Meta finally set a concrete timeline to ship realistic avatars, called Holograms, its take on Apple Vision Pro's Personas.
It's now been more than seven years since Meta (then Facebook) first showed off a research prototype of realistic VR avatars, called Codec Avatars, and the company has repeatedly shown off improvements to this research in the years since. Yet throughout that time, its actual VR products you can buy have featured the often-ridiculed cartoonish avatars .
With the release of Meta VR Glasses in spring 2027, that's finally set to change. However, to be clear, the launch version of Hologram will not be a truly volumetric implementation of Codec Avatars.
Further, VR won't even be the first platform to get Holograms. A shoulders-up version of Hologram is coming to Meta Ray-Ban Display first, and then a full-body version will launch on Meta VR Glasses .
I briefly tried both at Meta Connect 2026.
Meta will first bring Hologram to Meta Ray-Ban Display, for WhatsApp calls, in early access in the US this fall.
To set up your Hologram, you hold up your smartphone with the Meta AI app open. After getting you to turn your head up, down, and to each side, the app provides you with open-ended questions, and you provide long-form expressive answers. As you're speaking, the system captures your facial expressions to condition the model. This includes incorporating your clothing and background, so you'll need to carefully pick what you want to be wearing in every Hologram call, and what you want your background to always be. After just a few minutes of server-side processing, your Hologram will be ready.
Once your Hologram is set up, when you make or receive a WhatsApp video call on Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, the other person will see a synthetic version of you, with its facial expressions entirely derived from your microphone input.