Until now, all built-in software features of Meta smart glasses have been entirely free to use. But as a Meta support page describes, the company is moving to a model where "certain features" have limited free usage and longer usage if you pay for 'Meta One Premium'.

Meta One is the company's subscription that offers extra usage and features across all its main services: Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Meta AI. Meta One started rolling out last month in select regions, with two subscription tiers and the following stated benefits:

Meta One Plus
• "Access to Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus, and WhatsApp Plus benefits, such as custom app icons, story previews and exclusive messaging enhancements, at a discounted price compared to subscribing separately."
• More AI usage across eligible Meta technologies: Get more monthly AI usage allowance for eligible AI features in order to think deeper and create more:
• Generate more images and videos: Get more access to advanced image and video models for image and video generation and editing.
• More advanced Meta AI reasoning: Get more detailed answers to your questions and complex tasks with Thinking mode

Meta One Premium:
• Premium plan includes benefits from the Plus plan, and more:
Expanded AI usage across eligible Meta technologies: Get expanded monthly AI usage allowance for eligible AI features in order to think deeper and create more.
• Generate more images and videos: Get expanded access to advanced image and video models for image and video generation and editing.
• More advanced Meta AI reasoning: Get more detailed answers to your questions and complex tasks with Thinking mode

According to TechCrunch, Meta One Plus will be priced at $8/month in the US, while Meta One Premium will be $20/month.

(Meta One should not be confused with Meta Verified, a separate per-platform subscription that offers a blue checkmark on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.)

According to the support page, Meta One Premium will also offer 15 hours of Conversation Focus, compared to 3 hours for non-subscribers.

Conversation Focus is an accessibility feature that amplifies the voice of the person in front of you. It started rolling out in early access back in January, the result of more than six years of research into “perceptual superpowers” at Meta.

Meta Glasses Get ‘Conversation Focus’ Early Access

Meta is rolling out the Conversation Focus accessibility feature to the Early Access program of its smart glasses in the US & Canada.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Despite the widespread outrage already seen around this decision, we should point out that many consumer tech devices require a subscription for select features.

PlayStation and Nintendo Switch consoles require a subscription for cloud saves and on-platform multiplayer. Most smart home cameras require a subscription for detection of people, pets, and vehicles. And many fitness wearables require a subscription for the most advanced tracking features.

The rational distinction driving the outrage, however, is that most of the aforementioned features leverage the company's server, whereas Conversation Focus runs locally.

Facebook Researching VR/AR ‘Hear-Through’ Technology For ‘Perceptual Superpowers’

Facebook researchers are investigating AR glasses featuring “hear-through” technology powered by specialized in-ear monitors for “enhanced hearing.” The technology “would be able to recognize different types of events happening around you: people having conversations, the air conditioning noise, dishes and silverware clanking. Then using contextualized AI, your AR

UploadVRIan Hamilton

Still, it could be argued that this is Meta trying to recoup its massive research investment into features like this, and to make its massively capital intensive smart glasses project into a more sustainable business element in the long term.

Meta may also simply be running an experiment, as it often has with pricing, to gauge the public reaction to adding smart glasses features to its subscription.

We'll keep an eye out for any signs of further features being added to the Meta One subscriptions.

As of this article, a large portion of Labyrinth's description is a direct copy from Arena, but the additional text details the gameplay loop where players must retrieve seven pieces of a magical crystal in a roguelike mode.

Other notes include a 'deep' progression system, eight different biomes in the same dark fantasy style of Hellsplit Arena, procedurally generated levels, and a full story with multiple endings determined by players' choices during runs.

We should also note that the description claims the game is roomscale, copying the same line from Arena's synopsis:

A full-fledged, room-scale VR experience - the game requires the player to be standing, with the ability to move through real space over an area of 1.5 x 1.5 meters, and supports VR controllers.

That said, Hellsplit Arena is playable with artificial stick-based movement, so it is fair to assume Labyrinth will follow suit and allow for both movement styles.

In regard to other platforms, there are no listings for Hellsplit: Labyrinth on Steam or PlayStation at the time of this article.

Hellsplit Arena was ported to Meta Quest in March 2025, five and a half years after its original September 2019 SteamVR version. A PlayStation VR2 port was said to be in development, but to date no listing has shown up on Sony's storefront.

In June 2025, a moderator in Hellsplit Arena's Discord post mentioned that the PS VR2 version was delayed into late 2025 or 2026:

Arena was last updated in summer 2025 with no official word from the developers until this Discord post from a developer back in June about a coming update on '2 platforms' with no mention of PlayStation VR2:

Developer Deep Type Games also appears to have cut bait on its latest offering, zombie shooter Cute & Dead. The game is listed as 'discontinued' on QuestStoreDB. It still shows a release date of July 1, 2026, but that date has passed.

Hellsplit: Labyrinth can be wishlisted now on Meta Quest.

The game was first teased by showcase hosts Damien and Bryan Ruffy without a trailer or any sort of gameplay footage. Survive The Night was intended to be a game show-themed roguelite with players working together to complete challenges and fend off enemies for rewards and upgrades.

Survive The Night Is A VR Co-op Roguelite From The Developers of Into Black & Resist

Survive The Night is a free-to-play co-op action roguelite coming to Meta Quest from The Binary Mill (Resist, Into Black).

UploadVRMike Johnson

Developer The Binary Mill (Into Black, Resist) stated the following on Discord:

After a lot of internal discussion and deliberation, we've decided to move on from the Survive the Night project. While it was shaping up into something pretty cool, multiplayer freemium games have never really been our thing as a company, so we're putting this game on indefinite hiatus. Apologies to any of you who were really looking forward to it, but on the plus side we have decided to go back to our roots in making more premium, single player, story-driven games. And while it's too early to talk about just yet, it's already looking incredible in early development.

Survive The Night would have been The Binary Mill's first foray into an increasingly crowded freemium market on Meta Quest, but the team thought better of it and seems to have moved on to a different project.

Rust Ltd's Anton Hand thanked the H3VR community in a lengthy developer post on Steam before detailing the official Update 120. Setting aside the decade long development cycle, Update 120 itself spent nearly a year in the experimental branch of the game dating back to October 2025.

With twenty-three different versions of that update pushed before the full release this past Saturday, a lot of the new weapons and features were already available months ago and several versions featured time-specific events, like an Easter Egg hunt in April, so quantifying it here is a bit tricky.

That said, in terms of content, Update 120 'officially' includes the following:

• The signature Take & Hold game mode supports two more focused modifiers. Blitz focuses on the 'take' part with attacking densely patrolled control points while Rampart centers on defending points.
• The Lucky Looter character archetype in TNH (Take & Hold) completely bypasses the item shop and standard weapons progression, only picking up ammo, supplies, and new weapons from enemies and supply crates.
• H3VR Studio is in full release. This is an officially supported alternative to fanmade modding tools that allows players to upload custom Sosig NPCs, Take and Hold characters, weapons and more. Rust has always openly supported modding for H3VR and this tool bridges the gap.
• The Gameplanner, a sandbox specific system that allows sandbox players to set up specific scenarios as makeshift gameplay modes, has added multiple new objects and enemy options. These can be saved and shared with other players.
• A new sandbox scene, the BBQ Range, is a recreational hangout where players can relax and play minigames like horseshoes.

A sequel, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2, was announced for PC VR and Meta Quest 3 in May.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Is Getting A Sequel, With Quest 3 Support

The award-winning VR sandbox FPS Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades is getting a sequel, and as well as SteamVR, it’s coming to Quest 3 standalone.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades is available now on Steam.

Seemingly out of nowhere, survival horror Bramblefort started making the rounds on social media last month by being compared to Resident Evil 4 and Bloodborne due to its gameplay and aesthetic. Set during the Victorian era, it immerses players in a desolate island in the North Atlantic beset by a ravaging plague caused by macabre rituals. As a field operative, your goal is to uncover its secrets by shooting, fighting, and exploring its labyrinthine levels. Imbuing immersive sim elements like offering multiple pathways next to its horror aspects, it is certainly a fresh formula in today’s VR landscape.

After trying its Steam Next Fest demo mid-June for our hands-on preview, we walked away impressed. “To meld two of the biggest genres in gaming successfully is no small feat.” Intrigued by the story behind such a promising title, UploadVR took the time to interview Helsinki-based studio False Member over email.

Made from the ground up for VR since the winter of 2024, team manager Jesse Aalto explains the reasoning behind the game’s concepts, “Being big fans of immersive sims, we noticed there wasn't much representation of that style of game in VR. In a lot of ways, virtual reality feels like a perfect fit for the genre, and the amount of interaction it can offer when compared to flatscreen games is something we all found very exciting.”

Because interacting with everything in a virtual environment offers its own set of challenges during production, he went further about how they went about implementing meaningful systems, “The way space and proportion are perceived from a computer screen feels totally different when compared to using a headset.”

“Layers can also physically get a lot closer to objects when compared to flatscreen games. It is possible to reach out and grab basically anything, so everything in the world has to be believable and responsive, or immersion is disturbed. In a flatscreen game, background props are often just that, but in VR you can't just have a cup be a static cup in the background. You need to be able to pick it up, and what happens if you throw it or put something inside it?”

As there are various moving parts in game development and the sheer amount of well-thought-out design choices incites curiosity, the fact this is their first full-fledged release is nothing short of surprising. Jesse confirms that “most of what we've learned about VR has come from developing Bramblefort itself.” But this nimble back-and-forth among the tight-knit team helps, as “a lot of the gameplay ideas and decisions come from testing and iterating on things we think could work well in VR.”

It is expected for games to be iterative. In truth, it should be encouraged to borrow from renowned works of art. False Member is candid about their impeccable inspirations: “Resident Evil 4 and Bloodborne are definitely on the list of inspirations. Some others are Dishonored, Dark Souls 3, and the movie The Wicker Man. There are a ton more, some very specific; for example, the way the shooting range target explodes when shot is inspired by the Jak 2 shooting range.”

Witnessing Bramblefort’s clever level design in motion proves how it is not a facsimile that steals from other games’ ideas, but a carefully crafted design philosophy of their own. Being able to find a key, walk around to find a window, and shoot the lock or take another path entirely brings a plethora of options to the player. This was not a coincidence. The studio knows offering such an unprecedented amount of freedom also comes with constraints of their own, and they have made their peace with it.

A good lesson we took from Dishonored is that it is okay that not all the different ways you can approach an obstacle are equal. Some ways can be faster, others slower, some are tedious, and some are more exciting. Giving the player the option to skip things they have no interest in doing, while still allowing them to get past an obstacle by finding a different way through, is something very core to the type of game we are making.

Another lesson we took is that it is okay if players miss content. There are quite a few different events and secrets hidden in the game which some players might never see depending on how much they explore and what choices they make. Even in the demo, there is a certain sequence that most likely has the most work put into it out of any portion of the demo, and it is totally skippable.

Looking at the favorable comments of the demo on Steam, players were eager to praise Bramblefort. Earning a “Very Positive” rating, most reviewers rave about the atmosphere, amount of content, and physicality. As an independent studio, Jesse and Co. are grateful for the reception in more ways than one.

“People seemed genuinely excited about the game, which meant a lot to us. It is also great how much feedback we have received.” The benefit of having a sizable player base is twofold, as he mentions, “Testing a game with a small team has its challenges, and suddenly having a large number of players helping us find bugs and issues has been amazing.”

Finally, wondering if they would consider launching on other platforms besides SteamVR, we receive a sensible response: “We need to focus on one platform at a time, but we're definitely interested in bringing the game to other platforms in the future.”

Bramblefort's story is only just beginning, with the full game still on the horizon with no set release date as yet. But it seems like morale is at an all-time high at False Member. “It is still a bit early to say on release, but we do have plenty of plans for the full game. We want to add light RPG elements like character and weapon upgrades, smarter and more varied enemy types, many different weapons, new levels, and more story elements. We are really excited about where the game is heading.”

The Bramblefort demo is available on Steam.

This system not only transforms the real-world objects in your play space into in-game assets, but also brings other players into your scanned rooms for remote shared space co-op.

We featured the new multiplayer mode for Hauntify at the UploadVR Summer Showcase. I had a chance to chat with VirtualGo's CEO, David Montecalvo, at AWE (Augmented World Expo) about the technology his team developed to realize the multiplayer experience.

Hauntify On Quest 3 Now Uses Lasertag’s Continuous Scene Meshing

Hauntify on Quest 3 now uses Lasertag’s continuous scene meshing, avoiding the problems of Meta’s official room scanning system.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Scene understanding has been used to create transformative experiences in other games like Espire: MR Missions, Drop Dead: The Cabin: Home Invasion, and the upcoming Into the Dead: Crimson Heights. The difference here is the shared space co-op gameplay.

Per VirtualGo, remote Hauntify players will be able to enter the host's scanned play space, seeing their transformed real world space in real time. I asked about the latency for the remote players and Montecalvo said it was negligible. I did not have a chance to test it live, a logistical impossibility in a convention setting, but the video and what this represents was my big takeaway.

Here's the video:

Many people, including my colleague David Heaney, are on the record saying XR technology is still in its infancy, its Atari-level era. Hopefully, we can skip seeing landfills stacked with headsets in the near future. In terms of gaming, mixed and augmented reality both lag behind virtual reality, in part because the 'transformative' experiences of MR & AR have lacked both the visual fidelity heights virtual reality has seen and the true social experience of a shared world. VirtualGo's system addresses the latter.

In VR, players have been exploring immersive worlds for years in apps like VRChat and Gen Alpha-focused experiences like Gorilla Tag and Animal Company. Similarly, asymmetric VR experiences like Acron allow players outside of a headset to still participate in immersive gaming.

MR and AR have been more limited. Portal-based experiences like Soul Assembly's Last Stand and asset-driven party games like Grokit are perfectly fine, but each player is still in their individual play space, only seeing the game generated assets in their rooms. Co-location, the XR equivalent of couch co-op, does exist and developers like Resolution Games have utilized it in games like Demeo and Spatial Ops. That said, headsets are not so ubiquitous that the common household has multiple XR devices available. As such, that's not a viable lane for developers to pursue as a primary feature at scale.

VirtualGo's system removes that adoption requirement. We have already been joining our friends and family in fully realized VR spaces for years now. Being able to do the same in mixed reality is that specific corner of XR's next step forward, especially if it opens up the potential for mixed reality user generated content.

Montecalvo says the system will not be limited to horror games and shooters, VirtualGo's current projects. It will translate across any genre: cozy games, RPGs, etc. The multiplayer updates for VirtualGo's Hauntify and shooters Mission Rift and FPS Enhanced Reality are planned for 2027.

All three of VirtualGo's current projects, Hauntify, Mission Rift, and FPS Enhanced Reality are available on Meta Quest. There is a temporary AWE promo code VirtualGo shared to get 25% off each game: AWE2026-878AEE.

In The Castle, users take on the role of an apprentice to Nigel Kupferman, a retired baron who was obsessed with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and went as far as purchasing the actual castle to reenact the infamous experiment.

As explained by Chameleon Studios Managing Director, Cecil Colvin, the amount of power that would've been required to bring life to Frankenstein's monster would've blown out everything in the castle. The Castle starts the apprentice just after that blowout. It plays out as a series of story-driven tasks, but unlike a traditional game, Kupferman narrates directions on how to make repairs and explains the physics behind it all.

The exhibition floor where I did this was very loud and I did not have headphones available, so Colvin and another booth attendant filled in Kupferman's lines for me. Signs on the dungeon walls lay out the tasks required to complete each room's challenge and proceed to the next one. This included setting amperages, taking measurements, connecting batteries, locating and replacing blown fuses, and other hands-on activities.

It only took about 15 minutes to complete the dungeon, but this was not meant to be a challenging experience. Education was first and foremost and that was evident in the level design and the simplicity of the controls. There was no inventory system and no controls to memorize other than basic VR locomotion and grabbing objects. Anything more complicated than that, like taking measurements, was a straightforward button press that was clearly explained.

This section, titled The Basement, was just the first of four planned levels that increase in complexity as the user progresses. Colvin also mentioned the possibility of ulterior motives behind Kupferman's directions, keeping the narrative underscoring the instruction.

The Castle is remarkably well made. I could imagine a later version that takes away the guardrails and tests the user's retention of the knowledge because the physical actions required to complete each room are intuitive if the science behind it is understood. Taking this approach distills what can be complex physics concepts into immersive, tactile experiments that turn theory into action. For those like me, who learn by doing instead of reading or listening, applications like this could be tremendously useful in the education sector.

You can learn more about The Castle and Chameleon Studios on its website.

While my twenty-minute demo didn't present anything new or special, I am curious if we are approaching or already at the point of diminishing returns in the free-to-play social hangout VR market.

High Horns is the fifth game since December 2024 from XORWire. Its previous titles are BreakoutVR, Chemp Physics, Stupid Chimp Slop, and Munkie All-Stars. All-Stars was just launched on May 29, less than a month from my trip to AWE.

My time in the game was fine with only two issues: a peculiar 'sticky hands' issue where my virtual hand seemed to disengage from its grab point later than expected, causing a jerking motion while climbing, and the climbable mountain faces were indistinguishable from the non-climbing walls. I gave this feedback to the developer via the marketing team and moved to my next demo. I am very much not the target audience for High Horns and games like it, but playing it and meeting the team did offer some food for thought.

The five titles in a year and a half is an eyebrow-raising fact though. We at UploadVR have been actively reporting on all of the layoffs and shutdowns of VR games and studios. Many developers in those situations have pointed to a softer-than-expected VR market for these actions or the decision to pivot to flatscreen development after disappointing sales. With the notable exception of Rec Room, these studios have all been developing premium, paid titles. Meanwhile, the most popular games in VR these days are free-to-play.

This is a screenshot I took of the 'Most Popular' titles on the Meta Horizon Store just before starting this article. Note that only two titles in the top ten are paid apps: Beat Saber and Blade & Sorcery: Nomad.

That number only increases to four apps when looking at the top twenty overall, adding Bonelab and Job Simulator. We are not sure what its current numbers look like, but Gorilla Tag at one point not too long ago had over one million daily users. Animal Company has half a million, according to its website. Those are numbers most flatscreen game studios on any platform would love to have and flatscreen developers have access to a pool of players upwards of ten times larger than virtual reality.

Hence why companies like XORWire continue to take swings at the proverbial plate, hoping to hit a home run. In recent years, Owlchemy Labs, My Dearest, Fun Train, and The Binary Mill have all dipped their toes into the free-to-play social experience market. Both the Ruff Talk VR Showcase and our own UploadVR Showcase featured a new title in the free-to-play category, OogaBonk and Jetpack Clankers respectively.

This is not unlike the push for live service games we have seen on the flatscreen side of gaming with some notable big budget failures like Concord, Redfall, and about a dozen other titles I could name. The general theory is the same. Even with a flop or three, finding lightning in a bottle on the level of a Fortnite or in VR terms, a Gorilla Tag or Animal Company, and the revenue such a unicorn brings, is worth the failed attempts and resources burned. The endgame for all of these is the same: a single title with steady recurring revenue without the increased development needs or finite gameplay of a premium title.

The catch with VR is the player base remains so much smaller than the flatscreen world, so the number of free-to-play titles (and their studios) it can reasonably support is much lower. One of the reps at XORWire told me it has a Discord of five thousand users, a perfectly respectable number for a single, hobbyist developer likely to drop another title within the next year. For a full studio though, even a small one with a handful of employees, that number is not viable long term, given only a percentage of them will be actively spending money in the game on a regular basis. It's a volume game, where the app's player pool has to be so large that even just a single digit percentage of it paying money into it is enough revenue to be profitable. The free-to-play model relies on in-app purchases of game add-ons and cosmetics for income, so only having a few hundred or so active spenders cannot support a sizable team. The math does not work. Just ask Rec Room.

Meta itself, it can be inferred, seems to be seeing this plateau coming, given its recent actions with its own free-to-play social hangout app Horizon Worlds. The market leader, armed with all of its data about user counts, ages, playtime, and so on, made the call to shutter VR support for Horizon Worlds (even though it pivoted later). That lone action, not even factoring in the closure of several of its first-party studios, is very telling. If the overall number is not growing fast enough to keep pace with the number of developers entering that specific category of VR, how much longer will developers continue to chase the golden goose?

High Horns is expected to release sometime this fall on Meta Quest.

TactGlove is a haptic glove, meaning it provides the sensation of texture to your fingers and palms through the use of vibration motors. To be clear, though, it isn't a resistive glove – it can't make you feel as if you're holding an object.

Compared to the previous iteration the new DK3 increases the number of motors in each hand from six to eight, adding two new contact points in the lower part of the palm of your hand. At release they will come with a set of inner gloves, but for the demos at AWE, the reps were using disposable gloves. I was thankful for this when I finished my demo and noticed how sweaty my hands were.

The game I played was Galactic Repair, a short Quest exclusive experience built by bHaptics to show off the gloves. In this short, 10 minute experience, I was an interstellar pilot whose ship was damaged while traveling through space. I worked through a series of modules to repair systems and reconnect the power, all via hand tracking. One of the first actions was a hand scanner that sent feedback through the entire glove to set the tone for the rest of the session. Every activity after this, grabbing handles, plugging cords into sockets, and moving electric balls into their pedestals, was all well made. After repairing the ship, I was shifted to a series of sandbox-like tabletops with multiple cubes of different weights to pick up and other interactable objects. The largest cube required both hands to lift and the intense feedback in the gloves if I tried to lift it with one hand was easily my favorite part of the demo. Overall, the experience got the job done in terms of proving how much the gloves add to immersion, but therein lies the issue.

While I waited for my turn at bHaptics' booth, I asked the technician about app support and he admitted game developer adoption for glove support has been slower than they would prefer. This is no fault of bHaptics, mind you. The company provides official SDKs (software development kits) with support for Unity and Unreal Engine. The underlying issue is hand tracking itself. The ratio of hand tracking to motion controller applications in VR gaming is fairly drastic, with most of them being on standalone VR headsets. It's not reasonable, given the size and flexibility of the gloves, to expect to play a game with controllers and gloves comfortably.

I checked the bHaptics PC application for glove-supported applications and got eleven results, one of which, curiously, was Half-Life: Alyx. That is an experience I'd be curious to try if Upload can secure a pair of review units. Of the remaining ten, one is the official bHaptics app on Quest and Pico, two were bHaptics demos including the one I played, and a third is a volumetric video player. Alyx aside, other supported games include Synth Riders, Rogue Ascent, Masters of Light, and Pathcraft. All of these are perfectly fine games, but player options are limited.

While the haptics suit can use the audio-to-haptics feature to simulate feedback in games without official support, that feature simply adds general feedback using the in-game sound. I use it all the time with my TactSuit Pro, but that is not exactly viable for gloves.

It's no secret game developers in VR have been struggling. We have been actively monitoring and covering the multitude of layoffs, studio closures, and developers pivoting into flatscreen development in the hopes of keeping themselves afloat, with mixed results.

Hand tracking in XR has come a long way and some developers like Owlchemy Labs are bullish on it, but it is fair to say controllers will remain the predominant input system of choice in VR gaming for the near future. It feels like a tough ask, in the current VR gaming ecosystem, to expect game developers en masse to not only adopt hand tracking as a primary input, but take it a step further and devote time and resources to adding support for a fairly reasonable, but still costly accessory in a struggling market. It is telling that many developers who have already added hand tracking support to their games, like Owlchemy Labs and Resolution Games with the Demeo series, have not already taken this step.

That all said, the DK3 gloves are great, addressing the user feedback that the haptics were limited to fingertips and thankfully offering enough size options to fit most players. Like all of bHaptics' products, modded game support is available for those willing to put in the time to develop it as well.

The TactGlove DK3 can be preordered now on the bHaptics website for $385. Shipping is expected to begin on June 28.

CES Hands-On: bHaptics TactGlove Brings Feeling To Quest Hand Tracking Games

At CES 2022 I tried bHaptics TactGlove, an upcoming $299 product for Quest 2 (and, apparently, PC VR too). bHaptics is the same company behind the TactSuit, supported in games like Onward. Unlike the force feedback gloves I tried, TactGlove doesn’t actually restrict the movements of your finger. Instead

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Developer Gamitronics added the new system after players expressed wanting more to do in the game beyond leaderboard chasing. This follows the announcement of league mode tournaments back in May. I played Bullseye when it released in Early Access and found the general gameplay fairly addictive aside from the zombies mode, which felt a tad outdated.

Darts VR2: Bullseye Impressions: Of Course There Are Zombies

Darts VR2: Bullseye, out now in Early Access, keeps it simple, making it easy to repeatedly return for one more round.

UploadVRMike Johnson

XP can be earned in both solo and competitive multiplayer with twenty-five unlockable levels packed with rewards, including several brand new ones. New dart designs and avatars are joined by new rewards like visual effects, titles, voice packs, and custom dart board designs.

XP is earned from small amounts with a single hit up to larger progression on every 180.

Kevin Joyce, CEO of Bullseye's publisher Evolution Publishing said the following in a statement:

We’ve been listening to player feedback and requests, asking for a more rewarding experience. That naturally led us to develop the XP progression system, unlocking new features and rewards the more you play. It’s an exciting addition that we can’t wait for players to enjoy. And this is just the start!

At the time of this article, the XP system update is only available on Meta Quest headsets and is listed as 'coming soon' to PlayStation VR2 and PC VR players.

Darts VR2: Bullseye is available now in Early Access on Meta Quest, Steam, and PS VR2.

Let's break down everything included in the update:

New Missions

• A new questline built around Leopard Global Security sees players investigate a new armed force on the island with Leopard-themed gear skins to unlock as players progress.
• The Warzone Supply Agreement is now live. Players can log in to complete missions for rewards including gear vouchers and one of this update's new items, the grenade box.
• The new DLC casts players as an agent investigating the disappearance of a colleague on the island and uncovering a dark conspiracy in the process. This new playable character comes with two skins to choose from and new revolver variants. The new DLC can be played solo or co-op.

Quality Of Life Upgrades

• Armor repair has been added for greater player flexibility during raids. Armor can be repaired both in headquarters and during active raids. Developer Caveman Studio says this system has been balanced to avoid abuse in active combat.
• The player headquarters has been expanded with new storage rooms, racks, weapon walls, and gear stands.
• Two new storage boxes have been added: a dog tag box to collect and show off kill records and a grenade box for easier grenade storage and raid preparation.
• A new colorblind crosshair mode has been added in the Settings menu.
• AK-74 series first person weapon sound effects have been updated.

Contractors Showdown: ExfilZone is available on Quest and Steam.

Meta first announced that Discord was coming to Quest during its Connect 2025 conference back in September. Then, in December, the two companies rolled out the ability to link Discord to your Meta account to share to your status which Quest app you're currently in, letting your friends know what VR game you're playing.

Now, the Discord app for Quest has arrived on the Meta Horizon Store.

You Can Now Share Your Quest Activity As Your Discord Status

You can now link your Meta account to Discord to share what Quest app or Horizon World you’re currently in as your status.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

With the Discord app you can participate in both text and voice chats on the platform, as well as watch friends' livestreams – and even stream your own first-person VR perspective to friends. Previously, this required a janky workaround of casting your Quest's view to your PC's web browser, and then using the desktop version of Discord. But now you can do it completely standalone.

To be clear, you have been able to use Discord on Quest via the web browser for a long time now. The Horizon OS web browser can run in the background, either minimized or pinned. But the microphone behavior for the browser isn't always consistent, and the app seems to affect the performance of your VR game less, as well as uniquely supporting the streaming feature and proper system-level notifications.

And by downloading and signing into the Quest app, until September 30, you should get one month of Nitro, Discord's premium subscription which offers perks like HD streaming, larger file uploads, and greater profile customization. For me, this appeared as a notification for the Meta Horizon smartphone app, where I could redeem it.

(Unfortunately, some user reports suggest that if you already have Nitro, you don't get an extra month – you just get nothing.)

The problem with the Discord app for Quest is that it just doesn't work all that well, particularly the streaming feature.

The app is currently sitting at 3 stars on the Meta Horizon Store, with reports of it randomly causing your running VR game to crash, alongside significant bugs and hitches.

UploadVR's Mike Johnson tested the streaming and found that while friends said the quality was fine, it frequently caused crashes. In Asgard's Wrath 2 and TMNT: Empire City everything would crash when a new location was loading, while in Deadpool VR heavy fight sequences took it down.

It sounds like the Discord app for Quest currently requires a lot of RAM, and Quest 3's 8GB may simply be reaching its limit.

Meta and Discord seem set to keep working on the app, though. XR enthusiast Luna reports that the two companies recently added a permission referencing being able to join Quest multiplayer sessions from Discord, suggesting an even deeper integration between the two platforms could be coming soon – hopefully alongside improvements to the app.

Developer Urban Wolf Games announced the roadmap in April with these two new features as its planned summer updates following the recent Meta Quest port. The friendly fire mode can be toggled on or off when creating a multiplayer session, opening up some potentially chaotic co-op gameplay. Urban Wolf reiterated that friendly fire was not intended to be a makeshift PvP mode, though it expects some players to use it in that way.

Legendary Tales Planning A Sandbox Mode & Friendly Fire Feature Later This Year

After the release of its recent DLC, VR ARPG Legendary Tales has laid out its future roadmap, including a sandbox mode and friendly fire feature expected later this year.

UploadVRMike Johnson

The sandbox mode functions as a long requested option for players to create custom builds and test equipment in an environment that doesn't require hours of grinding and repeated dungeon runs to tweak and tune to perfection. Sandbox characters can be set to any level with any equipment and skill point allocations and tested in an arena. Any regular monster or champion, the latter with up to three special abilities, can be spawned in any quantity to test players' skills.

In the dev post, Urban Wolf also followed up on the possible roguelite mode it mentioned in the roadmap post in April. Originally an exploratory research project, it has now entered full production. There was no news on a possible release date, though it is very likely to be a paid DLC.

Legendary Tales is out now on PlayStation VR2, Steam, and Meta Quest.

Meta has once again bolstered its Horizon+ subscription service with two new monthly games and an addition to the games catalog. Gun Club VR lets you test your aim at the shooting range with tons of real-world weaponry, while Dragon Fist tests your might against world-class martial artists.

Here's a closer look at the Monthly Games for July.

Gun Club VR

Kicking off July, we have Gun Club VR, a fully interactive shooting simulator. Gun Club VR offers players the chance to play around with some of the world's most iconic real firearms. Emphasizing mechanical realism, you'll rack slides, load mags, flick safeties, and manage recoil while experiencing all types of firearms across hundreds of target-shooting challenges.

Dragon Fist: VR Kung Fu

Experience the golden age of martial arts cinema in Dragon Fist: VR Kung Fu. In this physics-based VR fighting game, you'll kick and punch your way through opponents, practice and combine strikes, dodges, blocks, and combos on your way to becoming a kung-fu master. There's a single-player campaign, co-op mode, and even PvP battles.

Lastly, Phantom: Covert Ops joins the Meta Horizon+ catalog this month. This stealth-action game has a unique mechanic in that it's played entirely seated, as you take on the role of an elite military operative moving via kayak through hostile waterways. You'll paddle your military kayak through flooded terrain and enemy bases.

Mike and I recently chatted about this very game during one of our recent UploadVR Gamescast episodes, where Mike recommended it as a thrilling and unique stealth game.

Horizon+ Games Catalog Games

Horizon+ continues offering a Games Catalog of Quest titles that any subscriber can access. Meta can add new games to and remove games from the catalog at any time.

Here is the current Horizon+ Games Catalog in the US:

• Beat Saber
• GOLF+
• Walkabout Mini Golf
• Ghosts of Tabor
• Job Simulator
• Green Hell VR
• Titans Clinic
• Thrill of the Fight
• Asgard's Wrath 2
• Angry Birds VR Isle of Pigs
• Dungeons of Eternity
• Breachers
• Action Hero
• Shave & Stuff
• Crime Shop Simulator
• I Expect You To Die 3
• Deisim
• After the Fall
• Zero Caliber: Reloaded
• Outta Hand
• Blacktop Hoops
• Spatial Ops
• Onward
• Into the Radius
• Pets & Stuff
• The 7th Guest VR
• War of Wizards
• Racket Club
• The Light Brigade
• Red Matter 2
• Premium Bowling
• Puzzling Places
• Demeo
• In Death: Unchained
• Thief Simulator VR: Greenview Street
• Vacation Simulator
• Project Demigod
• The Climb 2
• Les Mills Bodycombat
• Maestro
• Synth Riders
• Dragon Fist: VR Kung Fu
• Pistol Whip
• iB Cricket
• Medieval Dynasty New Settlement
• Fruit Ninja
• Table Troopers
• Moss
• Real VR Fishing
• Escaping Wonderland

10 Best Story-Driven VR Games On Meta Quest, PlayStation VR2 & More

Check out our list of some of our favorite story-driven VR games of all time.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Horizon+ Indie Catalog Games

Meta also continues to add new games to the separate Indie Games Catalog, and you can see the entire list here.

Meta Horizon+ is a subscription service that gives players access to a monthly selection of games for $7.99 USD per month, or $59.99 USD a year. New Horizon+ users can enjoy a one-month free trial.

Hybrid games supporting both flatscreen and VR are a tricky balancing act. Particularly in situations like Lanesplit, No Man's Sky, and several Resident Evil games where VR support is added post-release, developers have to figure out how to bring the immersive gameplay VR players expect without overextending themselves or hurting the much more financially lucrative flatscreen experience.

As such, I went into Lanesplit with tempered expectations. I made it a point to play the game on flatscreen first so I could take note of any issues or criticisms about the game itself aside from the VR experience. When I finally put the headset on, it felt like slamming into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour.

There is no motion controller support for turning your bike in VR. I specify turning because the left and right triggers can be used to brake and accelerate, respectively. This alone was baffling. Why do the triggers work if motion doesn't?

Right away, this felt like a miss. It's a first person racing game in virtual reality. To pass on adding hand poses and physically gripping the handlebars with the grip button would have been fine if the controllers were still able to at least control the bike. I have no problem using a traditional game controller for a VR game. Games like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and Edge of Nowhere were perfectly fine experiences. It just felt wrong to be riding a motorcycle in VR without motion controller support, like the immersion was stripped away.

The two primary issues I noted in my flatscreen run were unfortunately highlighted by being in VR. Lanesplit is more or less a score-chasing endless runner with options for weather conditions and traffic volume. The latter sticks out like a sore thumb. Vehicles in Lanesplit move at painfully slow speeds. At one point, I had to slow down because both lanes were occupied during a long turn and I did not have the space to squeeze between them, so I waited for the semi truck in the right lane to pass the car in the left lane. This felt like an eternity, riding the bike at roughly twenty miles an hour. Every car moves at a snail's pace in this game, presumably to heighten the sensation of zipping and cutting through traffic at high speed. It was impossible to unsee after noticing this and VR just made it feel worse.

Then there is the performance. I use a performance meter whenever I review a game and Lanesplit never exceeded thirty-six frames per second with a heavy amount of reprojection. This combined with the turtle-like vehicles kills any sensation of speed in the game.

Looking out to my sides at the admittedly well designed city was also problematic. The low framerate meant every building, guardrail, etc. stuttered in the headset while riding at top speed. I could look to either side for a few seconds at a time before I started to get dizzy. There are options to tune the graphics to match your PC's capabilities, but nothing to boost the framerate.

The last thing to note is the menus. The main menu, and Steam has a pop up warning for this when you boot the game, presents in a theater mode. This was begrudgingly acceptable, but bringing up the in game menu during a run does not work in VR. That menu, to continue racing or return to the main menu, only comes up on the PC monitor. This was a perplexing design decision, hopefully an unintentional one. Fastest way to ruin a VR experience is to force the player to take the headset off to perform any in-game action. That annoyance capped off an entirely forgettable, at times frustrating VR session.

In the end, Lanesplit's VR support comes up woefully short. I will revisit the game if future updates promise a better experience. If you are seeking a fun motorcycle escapade in VR, there are far better options like VRacer Hoverbike available. Right now, it is hard to recommend Lanesplit to any VR user.

Citing "consumer preferences" and the broader entertainment industry's shift away from physical discs to digital, Sony has announced that it will no longer release physical games on PlayStation consoles beginning January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and through retailers that will sell digital formats only.

Existing games and games that release prior to January 2028 will not be impacted.

Over the last decade there has been no shortage of instances in which legally purchased digital copies of games, movies, music, and media of all kinds are delisted without warning, rendering the purchased media unplayable.

The sentiment amongst commenters on PlayStation's blog post indicates widespread irritation at the decision.

PlayStation has released dozens of PlayStation VR and VR2 games on physical discs, including Vertigo 2, Tetris Effect: Connected, Humanity, The Last Worker, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, C-Smash VRS, and others.

Beginning January 2028, we will never again see a physical game release for Sony's headsets or PlayStation consoles.

It wasn't the first time he'd looked for a virtual museum experience. Years earlier, after buying an Oculus Go, he immediately searched for a VR version of Google Arts & Culture. Google Arts & Culture had already made millions of artworks available online, and he assumed a VR version would eventually arrive.

"I said, 'That's okay. They'll release it soon,'" he recalled. "Then I got the Quest 2 and they didn't have it."

Eventually, he decided to build the museum experience he wanted himself.

"A museum is just a cube with JPEGs on the walls," he joked. "How hard could it be?"

"It turns out that it's very, very hard."

Fortunately, he added, "I'm very stubborn."

That idea eventually grew into ArtQuest VR, one of VR's most ambitious virtual museums. Its latest expansion adds two new DLC collections, Sculpture & Decorative Arts and Ancient Art & Archaeology, bringing more than 1,400 three-dimensional sculptures and artifacts spanning prehistory through the modern era.

If you're new to ArtQuest VR, you can also read our previous hands-on impression, which takes a closer look at the app's core museum experience.

The collections draw from digitization projects and publicly available scans from institutions including the Louvre Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Pergamon Museum.

Building The Museum He Couldn't Find

Mosinger isn't a professional game developer. He's a university professor who taught himself enough Unity to build the museum experience he couldn't find. ArtQuest grew from a simple desire to spend more time with the artwork that had inspired him during museum visits.

The Getty Museum, in particular, left its mark on the app. The default gallery inside ArtQuest is modeled after one of the museum's Impressionist galleries, complete with gray walls and skylights.

His earliest prototype used artwork from Google Arts & Culture before he realized he couldn't use those images in a publicly distributed app. He rebuilt the project using public domain artwork from Wikimedia Commons, gradually expanding the collection while teaching himself Unity and everything else required to build a virtual museum.

Adding sculpture required a completely different workflow.

Unlike paintings, which can often be sourced through public domain archives, sculptures and archaeological artifacts had to be gathered individually from museum digitization projects and public photogrammetry collections. Each model then required careful optimization before it could run smoothly on standalone Quest hardware.

Many scans begin with millions of polygons.

"They need to be decimated down to about 150,000 polys at most without completely destroying them," Mosinger explained. "You can look at a model or an image whose resolution looks fine on a computer screen. Once you're in VR and you can get right up to it, suddenly it just snaps you right out of VR."

Mosinger doesn't just import everything he finds. He curates every addition himself, checking licenses, evaluating scan quality, repairing models when necessary, and deciding whether each piece meets the standard he wants users to experience.

Seeing Art A Little Differently

Spending time in ArtQuest changed the way I looked at paintings.

I kept finding myself lingering in front of works that I probably would have walked past in a museum. Walking right up to a canvas, I could study individual brushstrokes, the raised texture where paint had been layered over centuries, and even the subtle weave of the canvas beneath. They were details I'd never noticed before.

The Mona Lisa was a great example. While nothing replaces seeing the original, ArtQuest offers something museums often can't: the ability to quietly spend as much time as you want with a single painting, free from crowds, glass barriers, or the pressure to keep moving.

The new Sculpture & Decorative Arts and Ancient Art & Archaeology collections expand that experience beyond paintings. The range is impressive, from tiny carved figures that invite close inspection to full-scale sculptures like Michelangelo's David and monumental archaeological works such as the Temple of Dendur. Many sculptures can be explored at your own pace by walking around them, or you can set them to rotate, making it easy to study every angle without moving around your play space.

Whether I was studying a painting or circling a centuries-old sculpture, I found myself slowing down and spending more time with each work than I normally would.

When I described that experience, Mosinger smiled.

"It's what I had hoped to accomplish."

Designed For Curiosity

Although ArtQuest naturally appeals to museum enthusiasts, Mosinger hopes it also reaches people who never considered themselves interested in art.

"I kind of hope that one thing ArtQuest does is when a teenager stops playing Gorilla Tag and starts thinking about what else they might do on a Quest, they might look at that and say, 'Hey, I want to check out whatever that is.'"

Early in development, Mosinger recruited his parents, both in their seventies, to test the app.

"I experimented on my parents," he laughed.

His father spent eight to ten hours inside ArtQuest working through the interface and pointing out anything that wasn't intuitive. That feedback helped refine everything from seated play to movement controls.

As ArtQuest found its audience, older adults turned out to be one of its largest user groups, according to Mosinger. Today, the app is also being used by at least one library in France as part of an art appreciation program.

Multiplayer support lets families and friends tour galleries together, and Mosinger said some users regularly meet inside ArtQuest despite living hundreds of miles apart.

Asked what comes next, Mosinger said he's more interested in helping people discover art than adding a virtual guide.

"The most commonly requested features involve navigation," he said, pointing to search tools and better ways to surface related works. He'd also like to see museum curators eventually host live guided tours inside virtual galleries.

Looking For The Holodeck

Eventually, our conversation drifted beyond ArtQuest. Mosinger reflected on some of VR's early educational experiences, many of which are no longer available in their original form.

For him, VR has always represented something closer to Star Trek's Holodeck than another game console.

"I have always imagined VR as the Holodeck," he said.

Inspiring Real Museum Visits

I told Mosinger that after spending time in the app, I found myself wanting to visit art museums more often.

He smiled.

"The very best thing that anybody could ever tell me about ArtQuest is that they used it and loved it and then they went to a real-world art museum," he said.

"That is what I want more than anything else."

ArtQuest VR is available on the Meta Quest store for $9.99. The new DLC collections are available separately for $4.99 each, or as a bundle for $7.99.

Back in February we reported on a preview video showcasing a fan-made port of Perfect Dark running on Meta Quest hardware. Today the first public build of Perfect Dark VR has been released for PC VR and Meta Quest.

Created by Alex Le Tux, the VR port is derived in part from the Perfect Dark decompilation project from 2022. Since unveiling the project in February, Alex Le Tux has occasionally uploaded footage of the VR port to their YouTube channel. Today's release shows the player running through many of Perfect Dark's memorable areas and appears to be running beautifully with head tracking and motion control aiming.

A trailer for the project has been published by YouTube user Graslu00, which we've embedded here.

VR ports of classic games have become an increasingly popular idea in recent years, almost exclusively driven by fans, indie devs, and open-source communities. Among the notable contributions are those from Team Beef, whose unofficial VR ports of classic PC games like id Software's Doom, Quake II, and LucasArts' Jedi Knight games have been so well-received that they even grabbed the attention of id co-founder John Carmack.

Beyond ports alone, excitement around VR emulation of classic games and consoles has also blossomed in recent years. For instance, Virtual Boy Go is an open-source emulator that allows Nintendo's infamous foray into "VR" hardware to live on via Quest headsets. Projects like this demonstrate the ways that VR can serve not only as a preservation tool for classic games, but as a better, more immersive way to experience the classics.

Open-Source Emulator Plays Virtual Boy Games On Quest, No Switch Needed

Virtual Boy Go is a nearly perfect Virtual Boy emulator for Quest headsets, no Switch console required.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

First reported by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Paul Meade has just left Apple and will now work on hardware at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Meade joined Apple in 2010, where he started as a key manager for the iPad, and in 2012 he became the head of iPhone program management. In 2017 he joined the Technology Development Group (TDG), Apple's A-team working on virtual and augmented reality devices, and by 2019 he was leading hardware engineering for the headset.

By the Vision Pro launch (after which the TDG was renamed to Vision Products Group), Gurman's reporting described Meade as the top lieutenant of Mike Rockwell, who led the group and acted as its public face during Vision Pro's announcement. Under Rockwell, Meade was the key figure who got the complex and groundbreaking Vision Pro hardware ready to ship.

Last year, Meade's responsibilities became even greater. Apple moved Mike Rockwell out of the VPG to lead Siri, replacing the AI assistant's former chief in a "rare shake-up" after his failures left the company far behind competitors in the AI race. Rockwell took the visionOS group with him, bringing it into Apple's regular structure, while Meade remained to lead the hardware development of future Vision headsets – and smart glasses.

Apple Is Splitting The visionOS Team From The Vision Hardware Team

Apple is moving the visionOS team out of the Vision Products Group, with the VP who founded it, as part of a shake-up to get Siri back on track.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

As many reports have indicated, over the past few years Apple has been strongly prioritizing shipping smart glasses over future Vision headsets, and Meade was the key figure leading work on the Apple Glasses.

Expected to ship next year, Gurman's previous reports suggest Apple Glasses will be displayless glasses, like most of Meta's glasses, with cameras, speakers, microphones, and an Apple chipset based on the S-series used in Apple Watches. The product would be used for phone calls, music playback, live translations, turn-by-turn directions, and multimodal AI, similar to Ray-Ban Meta. To distinguish from Meta's glasses, according to Gurman, Apple plans to use "high-end materials" and have two oval-shaped cameras, one for high-quality image and video capture, and the other for computer vision.

OpenAI Reportedly Considering Making ChatGPT Glasses

OpenAI is now reportedly considering making ChatGPT glasses, despite CEO Sam Altman’s public rejection of the form factor.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

At OpenAI, Meade may be working on something very similar.

While CEO Sam Altman publicly stated that he didn't like smart glasses, last year The Information reported that OpenAI had at least "considered" the form factor.

Meade may have a more general hardware role at OpenAI though, and reports suggest its first hardware won't be a wearable at all. Instead, if the reports are to be believed, it will be a screenless, pocket-sized, contextually aware AI companion, intended to sit somewhere between a phone, smart speaker, and ambient AI assistant.

June might have been lighter on new VR releases after a very busy spring, but we had no shortage of announcements in VR gaming. Our own UploadVR Summer Showcase returned on June 12 and the VR Games Showcase aired its summer edition. Both were packed with new announcements for later in 2026 and beyond. We also gave our thoughts on CleanSheet Soccer 2, Color-A-Cube, and Starvault.

Lastly, don't miss out on some discounts for games you may have on your wishlist. Our UploadVR Summer Showcase Humble Bundle is still live until July 8. The Steam Summer Sale & Meta Quest Summer Sale have both already kicked off and we expect to see PlayStation VR2 follow suit in July.

That said, here is our current rundown of new releases on Meta Quest, SteamVR, PlayStation VR2, and other XR gaming platforms in July. We will update this article throughout the month if we see any changes or updates. If we missed anything, be sure to let us know in the comments section below. Also, we keep a running list of upcoming VR games through the rest of the year and into 2027 here.

Games marked with an asterisk (*) are slated to release in Early Access.

Enigmo - July 7 (PC VR)

Enigmo is an award-winning mobile puzzle game 'spatialized' for VR by developer Fortell Games. The Steam listing has a July 7 release date with a demo from February's Steam Next Fest still available to download. The Meta Horizon store listing has 'Fall 2026' as its target date.

• Store links - PC VR, Quest

Geronimo* - July 10 (PC VR)

GERONIMO is a tactical close-quarters-battle shooter inspired by games like Ready or Not, Insurgency Sandstorm, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. This game has been in development since at least 2023.

• Store links - PC VR

One More Delve 1.0 - July 13 (PC VR, Quest 3)

One More Delve is a three player cooperative dungeon with physics-based hack and slash combat. It launched in Early Access in April and currently has a 4.1 score on the Meta Horizon store and a 'Mostly Positive' rating on Steam.

• Store links - Steam, Quest

One More Delve Impressions: A Promising Start For This VR Dungeon Crawler

One More Delve gives classic dungeon crawler fans a VR option for up to three players to team up for quests featuring physics-based combat.

UploadVRJ Brodie Shirey

Fixer Undercover - July 16 (PC VR)

Spy thriller-themed escape room puzzler Fixer Undercover makes the jump to PC with a flatscreen/VR hybrid port, featuring better graphics and improved world interactions for VR players. If you are interested to try the game first, there is a VR supported demo available. We reviewed the original Meta Quest version, giving it 4 out of 5 stars.

• Store links - PC VR

Fixer Undercover Review: This Escape Room Puzzler Nails It

Fixer Undercover drills down on the basics of VR puzzle solving, resulting in a great puzzler that comes up just short of brilliant.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Roboquest VR - July 23 (Quest 3)

Roguelite FPS Roboquest VR finally comes to Quest 3 headsets after a delay in May. As explained in the above video, the delay was to further polish the Quest version and make sure the speed and fluidity matches its PC VR & PS VR2 counterparts. This is important because July 23 is also the planned co-op update, which would presumably be cross platform.

• Store links - Quest

Roboquest VR Review: An Instant Classic

Roboquest VR takes an already exhilarating FPS roguelite and delivers a near-flawless VR adaptation.

UploadVRJames Galizio

Puzzles of the World - July 23 (Quest 3)

Originally a free-to-play Early Access title, cozy miniature builder Puzzles of the World moves to a paid full release with seven locations worldwide and a larger-than-usual 33% pre-order discount.

• Store links - Quest

Cybercore Protocol - July 26 (Quest)

Cybercore Protocol is a mixed reality action game where your scanned play space is transformed into a central control hub that must be defended from enemies appearing via portals in your walls and hallways.

• Store links - Quest

Hyperstacks - July 30 (Steam)

Initially released in Early Access on Meta Quest in 2021, Hyperstacks is an action game driven by parkour, combat, and puzzle challenges in handcrafted levels using developer Squirrel Bytes' Greenlink system. The game also supports user-generated levels for added replayability. There is a demo on SteamVR for those who are interested.

• Store links - Steam

Streets of Miami VR - July 30 (Steam)

Wearing its Grand Theft Auto influence on its sleeve, Streets of Miami VR is a 1980s-based crime-action game. Players start from nothing and have to build up their resources in a semi-open world version of Miami. This game is also slated for release on Quest with a 'Summer 2026' tag, so we will see if it hits both platforms in July or does a staggered release.

• Store links - Steam

If you are a developer or otherwise know of a game releasing in July, feel free to reach out to us at tips@uploadvr.com.

Not to be outdone by the Steam Summer Sale, Meta's Horizon Store for Quest headsets has a Summer Sale of its own. The Peak Summer Sale will run until 11:59 pm PT on July 5, so make sure to browse the shop before the deals disappear.

While it would be virtually impossible to list every deal here, a quick glance through Meta's Peak Summer Sale page shows phenomenal discounts on basically everything, including some great deals on some of the best VR games ever made. You can browse the entire catalog here.

Some standout games include:

• Crime Shop Simulator: $9.99 (50% off regular price of $19.99)
• The 7th Guest VR: $9.99 (50% off regular price of $19.99)
• Synth Riders: $12.99 (50% off regular price of $24.99)
• Retropolis 2 - Never Say Goodbye: $5.99 (75% off regular price of $24.99)
• Vader Immortal: $6.99 (30% off regular price of $9.99)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Empire City: $18.99 (25% off regular price of $24.99)
• Moss: $13.99 (30% off regular price of $19.99)
• Forefront: $21.99 (20% off regular price of $27.99)
• Ghost Signal: $1.99 (80% off regular price of $9.99)
• The Climb 2: $13.99 (53% off regular price of $29.99)
• Star Trek Infection: $20.99 (30% off regular price of $29.99)
• Dungeons of Eternity: $14.99 (50% off regular price of $29.99)

In addition to discounts on individual games, Meta is also offering themed bundles that combine games and experiences into one purchase.

The Walking Dead Bundle, for example, packs The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and its sequel, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners — Chapter 2: Retribution into one purchase, while the Stealth Masters Bundle combines Assassin's Creed Nexus VR with Metro Awakening. There are a number of additional bundles as well, and you can explore those here.

In Color-A-Cube, voxel models made of tiny cubes appear in your environment and your goal is to relax and paint them. Each cube has a number on it which corresponds to a palette of available paint colors. You'll chill to some peaceful music, select your next favorite voxel model and while away the hours painting each cube the correct color. When all the cubes of your model are painted, you'll have completed the painting.

The premise is simple, and the execution is polished, especially in the game's latest Version 1.0 release, which dropped last week.

Your dominant hand takes care of the coloring while your non-dominant hand controls the model itself. Twiddling the thumbstick rotates the model on both X and Y axes, or you can simply reach out to grab, hold, and maneuver the model as if it were a real object. Grabbing it with both hands allows you to resize it instantly, making it easier to grab those awkward little corners where an uncolored cube rests annoyingly.

It's an intuitive setup that rarely gets in your way. As you finish every cube belonging to a particular number, a progress ring on your hand fills to show how close you are to completing that color. Once you've painted them all, your brush automatically switches to the next color in the sequence. There's also a handy hint button that briefly highlights any remaining cubes of your current color if you happen to miss one.

None of these mechanics are exactly revolutionary, but together they create an experience that's smooth, relaxing, and surprisingly satisfying (I defy you to dislike the varied reactive sound effects they've used for when a cube gets painted). Color-A-Cube isn't going to change your life. But it may make it a calmer one.

Of course, simplicity is a double-edged sword. Players seeking deep progression systems, narrative experiences, or any kind of challenging gameplay may find Color-A-Cube a somewhat limited experience. But Color-A-Cube knows what sort of game it's trying to be, and it never deviates. Its appeal lies more in the immediate satisfaction of its core concept. If the idea of sitting down with a cup of coffee (or whatever you like) and spending time with a color-by-number book sounds appealing, chances are you'll feel right at home here.

There's also no shortage of content. Now that the game has left Early Access, the base game costs $7.99 on PICO and Meta Quest (with a free trial). This base game version comes with over a hundred voxel models to paint. New free models drop weekly, plus monthly paid DLC packs often pop up. There's also a paid "Color Pass" that unlocks all available DLC for players who know they're going to stick around.

And, of course, the models themselves are varied and impressively designed. There are aliens, pirates, transportation, animals, technology, architecture, fossils, living fossils, alien eggs, monsters, foliage, cultural objects, weird characters, food, toys... the list goes on and on. There is, to put it simply, something for everyone.

Perhaps the game's biggest strength is that it makes excellent use of mixed reality without making a fuss about it. Seeing a brightly colored voxel sculpture floating above your coffee table or desk (or even under a maple tree) feels surprisingly natural, and because the mechanics are so straightforward, the technology fades into the background. You're simply focused on painting cool models, while also being present in or around your home. (Don't judge my grungy furniture- we still haven't pressure-washed after a brutal winter.)

Ultimately, Color-A-Cube succeeds by embracing simplicity. Rather than burying players beneath complicated systems, it builds around one central idea and executes it with confidence. In a market still discovering what mixed reality games should look like, that's a welcome direction. It may not be the flashiest or most ambitious MR title available, but it's incredibly satisfying and very well made. Sometimes simple can be very good.

Color-A-Cube is available now on PICO and Meta Quest.

That defines Zeus as an important part of the immersive video pipeline. Headsets like the Apple Vision Pro can already display very high quality immersive video, but capturing, processing, and delivering the dense data stream of live video at these high standards is often a serious production challenge.

Built For Live Immersive Production

Zeus is designed around ProRes 2110 live operations. SpatialGen’s public specs list support for 16K ingest, 90+ FPS, 100 Gb/s peak sustained throughput, and distribution through diverse content delivery networks like AWS CloudFront, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Akamai, and SpatialGen’s own network.

The system includes hardware, a software license for the lifetime of the system, and one year of direct access to SpatialGen engineers. Live immersive production can involve different cameras, routing, encoding targets, digital rights management, key management, and monitoring needs, so good support is essential.

Zeus supports Blackmagic’s URSA Cine Immersive 100G camera, an 8K stereoscopic 3D system designed for Apple Immersive Video production.

Why SpatialGen Matters To Vision Pro Video

In an AWE preview meeting, SpatialGen claimed it streams more than 90% of third-party immersive video on Apple Vision Pro. The company also said its system can ingest and encode multi-terabyte ProRes footage, including live immersive Lakers footage for Spectrum Front Row.

Live sports streaming is one of the clearest examples of why this infrastructure matters. Apple and Spectrum brought select Los Angeles Lakers games to Vision Pro in Apple Immersive, with the experience available through Spectrum SportsNet and the NBA app.

Immersive video isn’t new to headsets, but Apple Immersive Video raises the bar with 180-degree 3D footage, high resolution, high frame rate, HDR, and spatial audio. That quality is a big part of why Apple’s format stood out early on, and why tools for capturing and delivering it matter.

The Invisible Infrastructure

SpatialGen Zeus's value is in an integrated system that combines hardware, software, infrastructure, and support in a live workflow. A full-stack service is ideal for live streaming of immersive experiences with ProRes quality.

While traditional streaming apps can place 2D video inside VR, including DIRECTV on Quest, apps like Xtadium have shown the appeal of immersive sports viewing. SpatialGen aims to simplify the complex path from professional cameras to VR headsets in real time, without treating every production like a one-off technical experiment.

The details of Zeus may not matter much to Vision Pro owners, since it’s not a consumer product. But as live immersive concerts, sports, ceremonies, and events become more common on Vision Pro and other headsets, systems like this are the kind of invisible infrastructure that could help make that happen.

Steam's annual Summer Sale has kicked off and will run until July 9 at 1pm ET, and it's bringing discounts on hundreds of VR games, titles with VR support, DLC, and more. Now is the perfect time to take another look at your wishlist!

The full list of discount games can be found here. On that main landing page you can scroll down to the filter options and enter 'VR' in the search box to filter the list down to just VR titles, or find the platform listed under "Visuals and Viewpoint."

The following is by no means a comprehensive list as there are well over 800 games on sale, both native and hybrid. At a glance, I've seen incredibly steep discounts as large as 90% off!

Here are some highlights:

• Phasmophobia: $13.99 (30% off regular price of $19.99)
• Half-Life Alyx: $14.99 (75% off regular price of $59.99)
• Hitman World of Assassination: $27.99 (60% off regular price of $69.99)
• Assetto Corsa Competizione: $3.99 (90% off regular price of $39.99)
• Blade and Sorcery: $23.99 (20% off regular price of $29.99)
• Five Nights at Freddy's Secret of the Mimic: $19.99 (50% off regular price of $39.99)
• Bonelab: $31.99 (20% off regular price of $39.99)
• Into the Radius 2: $27.99 (30% off regular price of $39.99)
• The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim VR: $14.99 (75% off regular price of $59.99)
• The Midnight Walk: $14.99 (50% off regular price of $29.99)
• Project Wingman: $12.49 (50% off regular price of $24.99)
• Five Nights at Freddy's Help Wanted 2: $19.99 (50% off regular price of $39.99)
• MYST: $20.99 (40% off regular price of $34.99)
• Riven: $20.99 (40% off regular price of $34.99)
• Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked: $23.99 (20% off regular price of $29.99)
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: $52.49 (25% off regular price of $69.99)
• Vertigo 2: $14.99 (50% off regular price of $29.99)
• Walkabout Mini Golf: $14.99 (40% off regular price of $24.99)
• Arizona Sunshine 2: $13.99 (65% off regular price of $39.99)

The list truly goes on and on, with an almost overwhelming number of amazing VR experiences getting deep discounts.

Check it out for yourself, but be aware that the sale ends July 9.

Many VR developers are feeling the sting of a continued downturn in the gaming ecosystem, and that trend continues this month.

Layoffs At Combat Waffle Studios

Combat Waffle Studios CEO Scott Albright released a statement detailing the staff reduction for the team behind extraction shooter Ghosts of Tabor:

Today we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team.

As part of this, we are saying goodbye to a number of talented individuals who have contributed meaningfully to our work. We are grateful for their efforts and are committed to supporting them as they transition to new opportunities. Any studio would be fortunate to have them.

We came to this decision after having a project we were working on with a large platform partner get cancelled.

These actions are part of a broader effort to align the company with the current state of the VR industry and ensure we are positioned for long term sustainability.

Our focus remains unchanged. Ghosts of Tabor continues to be our core product, and we will continue expanding that universe alongside our partners.

We remain confident in the future of VR and our role within it.

Tabor was an early access success, reaching $10 million in revenue and $30 million by the time it was ported to PlayStation VR2. Since release, it has seen multiple collaborations with popular franchises like The Terminator and stealth series Splinter Cell.

The 'large platform partner' in the statement has not been publicly identified, though the early speculation points at Meta.

Open World RPG A Township Tale Shutting Down Next Month

Developer Alta ended development of its co-op dungeon crawler Reave earlier this year and now its previous title, A Township Tale, is closing up shop. Here's the full statement from Alta co-founder Joel van de Vorstenbosch:

It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing the closure of A Township Tale and its live services.

The game will become unavailable to download, and its backend services will be taken down, on the 20th of July.

Like many others, we’ve been impacted by the state of the VR industry in ways we didn’t foresee. As many of you know, we discontinued our second game, REAVE, at the start of May. We have explored various avenues to keep A Township Tale live, but unfortunately none are realistic in our situation.

A Township Tale began in 2016, launched in pre-alpha in 2018, and launched on Quest in 2021. Across that journey, we had the privilege of building what we believe became one of the most special experiences in VR, with one of the best communities in VR.

Reave was first announced in March 2025 at the VR Games Showcase and spent months in open playtesting before Alta announced the end of active development. A Township Tale, as detailed in the statement, has been available to play since 2018.

Smash Brothers-Inspired Quantaar Shuts Down This Fall

Developer Pumpkin VR has announced that its competitive VR brawler Quantaar will end in September. Here's a snippet of the statement:

Since the launch of QUANTAAR, we have witnessed countless epic battles in the arenas and social hubs. We have also received an overwhelming amount of passion and valuable feedback from our global community. The entire Pumpkin VR team would like to express our deepest gratitude—thank you for your unwavering support, which allowed us to bring this thrilling and hilarious VR party experience to life.

However, every epic journey eventually comes to an end. After long and careful consideration by the development team, it is with a heavy heart that we announce the official sunset of QUANTAAR. All game servers will be permanently closed on September 5, 2026, at 11:00 (UTC+8).

Quantaar has already been delisted on Quest, Steam, and Pico's storefronts.

Memoreum Ends Full-Time Development Due To Poor Sales

Lastly, a developer from Patient 8 Games had this to say on Discord about the fate of its Dead Space-inspired story-based sci-fi shooter, Memoreum:

We’ve been trying to make updates and fixes, but unfortunately the reality is that the game didn’t sell enough copies to justify continued full-time development.

At the moment, we still have one person occasionally working on the Steam version. However, we can’t make any promises regarding when—or even if—it will be released.

We built this game with passion and love, and we’re incredibly grateful for everyone who supported us. But passion alone doesn’t pay the bills or keep the lights on.

We’ll continue to do what we can with the resources we have, and we’ll share any meaningful updates if and when they become available.

Memoreum was first announced at Gamescom in 2023 from Patient 8, with publisher 2080 Games, a then-new company headed by content creator Mike of VR Oasis, announced later. It released in October 2025 on Meta Quest and currently has a score of 4.4 from 353 ratings.

It has had a listing on Steam since last year and updated its planned release at least two times, first from '2025' to 'Q2 2026' and now its current 'Q3 2026.'

This drop follows earlier shock drops of tracks by Bad Bunny and Twenty One Pilots and three new free original songs added late last month for Beat Saber's eight year anniversary.

Here's the release trailer:

Yungblud's songs have a combined four billion streams on Spotify. "Zombie," first released in 2025, is a departure from Yungblud's signature punk rock sound.

The new track is available now on Meta Quest and Steam for $1.99. Meta announced the end of Beat Saber support for PlayStation VR2 last year, though it has not stopped the game from appearing in Sony's top ten list of most downloaded PS VR2 games every month.

Beat Saber is available on Quest, Steam, and PlayStation VR2. It also joined the Horizon+ games catalog earlier this year.

The full list of playable activities is as follows:

• Tourist Crap Character Introduction
• Bubs' Many Golfs
• Dangeresque Foxhunt
• Burnination Valley
• Strong Bad Zone
• Duck Pond Simulator

For the hidden ball collectors, Bubs' Many Golfs contains 18 collectible golf balls to find. Bubs' course does not have the standard courses' Hard Mode with the accompanying scavenger hunt for a new putter. That said, there are three custom putters unlockable elsewhere.

The 'takeover' concept is illustrated in the promotional art below, with Homestar Runner paraphernalia over the starting island and other courses like Cherry Blossom, Upside Town, 8-Bit Lair, and Quixote Valley.

Strong Bad's Basement is a new hangout area to spend time between rounds of golf with throwable darts, Cheat minifigures, and a Stinkoman Arcade Machine. It should be noted that all activities are not multiplayer. The ones that can be enjoyed with friends are Bubs' Many Golfs, Tourist Crap, and the Dangeresque Foxhunt.

The Distraction Pack is akin to a combination of the standard DLC course and the cosmetic packs developer Mighty Coconut has also been releasing. In addition to the six activities, collectible balls, and putters, the pack also has three hole celebrations, two of which must be unlocked to use, a custom ball trail, and six player avatars. The Brothers Chaps also lent their voices to the welcome island message and over thirty animated scenes spread throughout the game.

One final note: this pack does not count as one of Mighty Coconut's six planned DLC courses for 2026. The next official DLC course is slated for release in August.

Walkabout Mini Golf is available on Steam, PSVR2, Quest, Pico, Samsung Galaxy XR, and Apple App Store. The game is also available as part of Meta's Horizon+ subscription service. The Homestar Runner Distraction Pack is available now.

This is the third consecutive month with new music packs from developer Kluge Interactive after Crypt of the NecroDancer in May and Dua Lipa in April. The popular rhythm game also saw a new player progression system added in March.

The Music Pack includes the following tracks:

• In the End
• Numb
• Faint
• One Step Closer
• The Emptiness Machine (Radio Edit)
• Bleed It Out (Radio Edit)
• Breaking the Habit
• Battle Symphony
• Papercut
• Castle of Glass
• Heavy Is The Crown
• Up From The Bottom
• Over Each Other

Kluge Interactive's Sahin San had this to say in a prepared statement:

Linkin Park defined a generation of music fans, and we couldn't be more excited to bring their music into Synth Riders. Whether you grew up on Hybrid Theory or discovered them through their latest album, this pack is going to hit hard.

Tracks can be purchased separately or as a bundle for a small discount per song. The Synth Riders Linkin Park Music Pack is available now on Meta Quest, Steam, and PlayStation VR2.

The Apple Vision Pro (M5) price increases are as follows:

• 256GB: $3499 –> $3699 (a $200 increase)
• 512GB: $3699 –> $3899 (a $200 increase)
• 1TB: $3899 –> $4199 (a $300 increase)

Those are eye-watering price hikes for what was already an incredibly expensive headset. Whereas we once hoped for more affordable Vision headsets to have slashed the entry price of visionOS by now, we're instead in a much darker timeline where the cost is going up.

Apple applied similar price increases to its Macs, iPads, and HomePod speakers.

No, Apple Didn’t Cancel The Vision Headset Line Forever - Here’s What’s Happening

Multiple reports this year claimed that Apple, and particularly its incoming CEO John Ternus, has canceled the Vision headset line altogether. But that just isn’t true.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook blamed the price increases on the global memory crisis, telling The Wall Street Journal that it's a situation unlike anything he's ever seen in his 40 years in the tech industry.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation: the enormous demand for server-side inference of AI frontier models is far outpacing the global supply capacity of RAM chips, leading to a massive increase in their price.

A similar situation is happening for storage, given that agentic AI systems are generating and storing data at an unprecedented rate.

Meta Is Increasing The Price Of Quest 3 & Quest 3S

Meta is increasing the price of Quest 3 to $600 and Quest 3S to $350, citing the global memory chip crisis that has seen other tech prices rise.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Apple is far from the only tech company to increase its prices due to the crisis, and in fact was one of the main holdouts until now.

Sony has raised the price of PlayStation 5 consoles multiple times over the past year, while Microsoft has done the same for Xbox, and Meta even increased the price of Quest 3 and Quest 3S in April.

Earlier this week, Valve opened reservations for its hotly anticipated Steam Machine consolized PC, announcing a poorly received $1050 starting price that it also says is driven by the memory crisis. Estimates suggest it would have landed around $750 under original component costs.

Valve To “Revisit” Steam Frame Shipping Schedule & Pricing

Valve says it needs to “revisit” its “exact shipping schedule and pricing” for Steam Frame and Steam Machine amid the global memory shortage.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Valve is expected to launch its Steam Frame headset sometime in the next few weeks, recently confirming that it will launch "this summer", and it too will be affected by the crisis.

When revealing Steam Frame back in November, Valve told UploadVR it was "aiming" to sell it for less than the $1000 Index full-kit, but it's unclear whether the company can still hit that target.

When Will This End!?

Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

As advanced AI agents that run in loops for minutes or even hours become more capable and therefore more widely used, the memory requirements of the industry are set to increase exponentially.

Memory manufacturers like SK Hynix and Micron are urgently working to scale up production, of course but this will take years, and demand will significantly outpace supply during this time.

As such, it's likely we'll continue to see consumer technology increase in price through 2027, and relief, if it does happen, won't arrive until 2028 at the earliest. Expect this to impact Meta's next headset too, as well as any other new entrants to the standalone XR market for the next two years at least.

The age of low-cost consumer hardware is over. At least for now.

Sometimes a game catches you completely off guard, even if it’s on the second time around.

When I first played STARVAULT during early access, I thought it was good. Polished, well made and full of potential, certainly, but not a game I expected to spend much time with. Well, fast forward about a year and I have somehow logged more than thirty hours into the Steam version in just two weeks.

Considering MOBAs are usually my least favorite type of online shooter, that should tell you everything you need to know. Theia Games have crafted something genuinely special here and, much to my surprise, I have found myself completely hooked.

Zero To Hero

The objective in Starvault is simple: destroy the enemy base before they destroy yours. However, it's never really that simple, as almost every minute of every match presents another decision that could influence the outcome. Your friendly NPC units – known as ‘Creeps’ – constantly push down the lanes, applying pressure to enemy defenses and creating opportunities for your team.

Venture away from the lanes and you'll find more powerful ‘Jungle Creeps’ that offer perks for your team. Timed objectives can swing momentum in your favor, while portals create new strategic opportunities throughout a match. Then there is the Titan, a giant stone automaton that, once defeated, can be piloted directly into the enemy's defenses with devastating results.

What makes Starvault so compelling is the way all of these systems interact. Every match becomes a constant balancing act between farming experience, securing objectives, supporting teammates and knowing when to commit to a push. The game rewards skill, certainly, but the teams that consistently succeed are usually the ones making the smartest decisions. Understanding where you should be, what objective matters most and when to abandon one fight in favor of another often proves just as important as killing the enemy in front of you.

Fifty Shades Of Slay

At its heart, Starvault is a game about progression, both within individual matches and across your broader playtime. Every creep you defeat, every objective you secure and every enemy hero you bring down contributes towards making your character stronger. Leveling up unlocks new abilities, currency unlocks new items and before long your carefully chosen hero begins to evolve into something uniquely suited to your playstyle.

What I particularly enjoyed is that progression never feels automatic. Every match asks you to make meaningful decisions about how you want to develop your character. Do you lean harder into survivability? Double down on damage output? The item shop and ability upgrades provide enough flexibility that the same hero can feel quite different from one game to the next.

The game currently offers fifteen playable heroes and this is where Starvault truly excels.

While it follows many traditional MOBA conventions, the roster feels much closer to a hero shooter in practice. There are tanks, supports and damage dealers, but those labels only tell part of the story.

There’s a fully airborne drone, heroes that throw energy balls, blade-wielding assassins, heavy machine gunners and even mech units that move using arm-swing locomotion reminiscent of Gorilla Tag. One hero might use a grapple hook to reach inaccessible high ground and take the enemy apart from a distance, while another literally backflips into the enemy team hurling knives with deadly precision. No two characters feel alike, even when they fulfill a similar role within a team composition.

Even more impressively, all of them feel viable.

Balancing a roster this diverse cannot be easy, yet Theia Games have done an exceptional job of ensuring that every hero feels like they have a place within the game. Throughout my time with Starvault I never encountered a character that felt obviously overpowered, nor one that seemed remotely redundant.

Regardless of whether you're piloting a hoverboard-riding healer armed with twin pistols or a heavily armored frontline tank wielding an axe and shield, every character feels capable of contributing to victory. Moreover, in the right hands, each hero can become an absolute menace on the battlefield.

Playing The Long Game

I was fortunate enough to have access to all fifteen characters on Steam, allowing me to appreciate just how varied the roster is. On Quest, however, I followed the intended progression route and have unlocked a few characters the hard way – by grinding through gameplay.

While unlocking heroes requires a reasonable amount of grind, Starvault remains entirely devoid of pay-to-win mechanics. Every character can be earned simply by playing the game. Players can choose to accelerate progression with real money if they wish, but there is absolutely no requirement to do so.

The onboarding process is also very well thought out. Players have access to a hub world where they can experiment with every character before purchasing them. Tutorials, practice spaces and even a dedicated deathmatch arena allow you to familiarize yourself with heroes before committing your hard-earned currency.

This feature wasn't available when I first played the game and its inclusion has gone a long way towards making Starvault's considerable complexity more approachable for new players.

My only real criticism is that evenly matched games can become battles of attrition. Matches regularly stretch into the thirty-to-forty-minute range and can occasionally exceed that. For players like myself who often squeeze gaming into small windows of free time, this can be difficult.

If I could request anything from the developers, it would be to add a second, smaller map with all the same gameplay elements but designed around fifteen-to-twenty-minute matches. This would go a long way towards making Starvault even more appealing, particularly to those of us perennially short on time.

Strength In Numbers

Part of being an online title is the need for an active player base and I have been genuinely impressed by how healthy Starvault's community appears to be.

Whether jumping in during a lunch break or playing during peak evening hours, I consistently found other players online. In situations where player numbers are lower, bots can fill out the remaining slots and perform reasonably well, even if they don't replicate the communication and strategic thinking of human teammates.

The game also supports a thriving competitive scene, with regular tournaments and cash-prize events helping to foster a high-level player base.

Perhaps more importantly, the matchmaking experience is excellent. During my earliest matches I was consistently paired with players of an appropriate skill level, allowing me to learn without feeling overwhelmed. Compared to many competitive online games, Starvault does an exceptional job of easing new players into its systems.

Pretty Fly For A MOBA Guy

Graphically, Starvault is an impressive achievement on Quest hardware.

The map is large, varied and packed with verticality. More importantly, the art direction strikes an excellent balance between looking good and playing well. Performance has been rock solid throughout my time with both the standalone and PC versions.

It is clear that Starvault was designed with standalone hardware as its primary focus, and as such the Steam version does not dramatically transform the visual experience. Much like Population: One, the strength of Starvault's presentation comes from its effective art direction rather than cutting-edge graphical effects.

Quest players will be thoroughly impressed, while PC players may simply find themselves with a cleaner version of an already strong visual package.

The sound design delivers exactly what it needs to.

Spatial audio cues are excellent, allowing players to quickly identify attacks, abilities and threats during chaotic engagements. Every hero possesses distinct audio signatures that help communicate what is happening on the battlefield and where it is happening.

While the sound design may not stand out in quite the same way as in games like Breachers, it succeeds across every area that matters and contributes to an experience that feels consistently polished and high quality.

Final Verdict

Starvault has truly impressed me.

I went into this experience expecting very little. In fact, I assumed I would play for an hour or two before moving on. Two weeks later I have a new favorite shooter and absolutely no intention of stopping anytime soon.

The incredible diversity of its heroes, the depth of its strategic gameplay and the strength of its online community combine to create something genuinely special. It is not perfect though; matches can run a little too long and unlocking heroes can require a chunky time commitment, but these are relatively minor criticisms within an otherwise outstanding package.

If you have any interest whatsoever in online shooters then Starvault is an exceptionally easy recommendation. I certainly wasn't expecting to fall in love with it, yet here I am, thirty hours later, annoyed at you for making me write about Starvault when I could be playing it.

Article updated after publication to remove references to "free to play". Theia Games had described the game as free to play, and at no point until launch disclosed that it would be paid on Steam.

All Meta smart glasses come with a charging case, featuring a built-in battery that provides extra charges on the go, as well as passthrough charging when plugged in via the USB-C port.

As such, the new Charging Stand isn't a strictly necessary product, in the sense that simply plugging in the charging case already provides the same functionality. But it offers a slightly lower-friction option to quickly grab the glasses, and may be more aesthetic for some setups.

Meta says the stand is made out of stainless steel for the main body and silicone rubber for the footpad, weighing 108 grams.

The stand has a USB-C port but does not come with a cable or adapter. You'll need to provide your own USB-C cable and USB-C power adapter.

The Meta Glasses Charging Stand is compatible with Ray-Ban Meta glasses (Gen 1 and Gen 2), Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, and the newly announced Meta Glasses, including the Starfire Kylie Edition.

It is not compatible with Meta Ray-Ban Display and Oakley Meta Vanguard.

Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles Promise “All-Day Comfort” For Prescriptions

The new Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles promise “all-day comfort” for prescription wearers, with overextension hinges, interchangeable nose pads, and optician-adjustable temple tips.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The stand could be a good match for owners of the Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles who use them as their all-day eyewear with prescription lenses, letting them more easily grab the glasses in the morning and dock them at night.

You can find the Meta Glasses Charging Stand on the Meta Store.

Meta says Starfire was "designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner", and features her voice for Meta AI, a gemstone on the right lens, and a metal nose pad to prevent absorbing makeup.

Otherwise, as with the cheaper Meta Glasses launched this week, Starfire has the same chipset, camera, speakers, battery, storage, and connectivity as the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses, packed into EssilorLuxottica's smallest frame yet.

Three color variants are available:

• Classic Black frame with Black lenses ($400)
• Dark Tortoise frame with Chocolate lenses ($400)
• Classic Black frame with Clear to Grey Transitions lenses ($480)

As with the other new Meta Glasses, the Starfire design comes with the same kind of folding case as Meta Ray-Ban Display. It's also (unlike Meta Ray-Ban Display) compatible with the new stainless steel Charging Stand.

Something that hasn't gone unnoticed is that Meta's Starfire glasses have a striking resemblance to the Gentle Monster smart glasses announced at Google's I/O back in May. We noted at the time that the Gentle Monster design "looks nothing like anything Meta and EssilorLuxottica have put out so far" – but Starfire makes this no longer the case.

Google Gemini Smart Glasses Launching In Fall To Take On Meta

Google-powered smart glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are launching this fall to take on Ray-Ban Meta.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Tech hardware has a long development cycle, and the likely explanation here is simply that the two companies are following the same general fashion trends and engineering constraints. But it's still noteworthy that Meta has essentially preempted what would have been Google's unique design differentiation months before it launches.

You can find the Meta Glasses Starfire Kylie Edition on the Meta Store.

That's not to say that Meta is making these glasses without EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant that owns the Ray-Ban brand and that Meta owns a 3% stake of. These new Meta Glasses are still made in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the two companies confirmed.

Two styles of the cheaper "Meta Glasses", as they're branded, are available: Adventurer and Fury.

Both feature the same chipset, camera, speakers, battery, storage, and connectivity as the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses, but are sold starting at $300, an $80 discount compared to the Ray-Bans, owing to their lack of the premium branding.

They also have the more comfortable overextension hinges from the recent Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles glasses.

Adventurer is a classic rectangular style, offered in 8 colors:

• Classic Black frame with Clear lenses ($300)
• Classic Tortoise frame with Clear lenses ($300)
• Classic Black frame with Brown lenses ($300)
• Classic Tortoise frame with Brown lenses ($300)
• Classic Black frame with Grey Polarized lenses ($330)
• Classic Black frame with Clear to Grey Transitions lenses ($380)
• Merlot frame with Clear to Ruby Transitions lenses ($380)
• Linen frame with Clear to Sapphire Transitions lenses ($380)

Fury is taller and thus more square, offered in 7 colors:

• Classic Black frame with Brown Gradient lenses ($300)
• Mahogany frame with Green lenses ($300)
• Racing Green frame with Light Blue Atlantic lenses ($300)
• Classic Black frame with Grey Polarized lenses ($330)
• Sandstone frame with Dark Amber lenses ($300)
• Classic Black frame with Clear to Grey Transitions lenses ($380)
• Mahogany frame with Clear to Grey Transitions lenses ($380)

We should also point out that the new Meta Glasses are not the cheapest smart glasses the company sells. The Gen 1 Ray-Ban Meta glasses from 2023 are still sold starting at $300 normally, and are currently on sale starting at $224. But the new Meta Glasses have the improvements of the Gen 2: the doubled battery life and 3K video recording.

The Regular Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Get A Gen 2 Upgrade

Gen 2 of the displayless Ray-Ban Meta glasses brings them up to parity with the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, meaning 3K video recording and longer battery life.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Flat-Folding Charging Case

The new Meta Glasses range also has a unique advantage over the displayless Ray-Ban and Oakley branded smart glasses. They feature a folding charging case that seems to be very similar to the case of Meta Ray-Ban Display.

As we noted in our Meta Ray-Ban Display review, the advantage of a folding case is that, while you're wearing the glasses, the case can fit into a jacket pocket, or even a particularly deep trouser pocket.

Kylie Jenner Glasses & Charging Stand

The cheaper glasses are not Meta's only new smart product launch this week.

The company also worked with Kylie Jenner on a completely new smart glasses style called Starfire, which has a notable resemblance to the upcoming Gentle Monster smart glasses powered by Google.

Meta Preempts Google’s Gentle Monster Glasses With Kylie Jenner ‘Starfire’ Design

Meta teamed up with Kylie Jenner for new ‘Starfire’ smart glasses featuring her voice for Meta AI, a gemstone in the lens, and a metal nose pad to prevent absorbing makeup.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Further, for people who want to keep their smart glasses available by their bedside, Meta launched a $60 Charging Stand, made of stainless steel, with a USB-C port. It supports the company's displayless Ray-Ban and Oakley HSTN smart glasses, charging them to 50% in 20 minutes and fully within an hour. Meta Ray-Ban Display and Oakley Meta Vanguard are not supported.

Meta Now Sells A Charging Stand For (Most Of) Its Smart Glasses

Meta now sells a $60 stainless steel Charging Stand compatible with most of its smart glasses, providing 50% charge in 20 minutes or full charge in 1 hour.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The company says it will also "provide hands-on training with every single pair", in partnership with the Blinded Veterans Association and TechSoup. That will include a training guide, monthly webinars for all, as well as in-person events "across the country".

Meta says the donation program was championed by US Army veteran Don Overton, who lost his eyesight in the Gulf War. Overton says putting on smart glasses gave him his "independence back".

“These veterans sacrificed their sight in service to our country. Giving them technology that can meaningfully navigate the world around them is a profound honor for us and underscores the importance of why we build”, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in a prepared statement.

The technology Bosworth refers to is the visual capabilities of Meta AI, which uses the camera on the glasses to capture an image when responding to queries relating to something in the wearer's view. This can include advanced queries, or more basic requests like identifying objects and reading out text.

Last year, Meta added a Detailed Responses accessibility option, which makes Meta AI on the glasses provide a much more verbose description for visual queries. It's specifically designed for people with vision impairment, and thus the guidance for blind US veterans will likely start by explaining how to enable the setting.

The guidance should also hopefully note that the large language model (LLM) technology that makes chatbots like Meta AI possible is prone to error, as even Meta's terms warn against relying on it for any safety-critical tasks.

Additionally, Meta has a partnership with Be My Eyes, which lets blind and low-vision Ray-Ban Meta glasses wearers start a view-sharing video call with one of the service's 8 million volunteers who help them navigate a situation.

Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Can Now Describe What’s In View To Blind Wearers

Meta AI on Ray-Ban Meta glasses can now be much more descriptive about what it sees, via a new accessibility setting for blind and low-vision people.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Legally blind US veterans can request their free pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses at bva.org/glasses.

The new trailer premiered at this week's VR Games Showcase:

Narrated from the 'metaverse' by a classically dressed orchestra conductor, the Attack On Titan DLC was confirmed with two pieces, 'Attack on Titan' by Hiroyuki Sawano and 'Ashes on The Fire' by Kohta Yamamoto. A second DLC was teased with the name of the intellectual property and pieces comedically bleeped out.

There was no information on a release window or price. Past DLC with multiple pieces like the All Aboard pack featuring music from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise cost $8.99, so it's a fair assumption to presume the new DLC will be around the same price.

Along with the DLC, a free update 'coming soon' will bring a graphical and audio upgrade, two new free pieces (musical tracks), a scoring system update, and a new expert difficulty for higher skilled players to test themselves against.

Maestro is out now on Meta Quest, PlayStation VR2, Steam, and Pico.

As part of the latest VR Games Showcase, publisher Impact Inked and developer VertexBreakers showed a new trailer for their futuristic high-speed racing game VRacer Hoverbike. In the new trailer, the team revealed a free update, scheduled multiplayer meetups, and a wave of paid DLC that offers new gear, bikes, and tracks.

The full details of these many updates can be seen in the embedded trailer.

VRacer Hoverbike offers traditional thumbstick controls, but it shines when users embrace its ‘virtual handlebar’ control system. Seven gameplay modes are available, including a career mode, time trials, and weekly challenges. You can also select a combat mode which throws offensive weapons like missiles, drones, and EMPs into the mix.

VRacer Hoverbike released on Steam Early Access (an incredible) eight years ago, and entered full release last June alongside a Quest port. We reviewed the game at that time, calling it "a perfect blend of speed, motion and haptics."A PlayStation VR2 release followed in November 2025, with cross-platform multiplayer support, dynamic foveated rendering, headset rumble, and adaptive triggers.

VRacer Hoverbike is out now on PC VR, PlayStation VR2, and Quest.

As part of the latest VR Games Showcase, developer Flat2VR Studios and publisher Impact Inked revealed a trailer for the previously teased Disney-themed DLC for Trombone Champ Unflattened. Trombone Champ Unflattened Disney Movie Magic Volume 1 is a paid song pack that features six classic Disney songs, plus two new performance environments from The Little Mermaid and Toy Story.

The six included songs are:

• "A Whole New World" from Aladdin
• "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid
• "You've Got a Friend in Me" from Toy Story
• "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast
• "Circle of Life" from The Lion King
• "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid

This is not the first time that Trombone Champ Unflattened has offered licensed songs and DLC packs. In 2025, Trombone Champ: Unflattened DLC added songs from indie games like Celeste, Undertale, and Deltarune.

We reviewed Trombone Champ: Unflattened when it debuted at the end of 2024, calling it "more like a brand-new game than a flatscreen port, [that builds] upon the existing foundations well to deliver ridiculously silly fun."

Trombone Champ: Unflattened is out now on the Meta Quest platform, Steam, and PlayStation VR2. It's also currently available for free to subscribers of Meta Horizon+. The Disney Movie Magic Volume 1 DLC is launching this summer.

The new trailer premiered at the latest VR Games Showcase this week and showed a lot more of the gameplay loop players can expect.

Watch the trailer here:

The Lightkeepers, from developer Spectral Games (Medieval Dynasty: New Settlement), is set in the 1920s and combines elements of several genres into one diverse gameplay loop.

As shown in the trailer, players travel by boats to various uncharted islands during the day in search of weapons, gear, and treasure to prepare to defend their lighthouse base. This will include some puzzle solving to unlock certain doors and secrets. At night, the lighthouse must be defended against an onslaught of various monsters.

The islands are randomly selected each day and the game has a meta-progression system with unlockable upgrades and cosmetics. In addition to the available weapons, players can craft consumables like grenades and healing items and fortify the lighthouse for added defense.

The Lightkeepers can be wishlisted now for Meta Quest 3 headsets. It releases on September 10.

As part of yesterday's VR Games Showcase, publisher Squido Studio announced that META4 Interactive and Illogika's VR rail shooter Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux is coming to Meta Quest on September 3. Previously released on PlayStation VR1 and then ported to PlayStation VR2, the upcoming Quest version will have "new features" (though what those features are exactly has yet to be revealed).

A trailer was released to announce the Quest port, and you can see that below.

META4 Interactive has described Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux as a retro-inspired arcade-style first-person shooter. The action unfolds across Earth and Cybertron, where players team up with Optimus Prime and the Autobots (Transformers' good guys) to fight both the Decepticons and the Insecticons (unsurprisingly, the bad guys).

For those who may not come from the era of arcades and rail shooters, essentially these are games that progress along a predetermined path and allow you to shoot targets as they appear. It's like a shooting gallery on wheels - think Time Crisis, Virtua Cop, and The House of the Dead, except in VR.

When the game made the leap from PlayStation VR1 to VR2, the team added atmospheric effects and visual effects, and implemented over 30 new interactions. What changes will come with the Quest release remains to be seen. The game costs $24.99 on PSVR and PSVR2.

Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux is coming to Quest on September 3. You can wishlist the game today.

It released today as part of the VR Games Showcase after conducting multiple open playtests. Here's the release trailer:

In Inwigo, players will explore haunted mansions to unlock gameplay mechanics, outsmart adaptive monsters, uncover treasures, and survive an interactive ghost story where choices and teamwork shape the narrative.

The game keeps things fresh by shuffling the locations of treasures and secrets in each mansion. In keeping with extraction gameplay, all loot is lost if players fail to extract. Every mansion features a unique supernatural threat.

Inwigo is available now free to play on Meta Quest. A Steam release is also planned. At the time of this article, we do not know if the Steam version will also be free to play.

Here's everything announced during today's show, beginning with new game announcements. The full showcase can be seen in its entirety here.

Main Showcase: New Game Announcements

Breachers: Outbreak is a new co-op zombie shooter from the makers of Forefront

Triangle Factory, makers of Forefront and Breachers, have revealed Breachers: Outbreak, a four-player co-op zombie extraction shooter set in the universe of the very popular tactical VR shooter Breachers. Coming to Meta Quest, Pico, SteamVR, and Steam in 2026, the spin-off sends players into infected quarantine zones to recover the key to stopping an undead apocalypse. This one looks to carry the excellent gunplay of Forefront and Breachers into the night of the living dead. Very cool.

The Rifted Skies is a new VR parkour roguelite

DreamVR debuted The Rifted Skies, an acrobatic roguelite heading to Meta Quest and SteamVR in Fall 2026. Designed around fast, comfortable movement, players sprint, climb, leap, and fight their way through collapsing environments while unlocking new abilities and upgrades across repeated runs.

Outlanders VR brings town-building strategy to VR

Mucho Games and Pomelo Games announced Outlanders VR, a virtual reality adaptation of the popular town-building strategy series. Scheduled to arrive on Meta Quest and Steam in Q4 2026, players will guide a community of settlers as they build, expand, survive, and strive for a fulfilling life.

Nomsters is a new free-to-play pet collecting game

Squido Studio and Wide Game revealed a trailer for Nomsters, a free-to-play social pet collecting game coming to Meta Quest this summer. Players will hatch eggs, collect rare creatures, trade with friends, and expand their collections through themed packs filled with adorable companions.

Roar is a new free-to-play dragon flight game

Spectral Games and publisher Squido unveiled Roar, a free-to-play social VR adventure launching on Meta Quest in Q4 2026. Players explore mysterious islands as customizable dragons, battling enemies, unlocking new forms, and teaming up with friends across a shared fantasy world. This one comes from the makers of Medieval Dynasty and The Lightkeepers.

First gameplay shown for co-op shooter R.A.I.D.

Developer FusionPlay and publisher Impact Inked unveiled the first gameplay footage for R.A.I.D., a co-op VR shooter heading to Meta Quest and SteamVR in Fall 2026. Players work as customs agents aboard a space station, inspecting cargo and boarding hostile ships in missions that blend investigation and action. Playable co-op and solo.

Drifters: Blackout Crew revealed

Salmi Games announced Drifters: Blackout Crew, a cooperative extraction shooter coming to Meta Quest and SteamVR. Teams of up to four players will raid alien ruins, gather resources, and upgrade their mothership between missions using loot recovered from increasingly dangerous expeditions. This one comes from the developer of Sweet Surrender.

I Am Your Beast VR was announced

Flat2VR Spark and Impact Inked formally announced I Am Your Beast VR, bringing the acclaimed action shooter into virtual reality for the first time. Launching in SteamVR Early Access later this year, players take on the role of a retired secret agent using speed, improvisation, and environmental traversal to survive relentless pursuit.

Main Showcase: Release Date Announcements, Launches and New Looks

In addition to the handful of new game announcements, we also got plenty of new release date reveals, game launches, and fresh looks at upcoming titles. Here's all of that!

Skeleton Crew shadow drops on Quest 3

1A3M Studio surprised us by launching Skeleton Crew immediately following the showcase. The co-op pirate adventure is available now on Meta Quest 3 and lets players slash, loot, and brawl through open-ended levels either solo or with a friend.

Lanesplit launches VR support today

FunkyMouse announced that motorcycle racing game Lanesplit is now playable in VR on PC. The update lets players weave through traffic from the cockpit of a high-speed motorcycle. They've also added new weather effects, challenges, and appearances from real-life motorcycle influencers. As a biker myself, and a dad, I have to suggest we keep this kind of fun in VR, where a crash won't ruin your life.

Co-op horror game Inwigo launches in early access today

The spooky stuff continues to hit during these showcases. Dirty Pearl Studios announced that cooperative horror adventure INWIGO is now available in Early Access on Meta Quest. Players explore the mysterious Thornwake Manor, uncovering supernatural secrets hidden from the adult world.

The Lightkeepers gets new trailer and dev diary ahead of September launch

Spectral Games and publisher Squido offered a fresh look at the development of The Lightkeepers, a cooperative adventure heading exclusively to Meta Quest on September 10, 2026. Players explore and gather resources by day and defend their lighthouse from waves of monsters by night. This one looks amazing.

Check out the full dev diary video here.

Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux heads to Quest this September

META4 Interactive and Illogika's Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux is coming to Meta Quest on September 3 through publisher Squido Studio. The updated release adds new features while letting players join the Autobots in their battle against the Decepticons. This on-rails shooter is already available on PlayStation VR1 and VR2. Now it's coming to Quest!

Sol Protocol confirms Quest and PC VR release windows

Singular Perception revealed that co-op space roguelike Sol Protocol will launch in Early Access on Meta Quest in September 2026 before arriving on SteamVR in October. Crews physically operate a spaceship together while exploring dangerous procedural star systems. This one has a gorgeous cel-shaded art style, and I can't wait to try it out.

The new gameplay trailer for Guardians Planetfall is very silly

VirtualAge unveiled a fresh look at Guardians Planetfall, a squad-based shooter coming to Meta Quest and SteamVR in Q4 2026. Designed for up to four players, the game sends squads into procedural battlefields filled with alien threats and massive war machines. Our coverage has called it Helldivers 2 in VR.

Korea. IL-2 Series shows VR support ahead of Early Access launch this week

1C Game Studios debuted a VR trailer for Korea. IL-2 Series ahead of its Early Access launch this week on PC VR. Set during the Korean War, the flight simulator places players in the cockpit of early jet fighters across historic aerial battles.

Payday: Aces High gets extended developer spotlight

Fast Travel Games showed an excellent in-depth developer diary for Payday: Aces High, its upcoming four-player co-op heist shooter for Meta Quest and SteamVR. Scheduled for release in 2026, the game brings the iconic crime franchise to VR with large-scale robberies and coordinated multiplayer action.

Watch the full developer diary here.

Main Showcase: Updates, DLC & Post-Launch Content

We also got some news on game updates, DLC, and other post-launch content drops. Check these out below.

Maestro reveals Attack On Titan DLC and additional updates

Double Jack showcased a slate of upcoming content for VR conducting hit Maestro, including a new Attack on Titan DLC pack. The update will arrive soon across Quest, Pico, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR.

Exoshock adds multiplayer next month

Polarity One and VRAL Games confirmed that multiplayer support is coming to Exoshock this July. The co-op sci-fi shooter has not officially released yet, though a special Founders Edition is available now on SteamVR and Meta Quest.

We've previewed the game already, and it's definitely a must play.

See the full trailer here.

Wizherd teases major update ahead of full launch

Squido Studio offered a new look at upcoming content for Wizherd, its spell-slinging dungeon crawler. Currently available in Early Access on Quest, the game remains on track for a full launch in Q4 2026.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR teases future roadmap and PlayStation VR2 release

Developers Mutar and Flat2VR Spark shared a post-launch update on FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR, which entered SteamVR Early Access in May. The studio also confirmed that PlayStation VR2 players can now wishlist the game ahead of its future console release. We covered the game when it launched, and absolutely loved it.

Primal Rumble opens closed beta

Impact Inked and Play XD announced that registrations are now open for the upcoming closed beta of Primal Rumble on Meta Quest. The comedic card battler combines deck-building strategy with multiplayer arena combat. More details at the trailer here.

VRacer Hoverbike adds new tracks and DLC today

VertexBreakers revealed a major content update for VRacer Hoverbike, introducing new tracks, community events, and the game's first paid DLC offerings. The futuristic racer is available now on Quest, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR. Anyone remember Extreme-G?

Anyway, check out the trailer here.

Trombone Champ: Unflattened gets Disney DLC

Back in March, Flat2VR Studios teased that Disney tunes would be coming to Trombone Champ: Unflattened. They've now unveiled Disney Movie Magic Volume 1, a paid DLC pack coming this summer on Quest, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR. The expansion includes six songs from beloved Disney films The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Toy Story, alongside two themed performance venues.

Check out the trailer here.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 teases new features

RUST unveiled a new featurette for Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2, offering a glimpse at melee combat and other upcoming systems. The sequel is currently targeting Quest and SteamVR, though no release date has been announced.

Pre-Show Announcements

Before the showcase proper began, we got a whole slew of pre-show trailers, announcements, and reveals. Check 'em out below.

Bullet Time Agent gets a new trailer shot on Quest

Studio CyFi and Lakuza Labs shared a fresh look at Bullet Time Agent, a sci-fi action-adventure bullet hell coming to Meta Quest, SteamVR, and PC in 2026. Players can slow time, dodge impossible storms of bullets, rewind their own deaths, and battle robotic enemies across increasingly chaotic arenas.

Salmon Man shows multiplayer gameplay

Valem Studio unveiled a new multiplayer trailer for Salmon Man on Meta Quest and Steam. The update introduces competitive multiplayer alongside new unlockables, achievements, and an additional mountain environment.

Fixer Undercover shows SteamVR gameplay ahead of launch

Creativity AR revealed a new trailer for Fixer Undercover while announcing that the game's Steam and SteamVR versions will launch on July 16, 2026. Already available on Meta Quest, the escape-room-inspired adventure places players undercover inside a corrupt prison armed with an arsenal of realistic tools. We wrote about the game when it launched and found it to be a phenomenally good time.

Bamboo Grove gets spooky new trailer ahead of September launch

It's another spooky one! LingVision Games shared a chilling new look at Bamboo Grove, its upcoming Meta Quest horror title launching in September 2026. The psychological thriller follows a game tester investigating a mysterious VR horror experience that begins to blur the line between virtual reality and reality itself. That's pretty meta, and I don't mean Zuck's company.

Check out the trailer here.

Beat the Beats launches Steam Workshop Level Editor beta

Parallel Circles announced that Beat the Beats has launched its Steam Workshop Level Editor beta, allowing players to create and share custom tracks. The rhythm-boxing title is available now across Steam, Meta Quest, Pico, and PlayStation VR2. More on the level editor here, and you can see the trailer here.

Augmental Puzzles adds nonograms in latest update

Flammable Penguins Games revealed that mixed reality puzzle title Augmental Puzzles is receiving a new Nonograms update today. I didn't know what a Nonogram was before today. Neat! Currently available in Early Access on Meta Quest and PC VR, the game continues to expand its growing collection of handcrafted logic puzzles. Check it out here.

Dagger Woods VR shows another new spooky trailer

Why do they insist on scaring us? Paracosm Studio debuted a fresh look at Dagger Woods VR, a psychological thriller inspired by Nova Scotian folklore and true stories. Coming to Meta Quest, PC VR, and PlayStation VR2, players step into the role of a mother searching for her missing children within a snow-covered forest haunted by local legend. Horrifying.

Check it out here.

Daumier: Lila & Ghost debuts new co-op adventure trailer

Vision Bridge and LingVision Games showcased Daumier: Lila & Ghost, a cooperative puzzle adventure heading to Meta Quest. Launching in Early Access during Summer 2026 ahead of a full release later in the year, the game sees two players work together to uncover secrets hidden within a mysterious gallery of living artworks.

Check it out here.

And that's everything shown at the showcase today. Keep checking in on UploadVR for full coverage as we unpack these new game announcements, updates, reveals, and more.

In the meantime, tell us: What was your favorite?

Here's the announcement trailer:

In Drifters, players are stranded in deep space with limited resources, forcing dangerous runs into heavily guarded facilities to loot supplies and escape before the defenses overwhelm them. These supplies can be converted into upgrades, new gears, cosmetics, and improvements to the base. The game supports co-op for up to four players with tactile weapon handling and reloading and a jetpack for more dynamic movement.

Previous VR extraction shooters Ghosts of Tabor and Contractors Showdown: Exfil Zone have proven to be very popular with VR gamers and bringing a stylized sci-fi setting already helps Drifters stand out as a different take on the genre.

German developer Salmi Games did a great job supporting its previous title, FPS roguelite Sweet Surrender with multiple updates and platform releases, so it is fair to expect the same with Drifters. Private playtests are already planned. Salmi credits support and funding from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in getting Drifters made.

Drifters: Blackout Crew can be wishlisted now on Meta Quest and Steam. At the time of this article, there is no news on a PlayStation VR2 release. Sweet Surrender was ported to Sony's platform, but it did not sell well according to Salmi Games.

The Spark program is an initiative from Flat2VR Studios started to connect experienced VR modders to developers who wish to bring their games to virtual reality. The first look at VR gameplay for I Am Your Beast VR was revealed at today's VR Games Showcase.

Here's the trailer:

I Am Your Beast was first released by developer Strange Scaffold in 2024 and has a rating of 'Overwhelmingly Positive' with over four thousand player reviews on Steam. It combines stealth elements with fast-paced combat. Players take on the role of Alphonse Harding, a retired secret agent, hunted by his former employer, the Covert Operations Initiative, after refusing the proverbial 'one last job.'

In response, the COI hunts Harding across the North American wilderness. This plays out in a series of micro sandbox scenarios across over twenty levels. Every level is timed to push players for faster completions and is fully replayable with optional side objectives. I have not played the game, but the gameplay loop sounds reminiscent of Innerspace's recent release, Spymaster.

I Am Your Beast uses a stylized comic book art style similar to Flat2VR's other project, Roboquest VR. As mentioned earlier, it is the second announced release in the Spark program, after the excellent FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR in May.

I Am Your Beast VR hits Steam later this year in Early Access. It can be wishlisted now.

The tease was shown during last month's Creature Feature Showcase along with Impact Labs' Todd Jackson putting out a call to action for playtesters. Beyond that, we did not know anything about R.A.I.D. (Rapid Assault & Interception Division) until today. R.A.I.D. is being developed by FusionPlay and published by Impact Inked.

Here's the new teaser:

R.A.I.D. is set aboard an 'orbital customs station' with players taking on the task of inspecting Earthbound interstellar cargo. The procedurally generated ships are scanned and assessed for possible risks with players having to decide whether to clear the ship for passage or intercept and board it.

Interceptions are when the action kicks in. Spacecraft are filled with pirates, aliens, and contraband waiting to be confiscated after battling through the room-based interior of the spaceships. Between inspection shifts, players can cash in earned credits and protocol points for weapon upgrades, higher ranks, new gear, and milestone abilities.

R.A.I.D. can be wishlisted now on Steam and Meta Quest.

Watch the swashbuckling launch trailer here:

Skeleton Crew supports two player co-op as you and a friend make your way through Pirate Purgatory in casual adventurous gameplay. Players select a mission from the home base, then set sail for treasure, ship battles, and island exploration in a sandbox-like setting with dynamic heists driven by player choice. Loot can be cashed in for trophies and other rewards.

This is the flagship title (pun intended) from London-based 1A3M Studio, a team of two brothers, Michael and Adrian. According to the press release, Michael tried a VR headset at a friend's house, immediately fell in love with the medium, called brother Adrian, and started building for VR.

Skeleton Crew is out for Quest 3 headsets for $11.99.

DreamVR, after years spent in LBE (location-based entertainment) VR experiences, is developing The Rifted Skies with an emphasis on real world movement over artificial thumbstick locomotion.

Here's today's announcement trailer:

Players run by swinging their arms and jump with upward arm movement with attacks, parries, and charged strikes also based on physical gestures. All movements, including slides, gliding, wall runs, and grapples can be done at full speed, making for physical, fast-paced gameplay.

The game is set in a long abandoned world slowly being consumed by a mysterious rift. Players traverse the world searching for answers while outrunning the rift and battling the creatures left in its wake. It features three different biomes, each with its own set of unique enemies and a final boss fight. Being a roguelite, temporary upgrades and unlockable abilities will be available during each run.

Regarding the game's physically active design, DreamVR Game Director Victor Tsai has this to say:

In many VR games, I found myself missing the very essence of VR, when every button press broke my immersion just a little. With The Rifted Skies, we wanted players to feel like they're inside the game, not like a person with controllers. Every mechanic goes through two questions: is it VR-native enough? Is it comfortable enough? If either answer is not a strong YES, we go back and redesign it.

The Rifted Skies can be wishlisted now on Steam and Meta Quest. It is planned to release in Early Access in Fall 2026, with a future release for Pico.

We previously reported this was coming today in our UploadVR Summer Showcase earlier this month.

Here's the official trailer:

Lanesplit first released on Steam in January of this year and sits at a 'Mostly Positive' rating with 336 reviews. It favors speed with score multipliers for faster riding and daring, more skillful lane splitting. Crashes and driving too slowly reset players' current points, hurting the chance to place on the game's global leaderboards.

Lanesplit supports solo or multiplayer gameplay, a dynamic weather system that demands careful bike selection depending on the terrain, and optional traffic settings to cater to each player's comfort. Since release, the game has already received two major updates before today's VR support. A roadmap promises a high-speed police chase mode in Q3 of this year followed by motorcycle tuning options in Q4.

Lanesplit is available now on Steam. At the time of this article, the game is on sale for 34% off at $11.87. I have received a review key from developer FunkyMouse, so keep an eye out for gameplay impressions soon.

Here's the announcement trailer:

After its previous success with PvP competitive shooters Hyper Dash, Breachers, and Forefront, this is developer Triangle Factory's first foray into cooperative survival gameplay. In a statement, Triangle Factory said the following:

With Outbreak, we wanted to explore something different: the tension and camaraderie of surviving together. Horror, teamwork, and replayability are at the core of everything we've built here.

Players join The Cleaners, an elite unit tasked with infiltrating infected zones to track down Patient X: a mutated carrier whose bone marrow may be the key to stopping the zombie outbreak. Bone Marrow Extraction is the core extraction game mode with randomized maps and a progression system based on perk builds and weapon mods.

Also notable is the flatscreen support, also a first for Triangle Factory. This adds to the growing list of VR developers expanding to flatscreen platforms hoping to boost player counts. For a multiplayer game that depends on a high and consistent player count, it makes sense in light of a challenging VR landscape many developers have openly acknowledged recently.

Breachers: Outbreak can be wishlisted now on Steam and Quest. Per the trailer, it is scheduled to release later in 2026.

Fantasy in virtual reality is a thriving genre. Among the many genres to be adapted, it seems appropriate. Magic, dragons, and castles spark that desire to embark on a journey like the heroes of such tales. The Wizards - Dark Times: Brotherhood asked players to memorize its intricate magical spells to conjure with both hands. Waltz of the Wizard lets aspiring magicians achieve their wildest wizard fantasies. In that same vein, Spell Siege takes this framework to immerse players in a fast-paced, family-friendly wave-defense adventure game.

Guided by a snarky wizard fox called Enzo the Brilliant, you are introduced as its apprentice to defend the Kingdom of Souspire. Under attack by the Elder Dragon Saffrax, this is a cookie-cutter affair that wastes no time to focus on what it does best: its gesture-based magic spells. Drawing shapes with the wand, these charge it to create either a fire, ice, or lightning-based attack. Across its 8 tower defense-style levels, players are asked to defeat any threats before they reach a shiny, floating orb called the Sou Orb to destroy it.

Each level has a normal, hard, and an endless mode, each with its own set of challenges. Requests like defeating 30 mushroom archers, leaving the Sou Orb untouched, or destroying logs in the level earn more currency to buy more spells. You begin with a fireball that causes a decent area of effect damage, but it’s quite slow. As you are in an immovable area on top of a tower on each level, all of this is considered. For example, the Ice Spikes slow down foes, while the Zap attack damages them faster depending on how well you point your wand at them.

As a game released in Early Access, it plays into its strengths well. For example, the various shapes you need to draw are clear enough to remember. The letters Z and S, and the shape of a half arch are easy to learn. No mana bar means every spell can be swiftly repeated to overwhelm enemies. Then again, the fact that you cannot move even a bit in your dedicated space of each map to aim properly can be infuriating.

Smaller mushrooms move fast, “bramblebears” adequately drag on, but then the dragons are difficult to hit. Because every level has trees or pillars that get in the way, being able to maneuver even in this small area could help in a future update. The tower defense layout lends itself to summoning help against the escalating waves, but in this current version, it’s just you as the mage apprentice facing the danger.

Other than the main levels, there are a couple of minigames to blow off some steam. Pastimes akin to bowling, whack-a-mole, and throwing balls to break glasses are offered. Successfully completing each of the challenges posed gives a ticket to play a marble drop game. The only customizable items for now are the hands, with up to 40 different colors to mix and match the gloves, sleeves, bracelets, and sockets. May they allow more exotic wands to personalize down the line.

Spell Siege does what it says on the tin. Earning every spell and spamming them relentlessly at the ever-increasing onslaught of enemies is a reward of its own. The variety in challenges encourages replayability. Its story being as paper-thin as it is, holding on to the sarcastic remarks of the wizard fox ends up being amusing enough. Only time will tell if this fair try at a magic school graduates with flying colors or ends up flunking the test.

Spell Siege is out now in Early Access for Quest.

As part of the agreement, the Omni One treadmill will be featured on the Meta Horizon store as an officially supported Made For Meta product, joining other companies like bHaptics, Logitech, Syntech, Razer, and Kiwi who have their respective products listed as certified Quest accessories.

VR treadmills have been usable for standalone games already, but getting things up and running usually required connecting to a PC first and enabling developer mode to get everything connected and synced. A native, more turnkey process, much like the bHaptics app on Quest, eliminates that friction, making the Omni One a more attractive option for Quest owners.

Omni One for Quest launches with support for multiple titles including VAIL, Forefront, The Boys: Trigger Warning, Star Trek: Infection, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, Men in Black: Most Wanted, Exoshock, and Zero Caliber 2. You can see a full list of supported Meta Quest games here.

The full package is available now through Virtuix's website and authorized partners with a launch price of $2,595 USD / €2,995 / £2,795. For a limited time, new treadmill purchases come with a bundle of supported Quest games. The bundle contains the aforementioned TMNT: Empire City, Men in Black, Exoshock, and Zero Caliber 2.

For more information, visit the Omni One For Quest on Virtuix's website.

GOLF+ has released a new DLC that offers players a chance to hit the greens at one of Southern California's prettiest courses. The Omni La Costa North Course DLC is available now.

Omni La Costa hosted PGA Tour events for over three decades, during which time it welcomed some of the biggest stars of the sport. Beginning in 2024, Omni La Costa's North Course has been the home of both the men's and women's NCAA Division I Golf Championships, and will remain so until at least 2028. The course rewards precision and thoughtful shot-making, and has earned a reputation as one of the most demanding courses in collegiate golf.

Watch the full release trailer here:

In addition to this and many other real-world courses, GOLF+ also offers its own original courses, such as the recently added Dynasty Course, a stunning China-inspired course where greens graced with pagodas tower above the clouds.

Golf+ DLC can vary in price depending on the length and complexity of the course on offer. Some start as low as $4.99 and others climb as high as $14.99. Players can subscribe to the Golf+ Pass service for $9.99 a month (or $99.99 per year) to get access to all courses.

The Omni La Costa North Course DLC is available now on Quest for $11.99.

GOLF+ is out now on Quest for $29.99 and comes with three original courses. The developers have also confirmed that the long-awaited PC VR release will tee off sometime this summer.

What I enjoyed most about The Longest Day is how it harnesses a range of techniques which feel somewhat bold compared to other immersive videos on Apple Vision Pro, yet strongly aligned with supporting the intent of the short story.

Creative Choices in Service of the Story

Rather than keeping to one consistent visual style, The Longest Day takes its audience through Wagner’s challenging mental and physical journey with a mix of camera movements using the premium Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera, perspective shifts and stylized sequences. Despite transitions between many tightly-packed scenes, locations and styles, the length and sequence of each shot felt well timed with just enough breathing room to take in the moments there.

Studio altitude.101’s creative choices range from letting visitors come close to feeling the sensation of the speed of Wagner running thanks to their use of a camera crane attached to a Jeep going full-speed with him, through to virtually placing them in the water with him using custom housing built for the camera. My only caution is that the bold choice in how to present his speed at times could feel jarring for some people. Subtle choices like capturing the water splashing towards the audience, and eye contact with him during moments outside of the challenge, do a lot to create that connection with Wagner’s story and world.

The experience also tests a few stylized sequences to help to tell the story beyond the physical capture of what took place, with elements like integrating a heat-map-style effect, complementary 2D footage and text overlays.

A Brief Glimpse Into a Triathlete’s World

The Longest Day is not a long experience but its short narrative and range of vantage points into Wagner’s world give a strong glimpse into the athlete’s experience, leaving viewers with an inspirational message. In a way, the simplicity of the story makes it somewhat more relatable to a wide range of viewers because of how it conveys overall passion for performance and success and the challenge to keep going even during setbacks. The variety of physical challenges he goes through also makes it more interesting. With that said, I would have felt more connected with Wagner and interested in following his progress after the short film had his story felt a little more personal.

Wagner speaks French in the experience but there are various points where the stylized text is in English and the experience is available with English subtitles on Amplium and English, German, and Japanese subtitles on Theater.

The Case for More Immersive Sports Stories

What immersive videos like Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness, The Longest Day and even altitude.101’s KICK show is that immersive sports content does not have to be limited to experiencing a competition from hard-to-access vantage points. Being present with athletes or fans behind-the-scenes unlocks many compelling human interest stories and adventures whether you are a fan of sports or not.

According to many sources like consultancy Kearney’s 2025 report on unlocking value in sports, the global sports market is valued at over $400 billion thanks to media rights, licensing, merchandise, sponsorships and betting. As access to immersive technology grows both for at-home and out-of-home audience segments, immersive sports stories unlock new ways to grow engagement with sports, franchises, athletes and the ecosystem of brands that support them.

This update along with March's addition of Azruss the human warlock brings Battlemarked's total number of playable characters to eight, already passing the original Demeo's roster of seven heroes less than a year after release.

Here's the trailer:

Gruda can be unlocked by completing the Bear Hunting side quest in the game's first campaign, Embers of Chaos. This quest unlocks after the first encounter in Neverwinter Wood near the start of the campaign. To start it, go to the Dawdling Dell location on the world map.

Gruda is a support character that can transform into a bear occupying a 2x2 grid on the battlefield. I unlocked her before writing this article and in my short time with her, she's already a lot of fun.

In her own words:

I'm really good at helping! I can bite the bad guys, and heal the ouchies, and turn into a bear for hugs.

Plus I'm great at finding snack. And making friends! I'm BEARy useful! Get it? BEARy?

Demeo × Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked is available now on Quest, Steam, and PlayStation VR2.

After spending time with its public preview and speaking with founder Dr. Meng Zhang, coaches Dasha Walmsley and Mike Pistilli, and choreographer Janet Zhang, I came away convinced that FunFitLand isn't simply adding its own version of a flow-based workout. SwingFit stands on its own, but it also arrives at a time when the broader platform is expanding in several interesting directions.

FunFitLand's Take On Flow

Anyone familiar with flow-style workouts will immediately recognize the foundation. SwingFit places a club in each hand and asks users to strike, sweep, and move through a series of targets synchronized to music. Like other flow-oriented fitness experiences, the emphasis is on continuous movement and full-body engagement.

Where SwingFit distinguishes itself from FunFitLand's other workout modes is in how physical the movement feels. Dasha Walmsley believes that difference starts with the movement itself.

"The difference is that physiologically, there is a push movement. There is a pull movement," Walmsley explained. "In the movement world, there are three planes of motion. There's the frontal one, the side one, and then there's the circumduction all around."

Circumduction refers to a circular movement pattern that combines rotation and reach, something SwingFit encourages throughout its workouts.

Walmsley said she became convinced of SwingFit's potential after spending time researching how the movement style differed from existing modes.

"The amazing feeling that you get is because you are encouraged to stretch your arms wider," she said. "You do all this pivoting and twisting and rotational movement. It's more of a three-dimensional movement."

She also believes SwingFit's movement patterns activate parts of the body that don't receive as much attention in other workout modes.

"What's amazing is the contrast of actually striking with force and then being able to decelerate the movement as well," Walmsley said. "You keep switching between power and winding it down again."

That constant transition between acceleration, follow-through, and retraction creates a different physical sensation than either GrooveFit or CombatFit on their own.

"There are a lot of muscles on the back that, in Groove for example, you don't activate in quite the same way," Walmsley explained. "With SwingFit, you get the little muscles in the back, like your shoulder stabilizers and your thoracic spine activating from that retraction and follow-through movement."

That description matched my own experience.

At various points, SwingFit felt less like a rhythm game and more like a choreographed movement sequence. The closest comparison I could think of was a Jedi lightsaber battle or martial arts. The movements flow together naturally, encouraging torso rotation, reaching, lunging, and sweeping motions rather than simply reacting to incoming targets.

Mike Pistilli sees that sense of embodiment as part of the appeal.

"We all want to be warriors," Pistilli said. "We want to have swords. We want to go into battle."

That fantasy element helps transform the experience from a workout into something more immersive. Rather than simply hitting targets for points, users are encouraged to move with power and intention, creating a stronger connection between the physical movement and what they see inside the headset.

Why SwingFit Feels Different

Flow workouts are no longer unique within VR fitness.

What makes SwingFit stand out is the way FunFitLand integrates movement, visuals, sound, and haptic feedback into a single experience.

One of the things I've always appreciated about FunFitLand is the feeling of impact. Successful strikes don't simply register. Targets explode with synchronized audio, controller vibration, visual effects, and movement timing that create a surprising sense of physicality.

Pistilli believes part of that sensation comes from the physical connection between the movement and the controllers themselves.

"You need to grip that bat, that baton, that club," he said. "You need to feel that shake when you explode those targets. It's just a completely different vibe."

SwingFit builds directly on that foundation.

Every successful strike feels rewarding. Sound effects reinforce the movement. Haptic feedback adds weight. Visual effects complete the illusion. Individually, none of these elements would be remarkable. Working together, they create a level of responsiveness that feels both surprisingly alive and exceptionally polished. 

According to Dr. Zhang, SwingFit proved significantly more difficult to develop than previous modes because it required combining the flowing movement patterns of GrooveFit with the power and impact associated with CombatFit.

Music also plays a central role.

Janet Zhang explained that choreography begins with the music itself. Melodies inspire flowing movement patterns while stronger rhythmic sections influence target placement and impact moments. Rather than simply matching beats, lessons are built around the emotional progression of a song.

The moments that stayed with me weren't necessarily the fastest or most intense. They were the moments when movement, music, visuals, sound, and feedback seemed to click into sync.

A Public Preview Designed To Be Shared

Unlike a traditional beta test, FunFitLand is opening SwingFit to anyone interested in trying it on Meta Quest.

The public preview requires no subscription, no trial commitment, and no invitation. Users who join receive free access to three SwingFit workouts spanning Light, Medium, and Intense difficulty levels, giving them an opportunity to experience the new mode while the team gathers feedback ahead of launch. Participants can also explore other FunFitLand experiences during the preview period, which is currently scheduled to run through the end of June.

The company is also encouraging existing users to invite friends to participate.

According to Dr. Zhang, the goal is straightforward.

"We're still working out how best to spread the word, but the intent is simple: invite as many people as we can, gather feedback from a wider audience, and let them feel something that's different and uniquely FunFitLand."

Many VR fitness users have spent the past several months researching alternatives following Meta's decision to shut down the Supernatural studio. Although Supernatural is now set to continue under a new independent company, that period of uncertainty encouraged many users to explore other options. Rather than asking prospective users to commit to another subscription, FunFitLand is giving them an opportunity to experience SwingFit firsthand.

Taking Its Own Swing

For FunFitLand, SwingFit's arrival comes during a period of transition across the VR fitness landscape.

"A lot of VR fitness users are looking for what comes next," Zhang told me following our conversation. "We'd love for them to try FunFitLand, not as a temporary stand-in, but as a real alternative built with long-term conviction."

He also welcomed comparisons.

"If people compare SwingFit to what they loved in Supernatural or FitXR, we genuinely welcome it. This is our own take on flow, power, coaching, music, and full-body movement."

After spending time with SwingFit, that feels like a fair assessment.

The mode clearly belongs in the same conversation as other flow-based fitness experiences. While the influences are obvious, FunFitLand's visual style, coaching approach, and emphasis on impact feedback make SwingFit feel unmistakably like a FunFitLand workout.

Many VR fitness enthusiasts, myself included, already maintain subscriptions to multiple services because each offers a different experience. The goal may be similar, but Supernatural, FitXR, and FunFitLand each create a different atmosphere through their coaches, music, movement design, and overall approach to motivation.

For some users, SwingFit and FunFitLand may become a primary workout destination. For others, they may simply earn a place alongside the services they already use. After spending time with the preview, both outcomes seem entirely plausible.

A Broader Experience

As much as SwingFit impressed me, it was only part of the story.

FunFitLand recently launched Space, a new feature designed for moments when users aren't looking for a workout at all. Rather than focusing on fitness goals or performance metrics, Space allows users to relax inside the platform's virtual environments, stretch, breathe, explore, or simply spend time in a calming setting.

After spending time in several of its environments, I found myself appreciating the same attention to atmosphere and audio design that runs throughout the rest of the platform.

The company also introduced Activity, a social feed that lets users follow friends, view completed workouts and achievements, celebrate milestones through kudos, and stay connected to the broader FunFitLand community.

During our conversation, Dasha Walmsley spoke about the value of having different experiences available for different emotional states. Some days users may want an intense workout. Other days they may simply want a place to relax, breathe, explore, or unwind.

Space and Activity represent two sides of that broader vision. One is focused on restoration and reflection, while the other is designed to strengthen community and motivation.

That vision encompasses fitness, wellness, social connection, and self-improvement within the same platform. Activity's social features, including follows, kudos, and workout sharing, support that goal today, while multiplayer functionality is currently in development. As FunFitLand founder Dr. Zhang put it, "The idea is not just fitness. It's an everyday go-to app."

Accessibility By Design

The app already includes dedicated seated classes, low-impact options, and restorative collections. During our conversation, Dr. Zhang highlighted several design decisions that many users may never consciously notice.

One example appears when users participate in certain classes while seated. Rather than forcing the same movement patterns, target placement quietly adapts to make the workout more comfortable and achievable from a seated position.

The platform's bright orange-and-blue visual palette also serves a practical purpose beyond branding. According to Dr. Zhang, the high-contrast color combination was chosen in part to improve visibility for many users with low vision or color blindness.

The team is also exploring additional accessibility options, including potential one-arm workout support and expanded language capabilities. 

A Continued Evolution

A year ago, when I first covered FunFitLand, the conversation centered on making movement feel enjoyable, approachable, and sustainable.

Those ideas are still there. What has changed is the scope of the platform.

Over the past year, FunFitLand has expanded its coaching roster, introduced the meditation-focused FlowFit series, and launched Space and Activity, broadening its focus beyond fitness alone. At the same time, the company continues to invest heavily in fitness itself, with SwingFit representing its latest workout experience.

What isn't in doubt is that SwingFit gives people a reason to take a closer look. By opening the preview to everyone, FunFitLand is giving prospective users an easy way to experience SwingFit while also discovering everything else the platform has to offer. 

My time with the SwingFit preview was enough to leave me wanting more. SwingFit felt impressively polished, adapting naturally to a flow-based format while feeling unmistakably like a FunFitLand workout.

FunFitLand is available as a free download on the Meta Quest store, and offers subscriptions for either $9.99 monthly or $99 annually. It is also available on the Apple Vision Pro, though the newly announced features will not arrive on Apple's headset immediately. According to Dr. Zhang, Space is expected to arrive on Vision Pro before the end of Q3 2026, with SwingFit planned for early Q4 2026 following additional refinement and testing on Quest.

With the arrival of the Makoa Shelf expansion, which the developer describes as the game's largest environment yet, Subside is even better than ever. I've spent the past week exploring the game both alone and with my kids, and it's immediately become a favorite activity in our house. To put it succinctly, Subside and the Makoa Shelf expansion are breathtaking experiences and a must-buy for every VR player.

What's In The Water

The Makoa Shelf expansion comes with three new areas; the Makoa Shelf itself is the largest ever released in Subside, doubling the size of the base game's Cobalt Cove. Two smaller experience areas are included as well; Great Migration is an area full of hammerhead sharks in the deep ocean while Sleeping Giants is an area which lets you float amongst a pack of resting sperm whales.

There's plenty to explore in both the base game and the expansion, with more than enough areas to keep you busy for weeks. The added "Night Modes," unlockable areas, collectibles, and the general vastness and variety of creatures to interact with and places to explore are quite impressive.

There are new tools to unlock, such as the underwater scooter and extra air capacity, and these are earned through in-game currency that you find while exploring. They join with tools from the base game, such as the underwater torch and treasure finding wristband, two tools that will be critical to unlocking the expansion's two extra areas.

Subside was tested on PlayStation VR2, where it looks simply stunning and runs perfectly. Visually, Makoa Shelf continues the series’ reputation for excellence. Few VR games achieve this level of environmental realism. Water clarity, lighting effects and detailed underwater vegetation combine to produce scenes that often resemble nature documentaries brought to life. In places where people talk about VR gaming, it's not uncommon to find PSVR2 users, specifically, describing Subside as one of the best-looking experiences available on the headset.

That visual quality serves a purpose beyond simple spectacle. Makoa Shelf succeeds because it creates an emotional response. There are moments of tranquility where players can simply float and observe their surroundings, appreciating the beauty of the ocean. Yet there are also instances where the sheer scale of the environment triggers unease. Open-water exploration naturally taps into primal fears of the unknown, and the expansion appears willing to embrace that tension. For some players, that balance between wonder and vulnerability may prove to be the most memorable aspect of the experience. I know that my most memorable moment came when I left the shallows and dropped into deep blue. Equal parts exhilarating and awful.

The only other way to experience what Subside can deliver is to buy hundreds of dollars worth of specialized diving equipment, take lessons, hop on a plane, charter a boat, and get in the water. Subside brings the ocean to you, and that's pretty damn cool.

Dive In

My nine year old daughter loves the ocean. She wants to be a marine biologist and work with ocean animals. When she tried Subside, it was like a religious experience. When she got over the initial shock of how endlessly gorgeous the game was, she spent the next hours of her life chasing fish and cooing at turtles, squealing in thrilled terror when a shark loomed out from the shadows, wondering in open awe when a whale shark drifted through the sunbeams above her head, and giggling at the shy sandworms as they flickered into their dens when she came too close.

Later that night, when she was on a walk with my wife and our dogs, she couldn't wait to tell everything she did in "this new game dad got." She talked about it for twenty minutes. In fact, she popped into my office mere moments ago as I was writing this very impressions piece to ask if she could play Subside. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know, I'm not sure what will.

Subside is available on PlayStation VR2 and SteamVR, where the base game costs $24.99. The Makoa Shelf expansion costs $9.99.

First teased as "Project Aura" just over a year ago, Xreal Aura will be the second device to run Google's Android XR operating system.

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon Reality Elite, Its New Flagship XR Chipset

Qualcomm just announced Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, and it will debut in the compute puck of Xreal’s Aura Android XR device this fall.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

It's a prism-lens see-through device in a form factor that tries to imitate the basic appearance of sunglasses, as with Xreal's existing products. Though while Xreal's current products primarily act as a tethered virtual monitor for your existing devices, Aura comes with a tethered compute puck, running Google's Android XR on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset, which it will be the first device to use. Last year, Xreal told some outlets that the puck would use the XR2+ Gen 2, but either that was a mistake or the plans have changed.

The Reality Elite in the puck is paired with Xreal's own X1S chip in the headset itself, which handles core computer vision tasks to avoid the enormous bandwidth requirement of transmitting the camera data to the puck.

Xreal says Aura has a field of view of 70 degrees diagonal, its widest yet, and has built-in head and hand tracking.

Most features and apps available on Samsung Galaxy XR will also run on Xreal Aura's puck, with some notable exceptions such as the face-tracked Likeness realistic avatars, as Aura doesn't have face tracking.

Note that while Xreal devices are designed to look like sunglasses, they sit much further out from your eyes than real glasses, and thus are a markedly different device category than the true AR glasses of the kind Snap just opened preorders for.

True AR glasses like Specs use a display technology called waveguides to sit as close to your eyes as regular glasses, while Xreal uses a far cheaper but also far bulkier optical approach. They also block out most light, so can't be used as regular indoor prescription glasses.

Essentially, you can think of Xreal Aura as a lightweight alternative to Samsung Galaxy XR that trades off field of view and opacity for sleekness, rather than competition for future outdoor AR glasses.

Xreal says the glasses part of Aura weighs 95 grams.

You can now preorder Xreal Aura, and it will ship later this year. Though Xreal is using one of the strangest "preordering" systems we've ever seen.

The company is not yet announcing the price, nor many of the key specifications, other than to say that it will "not exceed $1500".

You can either pay $299 for a "Founder Priority Pass" or $99 for a "Launch Credit".

The $299 Founder Priority Pass, Xreal says, gives you "guaranteed earliest-batch delivery in supported launch regions", and "your unique, exclusive limited-edition number permanently printed on the product". The deposit will then be applied to the price of the product, so you'll only need to pay the difference.

The $99 Launch Credit meanwhile, still gives you an earlier shipping position than general sale, and actually doubles up, such that you get a net $100 discount on the total price you pay.

Xreal says the reservations are fully refundable before the final sale decision.

The chipset's naming is a departure from Qualcomm's usual for its chipsets for XR headsets, which currently power almost every non-Apple standalone headset on the market.

It's the new flagship offering for powerful standalone XR devices, and is explicitly designed to support multiple form factors, including the chipset being in the headset itself and the chipset being in a tethered compute puck. It's also designed to work in either passthrough or see-through display systems.

Essentially, this is XR2 Gen 3 by another name.

Compared to Qualcomm's previous flagship, the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 that's used in Samsung Galaxy XR, Play For Dream MR, and Sony's enterprise headset, Snapdragon Reality Elite promises:

• 60% greater GPU performance.
• 30% greater CPU performance.
• 160% greater NPU performance for machine learning tasks (48 TOPS).
• An expanded EVA (Engine for Visual Analytics) block which accelerates more computer vision tasks such as 3D environment reconstruction.
• Enhanced camera passthrough with 10% lower photon-to-photon latency, 33% less power draw, and advanced image noise reduction.
• Support for faster UFS 4.0 storage.
• Support for 4.2 GHz RAM (up from 3.2 GHz).
• Built-in support for up to 2x USB 3.1 ports.
• Bluetooth 6.0 support.

Qualcomm also claims Snapdragon Reality Elite achieves 20% longer battery life with the same workload as XR2+ Gen 2, and is up to 12°C cooler under load, crucial to making it suitable for tethered pucks that the user might put in their pocket.

When asked by UploadVR whether the chip would perform worse in a user's pocket than on a headset with an active cooling fan, the company declined to directly answer, instead pointing towards this as being the responsibility of device makers, and that the chip is designed to work in various form factors.

The company claims that the 160% more powerful NPU enables "entirely new gen AI experiences" to run on-device, from photorealistic avatars to LLM agents and rapid real‑time 3D object generation.

Specifically, Qualcomm says a 3 billion parameter LLM could run on the NPU at 45 tokens per second, while a 512×512 large vision model could run with around 1.7 seconds of latency.

UploadVR asked Qualcomm whether the expanded EVA block could enable performant real-time continuous scene meshing on headsets without a depth sensor, and the company responded that the answer was essentially yes, from a chipset capability perspective, but that this would be up to developers.

The first confirmed headset to use Snapdragon Reality Elite is the Xreal Aura Android XR, which today at the AWE expo was confirmed as shipping this fall.

Play For Dream also says it will use Snapdragon Reality Elite in its next flagship device.

Article updated after publication to fix cropping issue affecting the GPU performance chart.

At last year's AWE expo, the company behind Snapchat declared that it would ship fully standalone true augmented reality glasses in 2026, and at this year's AWE, as announced by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, the company is opening preorders to make good on its promise, beating giants like Meta, Apple, and Google to the punch.

It's the result of around a decade of work on smart glasses at Snap and its over $3 billion of investment into augmented reality research.

By "true AR glasses", for those not familiar with this space, we mean glasses you could (at least theoretically) wear in daily life that can place virtual objects and interfaces into the real world. This is a major capability jump compared to HUD glasses like Meta Ray-Ban Display, which just add a small fixed display to your view, and a vastly different proposition to displayless smart glasses that focus on cameras and audio. True AR glasses are also different from display glasses like Xreal and Viture, which heavily darken your view and sit out from your face too much to be used as everyday glasses.

Snap has released two true AR development kits in its long buildup to Specs, called Spectacles, giving developers the hardware, all equipped with hand tracking, to build experiences and get ready for the arrival of consumer AR. The first Spectacles, in 2021, was given to a select few developers and had a field of view of just 26 degrees diagonal and active battery life of just 30 minutes. The second, in 2024, was rented to interested developers for $99/month and while it massively expanded the field of view to 46 degrees, and battery life to 45 minutes, it was also much bulkier and weighed 226 grams.

The consumer Specs have a slightly larger field of view of 51 degrees diagonal, similar to Microsoft's HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 1, yet bring the weight down to 132 grams for the 47mm frame size and 136 grams for the 51mm.

It's definitely describable as a true glasses form factor, and much lighter than the Spectacles developer kit and the AR headsets of the 2010s. However, Specs are still significantly heavier than regular glasses and the less capable smart glasses on the market today. For comparison, Ray-Ban Meta glasses weigh around 50 grams, while Meta Ray-Ban Display, with its 20 degree monocular display, weighs 69 grams, and Orion, Meta's unshippable prototype AR glasses with 70 degree binocular displays, weighs 98 grams.

Beyond the weight and field of view, Snap isn't yet revealing many detailed specifications for Specs, an unusual move for a product available to preorder, and somewhat ironic given its name.

What the company will say, so far, is:

Displays

Specs use proprietary LCoS displays developed in-house (likely a result of its 2022 acquisition of Compound Photonics) that are capable of displaying 16 million colors per pixel, the same as a typical flatscreen. Snap is not yet revealing the resolution.

The company directly confirmed to UploadVR that the 51 degree field of view figure is diagonal, and refused to give the horizontal and vertical values or aspect ratio.

Chips

There are two unspecified Qualcomm Snapdragon chips onboard, a main chipset for the OS and applications, and a secondary chipset for computer vision tasks, which includes head position tracking, hand tracking, environment meshing, and spatial anchoring.

Snap refused to provide the name of the chipsets.

Latency

Snap says Specs achieve a motion-to-photon latency of just 7 milliseconds.

That's the lowest publicly stated latency claim for a 6DoF XR product we've ever heard, and a significant upgrade from the 13 milliseconds of the Spectacles developer kit.

Auto Tint & Opacity

Specs feature electrochromic lenses to rapidly automatically adjust to your environment, becoming clear glasses indoors and sunglasses outdoors in the sun.

Snap says the electrochromic tech can adjust to fully opaque in just 10 seconds, significantly faster than photochromic lenses like the Transitions in Meta Ray-Ban Display, which can take around a minute. It also solves the problem of photochromic lenses not working through UV-blocking glass like many car windshields.

However, Snap isn't claiming that Specs can become fully transparent. A major limitation of many last-decade AR devices was that they inherently blocked out a large percentage of light. Snap isn't giving a transmissibility figure, but says that this is noticeably improved over the Spectacles dev kit.

Frame

The frame, which comes in two sizes, is made of Swiss TR90 polymer, which offers an appealing balance of low weight, toughness, and flexibility.

That's a key part of the company bringing down the weight to 132 grams for the 47mm frame size and 136 grams for the 51mm, compared to the 226 grams of the Spectacles developer kit.

Prescriptions

Specs handle vision correction through inserts, supporting an unspecified “wide range” of prescriptions.

This makes shipping a far less complex process compared to glasses that bake in prescription correction at the time of manufacturing like Meta Ray-Ban Display, and also allows for easy sharing of the glasses for demos.

Battery

Snap claims the glasses last for 4 hours of "mixed use", which includes audio playback, video playback, AI assistance, and Bluetooth notifications.

It's an extremely vague figure that isn't directly comparable to the 45 minutes of 6DoF AR use of the Spectacles dev kits. I'd go as far as to say that it's effectively meaningless, since the glasses will use vastly more power in AR experiences than when just playing audio.

Case

As with any good smart glasses, Specs come with a charging case, which the company says provides four full recharges.

Snap OS 2.0 Brings The AR Glasses Closer To Consumer-Ready

Snap OS 2.0 is out now, adding and improving first-party apps like Browser, Gallery, and Spotlight to bring the AR platform closer to being ready for consumers.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Specs run Snap OS, the same operating system as the Spectacles developer kit, which we've been closely tracking the progression of over the past few years.

While on an underlying level Snap OS is Android-based, you can't install APKs on it, and thus developers can't run entirely native code apps or use third-party engines like Unity. Instead, Specs run sandboxed "Lenses", the company's name for apps, developed using the Lens Studio software for Windows and macOS, where developers use JavaScript or TypeScript to interact with high-level APIs, while first-party frameworks handle the low-level core tech like rendering. This approach is crucial to how Snap is shipping 6DoF AR in a fully standalone device with limited compute, whereas some other companies are using compute pucks.

So what will buyers actually be able to do with Specs out of the box?

Out of the box, Specs will include first-party Lenses for web browsing, on-foot navigation, measuring real-world objects and spaces, adding a second screen to your laptop, whiteboarding, and translation. Snap also mentions support for a contextual AI assistant.

Specs can also be used for simpler non-AR tasks like listening to music, audiobooks, and podcasts, as well as getting notifications from your phone via Bluetooth.

Snap's major focus in recent years with its Spectacles kit has been on the developer community, and building out the tools they use to build Lenses, many of which are games. Lenses will be available on a store on Specs, as you'd expect, though when asked by UploadVR whether all Lenses built for the Spectacles dev kit would run on Specs out of the box, Snap declined to answer affirmatively, seemingly suggesting that at least some degree of developer work will be required.

Lenses will be free to download for Specs owners, though to monetize, developers can include in-app payments or subscriptions via Snap's Commerce Kit, so that they can "build real businesses".

Back in October, Snap confirmed a Lens from Synth Riders, a modified port of its popular rhythm fitness title on other XR platforms, as well as official minigames from Star Wars and Avatar: The Last Airbender.

They joined existing Lenses from LEGO (Bricktacular) and Niantic (Peridot), as Snap works to flesh out the third-party AR content in the buildup to launch.

Today Snap also announced an expanded capability for Lens development called the Native Development Kit. This lets developers bring native C and C++ code and libraries into Lenses, which the company says could be used for advanced spatial mapping, physics, audio, networking, and navigation.

Snap also announced a full agentic workflow for Lens development, with full MCP support for AI coding agents like OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

Specs are available to preorder now, with a $200 refundable deposit and the remaining $1995 paid when the glasses ship "this fall" to the US, UK, and France. Snap has not announced plans for availability beyond these markets.

Assuming it isn't beaten to market by something we're completely unaware of, Snap Specs should be a landmark moment for the XR industry, the moment where the long-promised idea of true AR glasses finally becomes truly available for those willing to pay for it, though its price and the inherent limitations of it as a first generation product mean that we expect most buyers to be tech enthusiasts and relatively wealthy early adopters, as with Apple Vision Pro.

Japan hosts an entertainment and attractions industry happy to fund VR experiences in theme parks and for corporate uses, giving companies alternative revenue streams, while successful titles from its higher-profile developers with games like Ruinsmagus and Exit 8 VR keep a spotlight on the talent in the country and keep the industry stable. Also a factor is a sense of camaraderie between VR studios, a group brought together not just by nationality but a shared passion and, more recently, a new G-Smash initiative focused on advocating on their behalf and showcasing a united front and varied face to the industry that, they hope, can attract new players to the medium and technology.

Bitsummit, Japan’s biggest indie gaming event, invited 68,000 people to the country’s ancient capital of Kyoto over multiple days to celebrate indie developers and smaller creators. Yet the biggest booth belonged not to console manufacturers like Nintendo or PlayStation, or any of the major publishers of indie games from both inside and outside of Japan. Instead, that belonged to G-Smash, spread across not just a sponsored VR-focused game jam but a shared space for 15 developers from inside and outside Japan to present their games in one united front, showcasing the scale and breadth of what is possible inside the medium.

The initiative is a relatively recent one, started by founder Shun Harashima only shortly before last year’s Bitsummit event before spending the months that followed gaining support from manufacturers like Meta and Pico. G-Smash was founded with the intent to bring developers together, connect them to companies who can provide the funding to bring their games to life, and most importantly, introduce VR to the millions still skeptical or yet to try the medium for themselves. Much of which is inspired by his own childhood, where, after moving from Japan to the US at five years old, Pokemon fever took him from an outcast to a popular kid and helped him make friends in a new country.

That appreciation led him into the Japanese entertainment industry after a stint at toy manufacturer Takara Tomy, and later led to a broader fascination with the medium. “VR has always been my thing,” he explains. “Japan always felt ahead of other countries at the time, with open VR exhibition spaces like the [now-closed] Shinjuku VR Zone, or Bandai Namco’s location-based entertainment experiences. I started working on VR as an actual job when I joined Konami in 2018, helping to launch their first VR game, which led me to being a contact point to Meta and later joining them. There, I got to meeting so many other developers. Unfortunately, sometimes companies pivot, and Japan is not always the first priority, whereas my passion was always here. I wanted to do more for it.”

It’s no secret that the VR industry, like all of gaming, has undergone a turbulent few years, seen more acutely within VR in part due to the tighter budgets and finer margins many developers in the industry have always faced. While Sony have not entirely abandoned VR - they were a sponsor of G-Smash’s XR Yokocho booth alongside Meta and Pico, a first for all three companies to come together to sponsor a collective VR showcase - the underperformance of PlayStation VR2 has made it more difficult to reach new players, while low sales for some titles have led to the closure of studios and numerous canceled projects across all platforms.

Regular news about closures, such as that of Metro Awakening studio Vertigo Studios Amsterdam, highlights how even larger teams are far from immune from these challenges. For all that the industry has its share of successes, it's a space where many are understandably nervous knowing one failed release, or a sudden change in direction from the likes of Meta, could be enough to plunge a company into crisis.

But it’s precisely this that makes a united front from G-Smash important, according to Shun. “The first XR Yokocho event at Bitsummit 2025 was my first act with G-Smash, but I had to put it together in only two months after leaving Meta, and used all my severance package from the company to make it happen. I wanted to grow the VR market in Japan which is why, when I had this huge space, I went international to the US, not just to domestic creators. It has to be something international, it has to be known by everyone in the industry.

“That's why it's very important for Western developers to come over and find opportunities. This is about helping grow the market in Japan, which would ultimately help all developers, everywhere.”

The Japanese industry does have its own unique quirks that have proved to be long-term hurdles in adoption that make these initiatives important. For all consumer-grade VR has its place, it’s harder to sell to the general public as a result of smaller apartments and homes alongside other cultural norms. By contrast, though, in-person event-driven VR experiences succeed both within Tokyo and beyond. Tyffonium and Excurio show that you can maintain these large-scale immersive experiences, with the former even being a domestic company now hard at work on their own Final Fantasy effort with Square Enix to premiere later this year. Even the major developers are willing to give it a chance in these spheres - Capcom’s AR-driven Monster Hunter Bridge was initially developed for the World Expo 2025 in Osaka and made in-house, but its success means it will now receive a permanent exhibition inside the Nijigen no Mori theme park on Awaji Island.

G-Smash’s XR Yokocho booth was about more than merely making itself known with a splashy, large space. A secondary goal is to support creatives in reducing the risk of high-risk projects while promoting innovation that’s low-risk if it fails, but has a chance for viral success within and beyond VR. On one end of the spectrum, you had CharacterBank showing off their latest demo for the upcoming Knights of Fiona, with a layer of polish as they build towards beta tests for the game’s online components. A preview video for the upcoming Evangelion VR game was also shown, as were a number of currently-available big-hitters like Lumines Arise.

Yet for smaller projects, UNIVRS and Character Bank both had titles made in partnership with G-Smash that were defined as small-scale, quick-to-develop experiences with replayability to keep people coming back. For UNIVRS, they developed the fitness-like rhythm punching game Project Punch, while Sausage Batting was the name for the rather hilarious sausage fest the latter team produced.

“Both of those games are ideas we came up with at G-Smash in partnership with those developers, and we want to launch both of them this year. We built these teams two months ago, brainstormed, and just ran with it. We want to create conversations, launch these games, and create conversations that will bring people to take a fresh look at VR. After all, VR is very indie, so we should use that flexibility to create whatever we can to see if we can connect with people.

“I don’t want to do this alone, but I want to make the industry more exciting. If VR is small, we should use it to our advantage. We want variety, but for example, we could launch five sausage games from different companies in the space of a few months, and suddenly everyone can do it. VR is about sausages now! No one can do that on any other platform and shift the entire medium like is possible in VR because of its hyper-indie focus. But if you’re going to do that, you have to make it first. It’s not about who wins or loses. In Sausage Batting, you’re playing with this sausage, and because it’s wiggling it’s really hard to hit, but if you hit it just right it gets hard and you have a home run. Yet, if you wanted, you could create sausage darts, or fish with sausages, or grow sausages in a garden.

“I want a level of quality, but I want conversations to start around VR. If people notice such a movement, they may be confused about all the sausages, but then maybe they look further. The same goes for creating showcases at Bitsummit like XR Yokocho. They may see it one year and wonder what it is, but then when it comes back the next year, they check it out because it’s not a one-time thing. Then, bigger companies in the space like Flat2VR come here, and suddenly XR Yokocho is a recurring thing. That’s how trends are made. I want to make things happen, and try everything without regret. That’s the spirit of G-Smash.”

This philosophy spread to the student-driven game jam with four unique VR experiences made by aspiring devs. Winning the cash prize was Torima Headbang, a game as silly as it was immediately captivating to the audiences who would crowd and stare as people played. It certainly caused the scene G-Smash hoped to create, as you controlled a bird on a skateboard building speed by headbanging while wearing the headset to get the highest score. Perhaps slightly neck pain-inducing if you weren’t careful, but it’s not designed for something too intensive or for a long session. If anything, it’s exactly what VR needed: something just silly enough yet immediately simple to understand that anyone can play, while also being enhanced in manners only possible within VR.

“We found 90% of the people visiting our booths at Bitsummit have never played VR before,” explains Shun. “Maybe they tried it once in 2015 or 2016, but things have changed so much. It’s easy to be in the industry and think everyone knows about it, but the reality is, even in the US, people know about VR, but not many have actually played it. When they’ve played it, then they think about purchasing it, but my role is to do that since companies need to make money to survive to keep playing games. That also means bringing developers together, not just audiences, through mixers and events, or community building, talking to investors and informing them about the current market.

“A lot of people don't even know about Gorilla Tag! Investors in VR, they know about the game, but other people don't actually know about the numbers and the excitement around it and just how popular it is. And for Japanese developers it’s harder when investors are often in English and there’s that language barrier, or maybe they have a good game but are terrible at pitching it to people.”

Was the booth a success? Overall I would have to say yes. Growing in size from last year, with more attendees, if the goal is to introduce the potential of VR to those who, after more than 10 years, either have not tried or do not realize how much VR has advanced in the intervening years, saw a representative sample of the industry in one space. They even saw beyond games - Wrath: Aeon of Ruin VR was showcased with haptic hardware chairs and accessories to further immerse in ways that traditional flatscreen games are unable to achieve.

Bitsummit, beyond being a showcase of games, holds regular stage events where developers can share their games and talk about development. One of the more talked-about of these stages involved Shuto Mikami, the CEO of CharacterBank, speaking with former President of SIE Worldwide Studios and Head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida about Knights of Fiona and the VR industry, with the names alone being enough to bring curious onlookers to the show to hear what they had to say.

Over time, maybe the conversation will spread beyond a single event or the whispers of enthusiasts and return to the mainstream once more. G-Smash will likely be key in that change.

It can be difficult to keep up with the rapidly changing, seemingly contradictory claims, especially when they're recycled by outlets that don't fully understand the context behind the decisions. This article is an attempt to break the rumors down, give context of what's been claimed in the past, and help you understand what Apple might be planning.

There are two leading sources that have accurately predicted Apple's future Vision headset plans before: Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Both Gurman and Kuo have also been wrong before, though, and sometimes, as now, they contradict each other.

Since before the first Apple Vision Pro headset was even revealed, both Gurman and Kuo said Apple was already far along in developing a cheaper and lighter followup.

If those reports were accurate, the cheaper and lighter Vision headset was originally set to launch in 2025. But by late 2024 Kuo claimed that the headset was delayed "beyond 2027", and in late 2025 Gurman said Apple "paused" the project to prioritize shipping smart glasses sooner.

Now, in a May newsletter, Gurman reported that Apple is working on a "slimmer and lighter" headset to succeed Vision Pro, but wrote that he doesn't "anticipate" the device to launch until late 2028 at the earliest, and perhaps 2029.

Gurman's report came just weeks after MacRumors claimed in April that Apple has "given up" on Vision Pro entirely and disbanded the visionOS team after the M5 refresh saw poor sales. And earlier this month Kuo also claimed that Apple's incoming CEO John Ternus, set to succeed Tim Cook on September 1, has taken Vision headsets off the roadmap entirely. The MacRumors and Kuo reports led to a wave of secondary headlines claiming Apple will abandon the headset market for good, with endless hot takes and post mortems.

visionOS 27 Is A Much Bigger Update Than Apple’s Keynote Suggested

There’s a whole lot more coming in visionOS 27 than what Apple announced in its keynote. Read our extensive rundown of all the biggest features & improvements.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

However, the idea of Apple abandoning the Vision headset line and visionOS line entirely seems farfetched, and, according to a source with knowledge of Apple's work on a new headset, is wrong.

UploadVR understands that the "late 2028 at the earliest" headset Gurman is referring to is a new and total redesign, moving the main chipset to the external puck to significantly reduce the weight of the visor, a similar strategy to Meta's next headset, and the approach we expect much of the industry to take in coming years. Given the major architectural difference, it will take a lot longer than the previous approach of just moderately reducing the weight of the existing chipset-onboard design.

And back in April, in an interview with Tom's Guide, Ternus himself publicly said the following:

"I think we’re still very much in the early innings of spatial computing. We are super excited about it. The Vision Pro is an extraordinary product. As Joz said, it’s like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present. And people are continuing to find exciting new use cases for it. There’s a lot of compelling stuff in enterprise, in medicine, in other things, and that’s going to continue to grow. It’s fun, we’re at the beginning of the journey."

Do these really sound like the words of an incoming CEO about to cancel the entire product line?

Further, at WWDC 2026 Apple announced visionOS 27 with significant updates and improvements, many of which set the stage for the future, and the company continues to heavily invest in Apple Immersive Video.

These investments simply do not make sense in a narrative of the M5 Vision Pro being the final headset from Apple.

During the event, visionOS influencer Justin Ryan asked Senior Director at Apple responsible for product management and product marketing for visionOS whether Vision Pro is "on ice" and whether the team was broken up. Here was his response:

"It's still early innings for spatial computing. And there's a lot of things that we're doing, and learning, and we're continuing to improve on and continue to invest in. And so I would hope that updates like visionOS 27 and all the things we're adding and all the things that we're unlocking, whether it's for consumer use or it's for business use, serves as evidence that we are investing in this platform and we're invested in this idea of spatial computing and building these capabilities that just can't be done on any other device."

That "just can't be done on any other device" point is crucial. Some argue that visionOS is only being continued because it will one day run on Apple's AR glasses. But this idea too simply makes no sense.

Apple Immersive Video, for example, simply would not work on the AR glasses conceivable to ship any time in the next 5 years due to the translucency and limited field of view, never mind simple smart glasses with a HUD that will come. And the vastly different requirements, form factor, and use case of glasses mean they will almost certainly run a new glassesOS, not the visionOS designed for headsets. It would be akin to the iPhone running macOS – not just the technical core, but the interface itself.

Apple's moves only make sense in a situation where the company is not, in fact, abandoning headsets forever.

Apple Glasses Do Come First

What the reports about Apple's plans do get right is that the company is currently strongly prioritizing smart glasses, and this is indeed affecting the urgency and priority of its headsets.

Both Gurman and Kuo agree that Apple's next face-wearable will be displayless smart glasses, with cameras, speakers, and microphones, to take on Ray-Ban Meta. But even these may be slightly delayed.

As recently as February, Gurman was reporting that Apple Glasses were on track to be revealed this year for an early 2027 release. But late last month, Gurman reported that the release has been pushed back to late 2027, because the core functionality of the product depends on Siri AI and Visual Intelligence, and Apple wants to ensure it's in a highly reliable state at launch.

Gurman's previous reports described the glasses as lacking a display, having cameras, microphones and speakers, and being powered by a new Apple-designed chipset, based on the highly efficient S-series chips used in Apple Watch. The product would be used for phone calls, music playback, live translations, turn-by-turn directions, and multimodal AI, similar to Ray-Ban Meta.

To distinguish from Meta's glasses, according to Gurman, Apple plans to use "high-end materials" and have two oval-shaped cameras, one for high-quality image and video capture, and the other for computer vision.

UploadVR's take on that is that a dedicated computer vision sensor could draw significantly less power than a sensor designed for imaging, and thus be sampled continually for advanced use cases like spatially-aware pedestrian navigation. "Turn left just past that red Honda", instead of "In 200 meters, turn left". It might also enable hand gestures without the need for a wristband – though you would need to raise your arm. This is, though, to be clear, just our speculation.

Meanwhile, Kuo also reports that Apple plans to launch smart glasses with a binocular in-lens heads-up display (HUD) in 2029. While Kuo doesn't say exactly whether this would be capable of true AR, Gurman describes true AR as not coming from Apple this decade, suggesting the 2029 product may be more of a competitor to Meta Ray-Ban Display and its successors.

Adapting mainstay video game genres to VR is not a new concept. Horror is practically ubiquitous in virtual reality. After all, having ghosts, zombies, and monsters in your face enhances the experience to great effect. Soulslikes, on the other hand, are a tricky beast. Nailing impactful combat in VR is incredibly difficult, and those who have taken a stab at it have delivered with varying results. Now, blending these two genres sounds equally ambitious and complex. Bramblefort’s demo, now available as part of Steam Next Fest, seems to have successfully attained the formula.

Bramblefort does not shy away from its survival horror roots from the very start. The main menu is set inside a dilapidated cabin with three decomposing zombies looking straight at the player. The macabre tale begins inside a 1920s movie theater. A short film debrief from an undisclosed intelligence agency details the operation to infiltrate Bramblefort, an island in the northern Atlantic.

They suspect strange occurrences are happening and suspect low resistance. As a field operative, it is your mission to investigate what is behind it. A lean tutorial explains how to grab items and keys to put them over your shoulder for safekeeping and how to load your revolver before leaving.

Things go wrong almost instantly. I should say upfront, Bramblefort is quite gory. As soon as you arrive on a canoe to the isle, your paddler’s head is blown off. The graphics themselves are not too realistic, so it is not exactly traumatic to witness. Kidnapped and locked up in a jail cell, the soulslike elements take shape.

The game’s vertical level design asks you to jump off a ledge, climb, and drop off before fighting your first shambling corpse. Two conveniently placed knives on a table signal that to progress, you must cut your way through. The combat feels a bit flimsy, but in the context of its hectic action, it works well.

Much like Grimlord was able to capture the spirit of Dark Souls, so does Bramblefort seem on its way to being compared to Bloodborne in VR. In action, though, it would be rather comparable to Resident Evil 4. The place is teeming with infected humans craving blood. Knives, hammers, and cleavers are the only weapons available in this area.

After lowering a bridge to escape this hellish medieval prison, a revolver, explosives, and a shotgun also make their way to your arsenal. Many games tout themselves as “made for VR,” but Bramblefort’s pause menu with a giant rusty wheel to pull your weapons off feels particularly appropriate. Shooting the shotgun itself feels powerful but unwieldy. At least loading the shells and gesturing to pull the chamber up is satisfying.

In the tutorial, a door says there are four ways to enter it, and that design philosophy is applied to the game at large. Each level is not what it seems. As you make your way through a Victorian castle, moist marshlands, and an elaborate bathhouse—this is a hefty 2+ hour demo—there are several ways to progress. You can climb through pipes, jump across old buildings, find a key, or shoot your way across: the world is your oyster. This is the first time in a long while I have seen FromSoftware’s level design so well-implemented in a VR game.

Conclusion

To meld two of the biggest genres in gaming successfully is no small feat. Of course, there are small quirks to be ironed out, like tighter combat, but what is on offer here gives much hope. Bramblefort stands out not only because of its intricate level design but also how well it feels like a true soulslike in its approach. The haunting survival horror elements merely add to the tense atmosphere throughout. I will look at its full launch with great interest.

Bramblefort’s demo is available now as part of Steam Next Fest until Monday, June 22nd at 10AM PT. A release date has not been confirmed.

CleanSheet Soccer 2 approaches the ball from a different angle, both literally and figuratively. Rather than chase the fantasy of scoring spectacular goals, here you're trying to stop them. You play as a goalkeeper, using your hands to punch, block, catch, and deflect shots in training missions, mock games, and arcade-style minigames.

What immediately jumps out is just how natural this feels in VR. Every desperate punch to clear a ball, every lunge to catch a perfectly-placed shot, every fingertip stop feels physical in a way that no other medium can replicate. With the PS VR2 Sense controllers tracking your hands, CleanSheet Soccer 2 is so perfectly tuned that reactions become instinctive. It's a cool feeling, even for someone (like me) who's not played soccer since grade school.

When you first launch into CleanSheet Soccer 2, you're given a chance to join one of three soccer clubs. Each of these has its own coach (which is an incongruous anthropomorphized animal?), and its own clubhouse with its own stylized culture. From here you'll launch into training drills, match simulations, and tryouts, where your performance is monitored and recorded to leaderboards.

Completing drills and matches earns you experience, places you amongst your fellow gamers in online leaderboards, and satisfies mission objectives to unlock gear, new soccer fields, stadiums, and the opportunity to leap to new leagues, new clubs, and more.

Drills sharpen specific goalkeeping skills. Modes like Matrix Reflex, where training balls hit a randomizing launcher on their way to your face, and Lightning Hands, in which you must smash a randomized green button to fire a ball, focus on reaction speed and hand-eye coordination. Drills like Pick-A-Save, where you have to punch or catch a color-coded ball on command, prioritize decision-making and quick thinking. Others simply fire faster and faster randomized soccer balls at you to see how long you can survive.

There's enough variety in the Drills to keep things interesting, and as the difficulty ramps up through level after level, the drills very quickly become truly challenging.

Match Play offers something a bit closer to actual soccer games. This mode presents realistic motion-captured players in game-like scenarios ranging from free kicks and dangerous corners to 2-1 breakaways and penalty shot situations. While the mechanics are straightforward (you're only ever trying to stop the ball from getting in the goal), the variety of situations and the well-animated players keep things super engaging.

There's also a shot creator mode in which you build out custom scenarios and tailored drills. Though I didn't mess with this mode too much, beyond simply creating a nearly impossible shot from some extremely aggressive strikers, I could see this becoming a fun diversion from the main game for a certain type of player.

The game makes great use of the PS VR2 hardware. It looks great and runs perfectly. Controller haptics add impact to catches and punches, helping to sell the illusion that you've actually made contact with the ball.

What's most surprising about CleanSheet Soccer 2, for me, is how physically engaging it is. Play this game for any standard amount of time, say 20 minutes, and you'll be feeling the burn in your hamstrings, quads, and shoulders. I'm an active guy, and this game had me sweating.

There's something refreshing about a VR sports game that understands exactly what it wants to be. CleanSheet Soccer 2 doesn't try to recreate every aspect of soccer. It concentrates instead on one position and explores it in remarkable detail. It's a simple idea, executed very well. It's a focused, energetic, and surprisingly authentic goalkeeper experience that feels perfectly suited to VR.

CleanSheet Soccer 2 is available now on PlayStation VR2 for $34.99.

This, along with strong feedback from the PlayStation community, prompted developer Xlab Digital to develop Iron Guard: Day Zero for PS5. Day Zero releases this week on June 18.

As part of this shift in strategy, the original flatscreen Steam version of Iron Guard has been 'retired' and included for free for all existing and future owners of either VR game. Xlab says it hopes to bring Day Zero to Steam at a later date.

Responding to an inquiry about Day Zero on Reddit, Xlab responded with the following:

Not done with VR for sure, but taking a pause as it has been a rough patch trying to find enough players to continue, even after excellent reviews across all VR platforms.

I'm hoping flat-screen might create some more awareness, especially because we are heavily discounting the price and hopefully players can try the VR version ultimately , which I (and many players even not into TD genre games) feel is a whole different experience in VR.

Xlab continued in another response:

... as a small team we are not expecting to retire/own islands, just continue pushing our skills and do more bigger VR titles, for which we don't need a huge number of sales, but even that seems to be a challenge over the last year.

Funny/Sad enough the first IRON GUARD VR game made a decent return, in fact it funded the entire sequel IRON GUARD: Salvation , but the sequel which is a bigger game and with much higher fidelity and more fun gameplay features, etc. seems to be harder to sell and has done 1/5th the sales, which says something about the VR trend over the last 2-3 years

This continues the trend of over a dozen VR developers either going to a hybrid model or flatscreen altogether for upcoming projects due to a struggling VR market. Recently, Polyarc Games laid off two-thirds of its staff and announced a flatscreen port of its Moss series for PC and consoles and Vertigo Games closed one of its studios and announced a flatscreen port of the Arizona Sunshine series on the heels of its flatscreen port of The 7th Guest remake.

Both Iron Guard games are available on SteamVR, PlayStation VR2, and Meta Quest.

As always, this week-long festival features a mix of demos for upcoming games and games that have already released on other VR platforms, like Loop One Done, Fixer Undercover, and Peak Rhythm.

We received this list from Valve nearly two weeks ago, so it is subject to change. Some developers may have registered for the event and subsequently dropped out. We have already seen some participants developing hybrid titles release a demo that is not VR supported. We do our best to catch these ahead of time and exclude them from the list below.

Other developers may also release demos for their games despite not being a part of this event. Games can also be erroneously tagged as VR when they are not planned to have VR support. As always, we will update this list if we come across any changes.

Most importantly, many of these demos may only be available this week, so be sure to jump on the ones that catch your interest.

For now, here's the full list of participants we are aware of:

• Amelia's Escape
• Axe Gang
• Biodetention
• Blind Touch VR
• Bodian's Bay Wash
• Bramblefort
• Construcubes
• Crawler
• Dart Racer
• Dead 4 Now: Rebirth of Survivors
• D.E.C.A.Y.
• Driving Test Simulator
• Edd Skeleton VR
• Exoshock
• Fixer Undercover
• Fruit Golf
• Fuel Cell
• Grab Your Friends
• Gunshot Survivors VR
• Hyperstacks
• King Archer VR
• Kosmass
• Loop One Done
• MechPit
• One Day To Live
• Outpath VR
• Paranatural
• Peak Rhythm
• Snooker Billiard
• Streets of Miami VR
• Tomboy Adventure 2
• Unmourned VR
• Voxel Playground
• Wade
• ZipRush: Surf the Void

Steam Next Fest starts today and runs until June 22 at 1pm ET.