Codec Avatars Are Becoming "Holograms," and They Are Landing in Horizon OS as a Calling Framework

Meta has been showing Codec Avatars at research events since 2019, and in all that time it has never given developers a surface to call. The demos were always the same shape: a photoreal head, a stage, a reporter saying it felt uncanny in a good way, and no answer to the only question that matters to anyone building software, which is whether this will ever be something an application can request rather than something Reality Labs shows off once a year. The interesting thing in this month's teardowns is not the rendering. It is the location of the code.

UploadVR's Luna found, in August 2026 builds of the Meta AI mobile app, what appear to be product tour videos for a feature called a Hologram, rendered on glasses resembling the Ray-Ban Display hardware rather than on a headset. That alone would be a naming story. The part that changes its weight is the second finding: multiple packages inside Horizon OS now carry sub-frameworks for something called Hologram Calling, and those frameworks reference Codec Avatars extensively.

Framework, not feature

Anyone who has shipped on a mobile platform knows the difference between a capability that lives inside one first-party application and a capability exposed as a system service, because the second one is the only version you can build against. A feature inside Meta's own calling app is a product decision that can be reversed in a release note. A framework sitting in the OS with a name, a package boundary, and sub-components is a commitment to an interface, and interfaces are expensive to walk back once third parties depend on them.

The closest analogy is what happened to voice calling on mobile. For years every VoIP app rendered its own call UI, managed its own audio session, and lost to the system dialer on every interruption, until the platform holder shipped a call framework and the entire category quietly reorganized itself around the OS primitive within about two releases. Whoever owns the framework owns the defaults. Meta appears to be positioning avatars the same way, as a system capability that any surface can invoke, rather than as the marquee feature of one social app that has already been reorganized twice.

The hardware this was originally built for no longer exists

The device context matters here because it explains why the avatar work is moving. Codec Avatars were reportedly the centerpiece of La Jolla, the Quest Pro successor Meta canceled, and the project that replaced it in the roadmap is the one now carrying the Phoenix codename, first reported by The Information back in 2024. An earlier prototype in that lineage, Puffin, was described in that reporting as a bulky pair of glasses weighing under 110 grams, an opaque headset with pancake lenses and passthrough cameras that hit its weight target by moving both the battery and the compute off the head onto a tethered puck. That last detail is the one worth holding onto, because Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR both offload the battery and neither offloads the processor.

So the avatar research outlived the headset it was specified for, got a consumer-facing name, and is being wired into the operating system that ships on hardware people already own. That sequence is more informative than any render.

What it does not tell you

There is no SDK. There is no API documentation, no developer session on a published agenda, no entitlement to request, and no statement from Meta that any of this exists. Strings and sub-frameworks in a shipping build are evidence of intent and nothing more, and the archive is full of Horizon OS features that were fully plumbed and never announced. An announcement without an SDK date is a tease, and this is not yet even an announcement.

It is worth registering a disagreement with a colleague here. Alex Reeves argued in July that Phoenix's central problem is a weight budget, which is true as far as it goes. The harder problem may be a product one. A puck-tethered device has to justify itself against a Quest 3 that already sits on the shelf at a fraction of the price, and photoreal telepresence that works across glasses, phones and headsets is the most plausible answer anyone has put on the board so far. If that is the pitch, the framework has to land before the hardware does, which is roughly what the firmware is showing.

Connect runs September 23 and 24. If you are shipping something social in the next six months, the useful thing to watch for is not a headset reveal. It is whether Meta names Hologram Calling on stage and then publishes anything a third-party application can actually call, because those two events have historically been separated by a year or more, and everything you can build against lives in the gap between them.