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 often-ridiculed cartoonish avatars instead.
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. It's something quite different.
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. Then, a full-body version will launch with Meta VR Glasses.
I briefly tried both at Meta Connect 2026.
Hologram on Meta Ray-Ban Display
Meta will first bring Hologram to the Meta Ray-Ban Display HUD glasses, for WhatsApp video 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, and then to smile, the app provides you with open-ended questions, and you provide long-form expressive answers. As you're speaking, the system captures the appearance of 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 this synthetic version of you, with its facial expressions entirely derived from the device's microphones.
On a technical level, this is a real-time generative AI diffusion model running on Meta's servers, taking in your microphone audio stream and producing a generated 2D video stream that gets sent to the person you're calling.
I tried this at Meta Connect 2026, and was shocked by just how plausibly realistic what I saw was.
A Meta staffer, who had introduced himself a few minutes earlier, put on Meta Ray-Ban Display, walked to another room out of sight, and WhatsApp video called a phone in front of me. Upon picking up, for the first few seconds I assumed he simply hadn't put the glasses on yet. I thought I was seeing the view from his phone's selfie cam. But I wasn't. I was seeing his Hologram, driven entirely by his voice.
It's hard to shock me these days. I've seen a lot of impressive demos. But I let out a slight gasp at what I was seeing. It was entirely plausible.
Shortly after, I was able to try the other side. I wore the glasses, and Meta handed me the phone I was video calling. Being more familiar with my own appearance than that of the Meta staffer I had met only minutes ago, I could recognize the minor flaws here. The ways in which it didn't perfectly match me. But plausible is the key word. Hologram on Meta Ray-Ban Display does what it claims.
Still, I'm somewhat skeptical at the usefulness of this. Will your friends and loved ones really want to see a synthetic version of you on their phone screen, a surface where the advantages of spatial avatars don't apply?
Meta says that at some point in the future the model will be upgraded to incorporate the glasses' IMU chip as input, meaning the rotation of your Hologram's head will be driven by the gyroscope.
The company's engineers are also exploring the idea of sampling the camera on the glasses to generate a dynamic background for each call, instead of the current situation where the background is just where you set your Hologram up, and sampling the accelerometer so you look as if you're walking through this environment. They're even thinking about allowing you to change your clothes through a text prompt, rather than needing to set up Hologram again.
But still, even if it had these improvements, Hologram feels shoehorned into the HUD glasses, when the mediums that realistic avatars are truly useful for are VR and AR.
Hologram on Meta VR Glasses
On Meta VR Glasses, and eventually Quest 3 too, Hologram can be full-body at true scale, not just shoulders-up. And this version of Hologram is driven by the headset's tracking too, not just audio.
When one Meta VR Glasses user calls another on WhatsApp, they'll first see each other's Holograms in a 3D window. But by tapping a button at the side of this window, the call will switch to full-body mode, with the other person's Hologram appearing at true scale in front of you.
(Meta's demo clip below skips this step, likely for marketing reasons, though it's possible there'll be an option to launch into the full-body Hologram mode by default.)
To be clear, this full-body Hologram is not a volumetric object. It is not a Gaussian splat or volume of any kind. And it's not a Codec Avatar.
It's instead a stereoscopic 3D video pixel stream of an entirely generated avatar, masked out to only include the Hologram. It's the same real-time AI diffusion approach as Hologram on Meta Ray-Ban Display, but stereoscopic 3D instead of 2D, and full-body instead of shoulders-up.
Also, while I said "true scale" above, in the demo I tried the Hologram of the Meta staffer seemed to be slightly smaller than they were in person. This was likely just a bug, though, as there's no technical reason the Hologram couldn't be scaled up, say, 10%. A bigger problem was that fine details, such as the Hologram's eyes, looked quite blocky, as if on a low-bandwidth video call. The engineers told me this may be partially caused by Wi-Fi issues related to having thousands of guests on campus for Connect.
Beyond the minor scale and clarity issue, the 3D video full-body avatar approach worked pretty well if I stood still, or stayed seated. It's compelling to see the person you're talking to at (almost) true scale in 3D, especially given the fact that they could in theory be on the other side of the planet. Seeing them nod as I spoke or look off to the side when thinking made me almost feel as if I was in the room with them.
But the illusion completely broke when I leaned too far to the side or walked towards the Hologram, because it rotated to always face me, exactly like a billboard sprite in an old video game.
This is of course deeply ironic for a standing-up full-body avatar system. It works, sure, but not if you actually walk around. Huh?
There is seemingly light at the end of the tunnel, though. Meta told me that while this is how Hologram will work at launch, it won't always be the case. Some time later, but with no specific timeline, the company plans to upgrade Hologram on Meta VR Glasses to be truly volumetric, delivering the real dream of Codec Avatars and enabling true co-presence, including group conversations. At this point, Meta says, it will also be available to developers to integrate into their VR apps, and supersede the cartoon Meta Avatars SDK, which is no longer being developed.
In the shorter term, I'm surprised Meta didn't demo the VR version of Hologram as a seated, but still full-body, experience. Meta VR Glasses are primarily designed and marketed as a seated experience anyways. I didn't get to see whether a seated VR version of Hologram exists yet, or if the Hologram dynamically sits down if you do. To me, this would seem like the obvious short-term workaround.
I'll be bringing you my impressions of Meta VR Glasses, beyond just the Holograms feature, soon. Stay tuned.
