Meta's hologram avatars put a photoreal you on video calls
Meta spent Connect this week selling hardware. The announcement that will outlast the hardware is the face it puts on your calls: at Wednesday's keynote the company said its holographic avatars — the productized version of the Codec Avatars research it has demoed since the Orion prototype — are coming to the Meta VR Glasses and to the Ray-Ban Display frames.
The avatars are photoreal, they run on a model Meta calls Muse Realtime Avatar, and the first place you will meet one is a WhatsApp call. On the display glasses you build the avatar inside the Meta AI app in about five minutes: the phone camera walks you through head angles, then a set of prompts captures how you talk — Engadget's Karissa Bell was asked what her perfect day looks like and what her hobbies are — and you finish by smiling on cue and repeating a line as if surprised. After that you can join WhatsApp or Zoom video calls wearing the glasses and let the avatar carry your face for you. Meta says early access on the Ray-Ban Display starts this fall in the US, WhatsApp first.
The honesty features are as interesting as the model. Every avatar call carries a transparent watermark, which Bell mistook for a logo on her call partner's shirt until she knew to look for it. That is a reasonable design and also a measure of where we are: photoreal synthetic presence now ships with a find-the-label game instead of a visible tell. Bell did not clock that the person she was speaking to was an avatar at all on first viewing. From the other side it held up less well — watching her own avatar speak, she said her brain immediately recognized it was not her.
On the VR Glasses the ambition is bigger and the compromise is explicit. Because that device carries inward-facing cameras and better sensors, Meta can build a full-body avatar without the training interview, and the avatar appears at true scale with spatial audio placed where the person would sit. At launch in spring 2027 it will still be a "2.5D" stereoscopic stream — a front-angle view that stays head-on as you move around the room, per UploadVR. Meta says it intends to evolve Hologram into true 6DoF and make it the platform's default avatar experience, effectively retiring the cartoon Meta Avatars. Calls are device-locked for now: someone on display glasses cannot call someone wearing VR Glasses. Bell saw blurring at the edges of her caller's head and distortion near the feet, and described the whole thing as an early preview. The $1,299 VR Glasses themselves we covered on Wednesday — Meta's VR Glasses land at $1,299 with no headset at all — and the avatar is the part of that package that has nothing to do with watching movies.
Why it matters: this is what shipping a face to a consumer agent looks like. Muse is already the product Meta is pushing hardest — Meta ships Muse: a consumer agent inside a sealed VM — and an agent that can speak in your voice is one step from an agent that appears as you. Meta has put the consent boundary in the setup flow, where it belongs, and a watermark on the output, which is more than most synthetic-media launches have managed. What it has not solved is the thing that makes avatars useful and unnerving at once: once the rendering is good enough that colleagues cannot tell, the label is the only thing keeping the call honest.
What to watch: whether the fall early access arrives with the watermark Meta demonstrated or a quieter version of it, and whether the 6DoF upgrade lands before Hologram becomes the default avatar across Meta's platform.
If a photoreal avatar is indistinguishable from you, is the watermark enough — or should avatar calls be opt-in on both ends? Tell us in the comments.
