Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Meta Connect on Sept. 23 with two devices and one clear aim: to move his company’s AI agent out of a phone screen and into the physical world.
The first was the Meta VR Glasses, a headset the company says weighs about 100 grams and packs a 5K micro-OLED display into a frame far slimmer than its Quest headsets. The computing is handled not by the glasses themselves but by an external puck housing a Qualcomm processor and battery that clips onto the wearer’s belt. The device will sell for $1,299 and reach stores in the spring of 2027.
The second was the Muse Charm, a device about the size of a keychain that lets users summon Muse, Meta’s recently released AI agent, without unlocking a phone or opening an app. Zuckerberg offered few details on what it can do and did not name a price, saying only that Meta needed to finalise the components and planned to have it ready to ship for the December holiday season. “We’ve packed a lot of technology with this little guy,” he said.
Both devices assume a future in which talking to software replaces tapping at a screen. The pendant is aimed at people who are not wearing Meta’s glasses, which Zuckerberg called “by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse and to show it what’s going on around you.” The VR Glasses, for their part, are Meta’s first virtual-reality device since the $299 Quest 3S in 2024.
The push began earlier this month, when Meta released Muse with a simple pitch: a personal agent that could book tickets, sort email and act across the web. Within twelve days it had reached 2.8 million installs, according to Apptopia, overtaking ChatGPT as the top free iPhone app in the United States. Muse is free to use, with subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month for heavier usage, giving Meta a way to earn from AI that does not depend on advertising.
The hardware debut also carried a concession on privacy. Meta said it is making a version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses without a camera, a step that follows a stretch in which the company permanently disabled the cameras on thousands of pairs after users modified the recording indicator light. The camera-free model is aimed at users and venues that balk at being filmed, and it comes alongside a third-generation Ray-Ban line that starts at $249.
The scale of Meta’s ambition showed up the next day in the numbers. Fortune calculated on Sept. 24 that Meta’s 2026 capital expenditure could reach $145 billion, roughly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025. That figure, the magazine noted, exceeds the military budget of every country except the United States, China and Russia.
Meta is also widening where Muse can shop and act. The agent’s retail access has expanded to Walmart, Best Buy and Gap, among others. JPMorgan raised its price target on Meta shares to $920 the same week.
The devices mark how far Zuckerberg’s pitch has travelled since he renamed the company for the metaverse in 2021. That ambition is still present, but the centre of gravity at Connect has shifted toward agents, and the hardware is now built to give those agents a way into the world rather than the other way around.
The bet is that hardware gives an AI agent a body. A pendant that summons an agent without a phone, and a lightweight headset that puts computing on the hip rather than the face, both assume users will want to talk to software the way they now talk to screens. Analysts said the question is whether the devices sell, or simply signal where Meta believes the next platform will be.
Meta has tried this road before. Its Quest headsets built a niche but not the mass market the company once promised, and its camera glasses have drawn scrutiny over covert recording. The new lineup leans into that history rather than away from it, pairing the lightest VR device Meta has made with an agent that, for now, mostly lives in a phone.
The spending, too, has a direct link to the products. Every dollar Meta puts into data centres and chips is, in its telling, buying the intelligence that Muse and the new devices are supposed to carry. The hardware is the visible end of a capital plan that has grown every quarter this year.
Zuckerberg has raised the company’s capital-spending forecast three times this year, and the new devices are the clearest statement yet of where he believes that money leads. The hardware is the visible end of a plan that treats computing capacity as the foundation of the agent business.
Whether the hardware becomes a business is an open question. But the direction is hard to miss: Meta is spending like a company that expects agents to become the interface, and it is building the things it thinks people will hold when they do.
