Valve watcher Brad Lynch thinks so. He just found code to suggest Valve’s “Roy” controllers are no longer marked as prototypes, and that Valve has finished building drivers for a Steam Link VR USB dongle that apparently uses Wi-Fi 6E to connect the headset to your computer. Is this Steam Frame?
In his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman mentions that Meta has decided that when its smart glasses with a heads-up display debut later this fall, the starting price will be around $800 instead of the $1,000 price range previously rumored.
I sold my PSVR 2 last year and haven’t missed it one bit, but for anyone hanging on to theirs, Sony shared details today about four games you’ll be able to play on the headset “later this year.”
To me, the most interesting one is the trippy Dreams of Another, but that game is coming to PS5 and PC, too, so you won’t need a PSVR 2 to play it.
“The next evolution is coming on June 20,” reads the caption to a teaser video republished by Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. The Oakley x Meta tie-up was first reported back in January as the sporty alternative to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, meant to appeal to cyclists and other outdoor athletes.
Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey have buried the hatchet after Zuckerberg fired Luckey in 2017, so they can build virtual and augmented reality gear for the military. Oculus made, of course, the most successful VR headset and was also a tremendous flop for Meta. Anyway, here’s the WSJ story about their new team-up. Time and money heal all wounds, I guess?
Android XR didn’t get a lot of screen time at today’s Android Show — apart from confirmation that it’s going to get Gemini AI support — but Google promises that there’s more to come at the full Google I/O event next week.
Android president Sameer Samat even broke out the company’s prototype XR shades to promise some “really cool Android demos” to come. And as you can see, this is a man who knows what’s cool.
Apple’s new ad launching days before Mother’s Day (this Sunday!) pitches the Vision Pro as a one-of-a-kind memories headset that will put mom to tears as they watch Spatial Videos of baby in VR. It includes a heartfelt closeup shot, which is giving us Verge folks déjà vu.
Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset is a new podracing-focused experience for Meta’s Quest headsets that will be shown at Star Wars Celebration 2025.
You won’t actually race from the cockpit of a podracer, but that’s probably a good thing to prevent the game from being a “puke factory,” as one of my colleagues eloquently put it.
The company is working on two follow-ups to the Vision Pro, according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. The goal for one is a cheaper Vision Pro. The other would tether to Macs for use as a wired display or for “high-end enterprise applications.”
That’s different from its canceled transparent-lens AR glasses that would have worked the same way, Gurman writes.
“Apple Immersive Video Utility” is available now for Macs and Vision Pros, though only in US English, as MacRumors notes. With the Mac version, you can “import, organize, package, and review Apple Immersive Video,” Apple’s immersive video format. You can stream the videos, synchronized, to one or more headsets with the visionOS version installed.
That could make it easier to share in-person experiences. If you can find another Vision Pro owner, that is.
Verge emigrant Cameron Faulkner has a fitting paean to Half-Life: Alyx, on its fifth anniversary still one of VR’s best games:
“It was a huge gamble to release the long-awaited prequel to one of the most influential games in virtual reality, requiring hardware that very few had then, and still very few have today. To that end, every developer making VR games is knowingly making a huge gamble that may not pan out in their favor.”
If The Weeknd wasn’t enough to convince you to pick up Apple’s $3,499 headset (or at least stop by an Apple Store to try one out), now the company will offer a 25-minute virtual trip to the Mexico City finale of Metallica’s M72 World Tour, which will also be available as an EP on Apple Music.
Filmed on 14 cameras in “ultra-high-resolution 180-degree video and Spatial Audio to give viewers unprecedented access to James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo,” it will be available as an extended preview in Apple Store demos beginning Friday.
Vision Pro owners should see the app if they install the visionOS 2.4 developer beta today. Last month, Apple described Spatial Gallery as containing a curated selection of spatial videos, photos, and panoramas, including things like behind-the-scenes clips from Apple TV Plus shows like Severance and Shrinking.
iOS 18.4’s second developer beta, which is also out now, adds the iOS Apple Vision Pro app, which lets you browse and remotely install Vision Pro apps.
Niantic’s ambitious 3D scanning tool Scaniverse is now available as a free app for the Meta Quest 3. Previously you could use the service — which features more than 50,000 real-world 3D scenes, according to Niantic — in VR via a browser, but the app should make the process a little more streamlined.
Details are slim, but UploadVR reports it’s being developed by Korean studio Pixelity Inc, and is expected to release next year as the first in a trilogy based on the original 1995 anime series. Platform support hasn’t yet been confirmed.
While Neon Genesis Evangelion has been turned into XR experiences before for theme park attractions, it’s not a franchise that’s had many videogame adaptations of late.
The company is launching a $50 million fund and early access to a desktop editor for Horizon Worlds, its 3D social platform for mobile and VR.
“Each month, we’ll pay out bonuses from the Creator Fund to the makers of fun and engaging mobile and [mixed reality] worlds,” Meta says. “Bonuses will be tied to worlds’ contributions to the overall ecosystem across time spent, retention, and in-world purchases.”
[developers.meta.com]
