsApp video calls as a photorealistic face-tracked avatar, and appear as a full-scale realistic avatar in calls with other Meta VR Glasses (and eventually Quest 3) owners.

However, at launch in spring, your spatial Hologram will be a “2.5D” stereoscopic video stream, at true scale but only seen as a front-angle view. Even if you change your perspective, the Hologram will stay as a head-on perspective, like billboarded assets in a video game. Meta says it plans to evolve Hologram over time post-launch to become a truly 6DoF 3D system, at which point it will become the default platform-level avatar experience for its VR platform, effectively superseding the cartoon Meta Avatars.

Frankly, three degrees of freedom and a “2.5D” spatial Meta Hologram do not sound anything like the continually-improving (and frankly, sometimes unnerving quality) of Personas on the Apple Vision Pro. While chatting with people via the InSpaze app in my AVP, have often completely forgotten that I am not really looking at them, but instead at their scanned and animated Personas! Apple really has done a masterful job of capturing the high end of the VR market, just as Meta has captured the low end with its Meta Quest 1, 2, then 3 headsets (we don’t talk about the Meta Quest Pro 😉).

I will reserve final judgement on these new VR glasses until I have viewed a few of the aforementioned virtual reality YouTubers’ opinions on the device (and until they actually ship the damn thing). As far as I am concerned, Meta has shit the bed so badly in their lamentable history of past (and current!) user privacy issues surrounding their products, that I honestly don’t have the slightest inclination to even try these out. I’ll be hanging out in my Apple Vision Pro or my venerable Valve Index instead.

Sorry, Meta.

Image source: UploadVR (no doubt via Meta).

*U.S. dollars (which currently works out to $1,833 Canadian as of this evening):

And you can bet that this price will not include all the necessary little extras.

The Narcissist

Narcissus, oil painting by Baroque artist Caravaggio, depicting Narcissus gazing upon the water after falling in love with his own reflection. (source: Wikipedia)

The only good thing about encountering a narcissist is that, once you’ve tangled with one, you can spot the next narcissist’s playbook a mile away. Why? Because they are pretty much all the same. The narcissist’s playbook consists of several distinct steps:

  1. Lovebombing the chosen victim, including isolating them from friends and family;
  2. Devaluing/denigrating/criticizing the victim, often instigating drama and discord, and when called out on it, using a technique called DARVO: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender;
  3. Discarding the victim (but usually not until the narcissist has extracted everything they can from the victim, and another, better victim comes along).

Sometimes, a person who is raised by a narcissist (or someone with narcissistic tendencies) becomes a compulsive people pleaser, falling victim to a narcissist later in life (in a relationship, or at work, or elsewhere in their lives). Often, it is only via therapy that the victim realizes the pattern—and can identify some of their own narcissistic thinking patterns (one of mine was, “if I am perfect, I can get everything I want.”) Compulsive people pleasers often have no real sense of who they are until some sort of crisis hits, forcing them to confront the fact that they have twisted themselves out of shape to keep someone else happy. And it’s a pattern that tends to repeat until you identify it, learn the lesson(s), and correct it.

You might think that a narcissist loves you, but you would be wrong. A narcissist loves nobody but themselves. Actually, that’s not true. They don’t even love themselves, but they would rather die than admit that. They are hollow, shallow, envy-and-hate-riddled people, who sow chaos and discord and wreak havoc in families, businesses, communities, and even entire countries (often while proclaiming themselves as perfect and blameless). It’s never the narcissist’s fault; it’s always YOU (remember, DARVO).

Narcissists cannot be cured, because they refuse to see themselves as the problem. The only way to deal with a narcissist is to cut them out of your life, and grey rock them (i.e. minimize or eliminate engagement; don’t give them any bait). This tends to drive the narcissist crazy, because they no longer feel that they can control you, so they might redouble their efforts. Resist anyway. Rebuild support elsewhere, accept that the narcissist cannot change, and prioritize your own good self-care.

Unfortunately, that might also mean cutting out whoever the current victim is, as well, as long as they are still under the narcissist’s spell, breathing the same air as the narcissist, agreeing with everything they say, and living within the resulting reality distortion field. You might not be able to help them, but you can save yourself. Cut them off. Maybe they will eventually see sense (unfortunately, usually not until after they have been discarded and can see the situation with clarity).

You might ask how I know all this. And I will tell you this: I know it because I lived it, and once you learn how a narcissist operates, and learn from it, you can spot the next one a light-year away, because the playbook is always the same.

That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
—The Narcissist’s Prayer

I wrote this blog post because this evening I saw a film at Winnipeg’s 2SLGBTQIA+ film festival, Reel Pride, called Solo (2023, directed by Sophie Dupuis; Canadian, French with English subtitles).

It’s a film about drag queens, but it’s really a story about how a young man slowly realizes (without putting it into words) that that there are two narcissists in his life: his boyfriend, and his mother. It’s a good film, and I can recommend it, even though I found myself so triggered by it that I skipped the second film, drove home, and wrote this blog post. Watching it dragged up some deeply unpleasant memories.

There’s lots of books out there about narcissists and narcissism. Go educate yourself (preferably before you encounter one). Start by learning about the Dark Triad (honestly, they should be teaching this shit in school). Oh, and our current social media hellscape is probably encouraging even more narcissism and other Dark Triad behaviour.

P.S. Another place to start your research would be Cluster B Personality Disorders, of which Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is one.

“What You Do Is Magic”: Carlos Austin Steps Out from Behind the Camera to Talk About His Work as a Filmmaker Capturing Live Events in Social VR

Like many other people, I have known Carlos Austin for as long as I have active in social virtual reality.

We first met in January 2018, as avatars in the social VR platform Sansar, at the virtual recreation of Intel’s booth at the real-life Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He was a cameraman for my short-lived but memorable stint as a host on the Metaverse Newscast, where I interviewed creators in both Sansar and High Fidelity (and honestly, we need to find some way to archive this slice of metaverse history!). Even though we have yet to meet in the real world, we have spent numerous hours together in various virtual worlds over the past decade, and we have become good friends. Carlos is often the source—or the instigator!— for many of the blogposts on the RyanSchultz.com blog.

As part of a monthly series of presentations hosted by Thomas Zorbach of IMMERSIVE-X, called X-Nights, Carlos was invited to come out from behind the camera and talk about his work as a filmmaker, capturing live events on a multitude of social VR platforms, both past and present.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this event (held yesterday, Sept. 10th, 2026 in VRChat) in person, but Carlos sent me the livestream recording, from which I took the following screenshots to share with you all. (Please click on any image in this gallery to see it in a larger size. You can find the video at the bottom of this blogpost, or here on YouTube.)

Here’s a partial transcript from just a part of this livestream, where Jason Moore of the MetaMovie project (which I have written about before on this blog), talks about Carlos and his pioneering work:

So, Carlos and I met in 2017, I think, in High Fidelity. As you probably have all met Carlos, he somehow found his way onto our set. We were rehearsing [pre-Alien Rescue, MetaMovie’s first production] and he just started taking pictures. And then at the end of the rehearsal, he sent me over this amazing album of all the pictures from the rehearsal, and it was all professional. So we immediately hit it off. We we both study and love live multicam television. Carlos has been a friend and a and a helper and a colleague for for so long.

When we got around to the stage of finally finishing up Alien Rescue and starting to launch it to the public, I had always had a fantasy about doing live multicam in VR. And it’s something that Carlos and I would talk about. [Metaverse platform] Resonite is this very special engine where you can really build just about anything you can imagine. So, I shopped around and I found some developers who were willing to try to build a bespoke VR multicam system. And it it was not easy.

Actually, it took us almost a year to kind of get this thing tuned up. Carlos was there the whole way, telling us exactly what he would need or what he would want and how he would want to use this thing. It was developed by the lead programmer for Secrets of Gar, the project we’re working on now. And we we ended up with this technology that was kind of an infinite multicam switcher. You could add as many cameras as you wanted. You could pin cameras to performers, getting a frontal medium shot or even an over-the-shoulder shot. You could assign the cameras to camera operators who could fly around invisibly in the world. And Carlos could attach it to his avatar and um kind of direct by just pointing at all of the screens on the fly.

There is a lot of technology going on in here. And you know, Carlos and I probably spent hundreds and hundreds of hours just thinking through, you know, the kind of work that we do like the Ferryman . It’s kind of live. It’s it’s acting. It’s moving. It’s action-packed. There’s a lot of stuff going on. Trying to get that all covered and and livestreamed out in a cinematic way to Twitch, which is what our workflow was.

Conceptually, it took many, many months just to figure out what the right approach was. And then technically, I think we told each other, Carlos, you know, the first twenty times we did it, we kept saying, “Okay, this was awful. This didn’t work. This is fine, but we’re learning every single time.” And it wasn’t until about thirty shows in until I think we finally both thought like, “Oh, shoot. This is really starting to come together.”

I tell Carlos all the time that what he does, on a technical level, nobody else on this planet is doing. He understands both visual storytelling, live broadcasting, and the immersive world in a way that I don’t know anybody else who does.

Deirdre Lyons and the Ferryman Collective won a 2026 Emmy Award for the live VR theatrical production Uncanny Alley: A New Day in the Outstanding Emerging Media Program category (you can purchase tickets for the show here). She was effusive in her praise of Carlos, stating:

Can I just say that this lovely, lovely, fabulous gentleman I’ve known since I’ve gotten into VRChat and um started doing all of this stuff and has helped us out so many times that I can’t even begin to thank you, who even jumped on and helped us do a recording to help us get the [Emmy] nomination and all of that. So, this guy is has my heart and always hosts a great event at South by Southwest when we’re there and makes the backyard feel like an XR Social Club in real life. So, just thank you, Carlos. You are a gentleman and a scholar.

Or, to put it simply, as Thomas Zorbach, the organizer of the event, said: “What you do is magic.”

Here’s the YouTube video of Carlos’ presentation, from which I gained a much deeper understanding and appreciation of how he works, and I hope you do as well (and yes, he recorded his own speech using the multicam technique he talks about!):

What does it take to film a live event inside a virtual world?

VR filmmaker Carlos Austin has spent years developing techniques for capturing talks, concerts, conferences, and multi-day events such as IMMERSIVE X across social VR platforms. Working with multiple virtual cameras and camera operators, he directs and switches between shots in real time – creating a finished broadcast in TV quality that turns immersive events into compelling experiences for audiences watching on a 2D screen, while the event itself is still happening.

In this X-NIGHT, Carlos takes us behind the virtual lens and into the emerging craft of live VR filmmaking. He’ll share how multi-camera productions work inside social VR, how virtual cinematography differs from filming in the physical world, and what he has learned from documenting events across platforms including VRChat, ENGAGE, Resonite, Rec Room, Horizon Worlds, Sansar, and Wave.

Oh, and don’t forget that the 2026 IMMERSIVE X Festival is also coming up, from November 10th to 12th, 2026. You can check out the calendar here. I wrote about last year’s festival/conference here, here, and here.

P.S. The audience also sang Happy Birthday to Carlos, as Sept. 10th was also his birthday. Happy belated birthday, Carlos!

Happy birthday, Carlos! (Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash)

The End of Summer and The Start of Work: MUDs and MOOs and Habitat!

An example of a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), an early text-based virtual world

Yesterday, Labour Day, marks the traditional end of summer here in Canada. While my research and study leave commenced July 1st, 2026, almost all of my first two months were taken up with two monumental tasks: grieving the loss of my mother in late June, and decluttering and cleaning up my apartment. I needed to take my time and energy to work through the pain, and (literally) to throw out the crap in my life.

Now that that necessary work is (mostly) done, I can focus on my research and study leave. I know that I am a fortunate man, to be able to take the next ten months and do a deep-dive on a topic that already interests and excites me: virtual worlds, social VR/AR, and the metaverse.

Here’s just a teaser:

(And no, I am not going to commit to anything until I have settled a few key issues, such as what publishing platform I am going to use for my Open Educational Resource textbook; it would appear that the province-wide consortium using Pressbooks has shut down while I was grieving my mother, so for now all my writing is in Microsoft Word. Wish me luck!)

For those of you using screen readers, the text in the above image reads as follows:

CHAPTER 1: Before the Headsets: Text Worlds, MUDs, and the Dream of Cyberspace

While countless popular articles, books, and websites, and hundreds of academic papers, have been published about the metaverse (including those published before Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, works which described the concept under other names), the nebulous and ever-evolving usage of the term has muddied rather than clarified things. What is the metaverse?

I think it’s best that we start with some back story. A little history lesson, explaining where this compelling but elusive idea(l) came from. Key components of the metaverse—avatars, virtual communities, and virtual economies—date back further than you might think.

(Please note; while I will be liberally sprinkling this text with my own experiences and opinions, this first chapter relies more on my research and reading, instead than my own personal experience. The real world/virtual world duality I mentioned in my preface to this book only began in March of 2007, when I first encountered Second Life, which will be the focus of the next chapter.)

In the Beginning Was the Word: Text-Based Virtual Worlds

Yep, you got it; I will doing a deep dive into MUDs and MOOs and other pre-graphical virtual worlds of the 1980s and 1990s! You gotta know where you came from before you know where you are now, and figure out where you’re going. So, I have a lot of reading ahead of me (not that I’ve ever minded that).

After that, I will be looking at the very first graphical virtual worlds that pre-dated Second Life (which will be the focus of chapter 2 of my book). Among these almost-forgotten early virtual worlds was Lucasfilms Habitat, which demonstrated a working avatar economy 17 years before Second Life came along.

Lucasfilms Habitat walked so Second Life could run!

Check out this eight-minute ad for Habitat from 1986, the year the platform launched in beta test, connecting users on their Commodore 64 microcomputers:

I figure all this research is probably going to take me most of the month, but I plan to have fun doing it!

UPDATE 7:00 p.m.: While searching my university library system’s online catalogue for an old 2003 book on virtual world design, I was overjoyed to discover that the author, Dr. Richard A. Bartle, has recently published a brand-new, completely revised and updated second edition of Designing Virtual Worlds! I’ve just started reading it and it is well-written, witty, and absolutely bang on for my research (he even includes several chapters on virtual world history). Perfect timing!

Here’s the citation if you want to buy it or obtain it from your local library:

Bartle, R. A. (2026). Designing Virtual Worlds: Volume I (Second edition). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003689638

I suspect that I will be quoting Bartle’s book often in my own work, and making good use of his extensive bibliography. Here’s a particularly pertinent quote from the aforementioned history of virtual worlds:

Another reason that virtual world designers should appreciate the history of their art and profession is to counter the misguided belief that everything done in the past must be irrelevant because today’s virtual worlds are “different”. This is a surprisingly frequent but predictably monumental error. Brash designers coming in “to shake things up” may indeed shake things up – but not until they’ve repeated all the well‐known‐for‐decades errors that they didn’t think applied to their ideas because they gave virtual worlds a different label (“the Metaverse”) or a different interface (“VR”) or a different purpose (“education”).

—Bartle, R. A. (2026). Designing Virtual Worlds: Volume I (Second edition), p. 14