The next step for Meta smart glasses is to bring you a photorealistic hologram during a WhatsApp video call. Announced at Meta Connect 2026, Hologram is coming to the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display and creates a digital version of your face that other people can see while you make hands-free video calls. Early Access begins for WhatsApp users in the US later this fall.
Your glasses can fake the camera angle for you
When you make a call through a pair of glasses, the camera shows whatever you’re looking at rather than your face. Hologram gives the person on the other end something much closer to a conventional video call. Creating one requires a short self-capture using the Meta AI app. Meta then generates a photorealistic digital version of your face. During a call, the avatar is driven entirely by your voice, with Meta’s model inferring expressions from what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.
It uses the new Muse Realtime Avatar model to approximate facial expressions. For full clarity of when this feature is in use, Meta also places a transparent watermark over avatar calls so recipients can tell they aren’t looking at a normal camera feed.
The holograms require Meta’s VR glasses
The Ray-Ban Display version recreates your face, while Meta’s newly announced VR Glasses take the concept to the sci-fi level. Those $1,299.99 glasses can create a full-body holographic avatar using their inward-facing cameras and sensors to track expressions and reactions. Someone wearing the glasses can even see another person’s life-size hologram positioned in the room, with spatial audio making their voice appear to come from the same place. Calls can work through services including WhatsApp and Zoom.
However, there are some limitations. They only present a frontal view rather than a completely three-dimensional reconstruction. Even so, it is a huge step beyond the floating cartoon avatars that have defined plenty of Meta’s previous virtual-world experiments. The VR Glasses arrive in spring 2027. Ray-Ban Display owners won’t have to wait quite as long to start sending their digital doubles into WhatsApp calls.
