Tomorrow evening, Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at Meta’s Menlo Park campus for the Connect 2026 keynote — and this year the event has firmly outgrown its virtual reality roots. The agenda is now built around AI, smart glasses and wearables, with VR relegated to a supporting role.
The keynote begins at 4pm Pacific on Wednesday September 23 — that’s midnight UK time going into Thursday the 24th, if you’re planning to watch live. A developer-focused day follows on the 24th. Meta streams the whole thing online.
As always, almost nothing is officially confirmed beyond the schedule — but the reporting this year has been unusually detailed. Here’s what to watch for, working up the ladder of ambition.
Luna: the camera-free glasses
The device that may matter most has no camera, no display and no lens — but it does have six microphones. Codenamed Luna, this is a pair of camera-free smart glasses reportedly shipping this fall, built around voice and Meta’s AI assistant via a dedicated Meta AI button, with slimmer arms than the Ray-Ban line.
The absence of a camera is the whole point. After a punishing 18 months of privacy backlash over camera-equipped glasses — regulatory scrutiny, venue bans, public unease — Luna reads as a deliberate concession. It’s the pair Meta can sell, and demo, without triggering another round of “what is that recording?” It also lines Meta up against startups like Even Realities, which raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation over the summer selling exactly this kind of discreet, display-light eyewear.
The number to watch is price. Camera-free means fewer reasons to worry, but also fewer capabilities — so what Meta charges will decide whether Luna matters to anyone beyond the privacy conversation.
Artemis: the first real consumer AR glasses
One rung up sits Artemis — Meta’s internal name for what’s reported to be its first consumer augmented reality glasses, and arguably the most interesting thing on the bill. This is the productised descendant of Orion, the striking AR prototype Meta showed off to press last year but never sold.
Artemis is expected to be considerably sleeker than Orion, though with a narrower field of view than Orion’s 70-degree diagonal — the usual trade-off when a research prototype gets shrunk into something wearable. If Meta shows real consumer AR glasses tomorrow, that’s the headline: it’s the category everyone’s been circling, and the one Snap just planted a $2,195 flag in with Specs.
Project Phoenix: the hologram headset
At the top of the stack is Project Phoenix — the slim, glasses-shaped mixed reality headset we covered when its images leaked from Meta’s own firmware earlier this month. Rather than transparent lenses, Phoenix uses camera passthrough and offloads its compute to a separate tethered puck, keeping the headset itself light.
The rumoured showpiece is a live “hologram-style” video call, with Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth demonstrating photorealistic Codec Avatars — the technology Meta first teased with Orion two years ago, and has been chasing in its research labs for over a decade. Expect Phoenix to be a preview rather than a product you can buy this week; the roadmap points to a 2027 release.
The software thread: Muse
Tying it all together is Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent, expected to be positioned as the connective tissue across the whole hardware lineup. The published agenda already names Muse Spark sessions and an open-weight local model called Muse Glimmer, so AI development is a confirmed part of Connect even if the keynote specifics aren’t.
Our take
At AugmentedReality.com, what strikes us about this year’s line-up is how clearly it maps Meta’s hedge. Luna at the bottom (cheap, safe, camera-free), Artemis in the middle (real consumer AR at last), Phoenix at the top (the ambitious research play) — it’s a company covering every rung of the ladder because it genuinely doesn’t yet know which one consumers will climb.
The privacy overhang is the story underneath the story. Meta spent 18 months teaching the public to be wary of its cameras, and now it’s launching a camera-free pair partly to escape its own reputation. Whether buyers who “absorbed the privacy panic,” as one report put it, have shorter or longer memories than Meta’s product cycle is the question no one at Menlo Park seems keen to answer out loud.
We’ll be covering what actually gets announced once the keynote wraps. For now, the three names to remember are Luna, Artemis and Phoenix — entry, consumer AR, and the future, all on one stage.