Meta plans to deliver an extremely lightweight mixed reality headset in 2027, The Information reports.
The new report from Information comes less than a week after it was reported that Mark Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth had canceled a high-end headset planned for 2027 under the codename La Jolla, which previous reports had described as a Quest Pro 2.
Meta Reportedly Canceled Quest Pro 2
Meta has reportedly canceled the high-end headset it was planning for 2027 due to the high cost of its micro-OLED displays.
According to the new report, at the same product roadmap review meeting where Zuckerberg and Bosworth canceled La Jolla, they greenlit a very different headset named Puffin, with the same target year of 2027.
Puffin reportedly looks like “a big pair of goggles” and weighs less than 110 grams, but it’s an opaque virtual reality headset with pancake lenses and pass-through cameras. Its remarkably light weight is apparently achieved by offloading both the battery and computing hardware to an external puck, which Meta “hopes” will be small enough to fit in the user’s pocket.
If the report is accurate, Puffin will be significantly lighter than any other fully functional VR headset released to date. For comparison, the Meta Quest 3 weighs about 400 grams without its straps and facial interface, and about 515 grams with them. Of that weight, the battery accounts for about 70 grams.
The report describes Puffin as not including controllers, but instead using the gaze-and-pinch input scheme introduced by Apple Vision Pro. Given that The Information also reported that Meta is planning two Quest 4 models for 2026, this strongly suggests that Puffin will be an entirely new product line, perhaps focused on media and productivity use cases, competing directly with Apple Vision headsets at a much lower price point.
