Meta Connect 2026: Date, Time, What to Expect, and Everything We Know

Last updated: September 6, 2026

Part of our VR, AR and XR events calendar. See also the Steam Frame hub for the launch landing the day before, and our Quest 4 tracker.

Meta Connect 2026 runs September 23 to 24, with the keynote on Wednesday the 23rd and developer sessions on the 24th, streamed from Meta's Menlo Park campus. Meta announced the dates on May 28 and teased a new pair of smart glasses in the same breath. It did not tease a headset, and the roadmap explains why: the gaming Quest 4 is pointed at the second half of 2027 and the ultralight Puffin headset at the first half, so anything Meta shows on stage is a preview, not a product. Expect a glasses-led keynote, a Horizon OS software story built around Hologram calling and AI, and a headset tease at most. This page tracks every signal until the show and becomes the everything-announced recap afterward.

Dates, time, and how to watch

Registration for the free livestream is open at meta.com/connect, which frames the show as a two-day livestream about "AI technologies, AI glasses and VR," in that order. Meta has not posted a keynote start time yet. Coverage of the May announcement pointed to a late-afternoon Pacific slot, which would put it in the evening for the US East Coast and overnight for Europe; we will update this table when Meta commits to a time.

What Meta has actually said

Two things. The May 28 save-the-date promised "the latest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI" and a look at Meta's "next computing platform," and it carried an image of an unnamed pair of smart glasses. Then in July, CTO Andrew Bosworth told Quest owners to stay tuned for Connect because there would be more to share about Meta's next headsets. That is the entire official record. Everything else on this page is reporting, roadmap leaks, and inference.

What the roadmap allows on stage

Meta is building two headsets and neither ships this year. The traditional Quest 4 effort was rebooted under the codename Griffin after the Pismo prototypes were scrapped, and reporting puts it no earlier than the second half of 2027. The more interesting device is the ultralight, puck-tethered headset that has gone by Puffin, Loma and Phoenix, tracking toward the first half of 2027 at under 110 grams on the face and reportedly under $1,000, aimed at media, social and fitness rather than headline gaming. Meta has shown future hardware years early before, so a Puffin preview is plausible. A Quest 4 you can order is not.

Glasses are where Meta has momentum to show off, and the tease says it knows that. The credible candidates are a successor or cheaper sibling to Ray-Ban Display, which opened to third-party developers in May, more of the neural wristband, and whatever "wearables" covers beyond eyewear. Bloomberg's May report that the next Display was pulled into the first quarter of 2027 makes a Connect preview the natural first look. On the software side, Hologram Calling frameworks are already sitting in Horizon OS with product tours in the Meta AI app, which is the shape of a feature staged for a keynote demo.

The day before: Steam Frame

Valve's stated summer window for the Steam Frame ends September 22, the day before the keynote, and two of the Frame's Steam backend packages were revised on September 3, the same move that preceded Steam Machine reservations by six days. So the likeliest sequence is a Steam Frame lottery in the second week of September, first units in mid September, and Meta walking on stage a week later with no new headset to sell against a 185 gram SteamOS device that streams the entire Steam catalog. Bosworth said in May that Meta would learn from the Steam Frame. Connect is the first chance to see what that means. Our Steam Frame vs Quest 3 comparison covers the two headsets that will actually be on sale that week.

Every Connect 2026 signal, dated