Virtual Reality

Kluge CEO Arturo Perez joined the Good VR Podcast from his home in Marina Del Rey, California for an in-depth conversation about everything from competition with Beat Saber and the coming addition of Dua Lipa to Synth Riders to layoffs and the overall reduced state of the current VR market.

“When Beat Saber dropped out of PSVR 2, we released a song ‘We Are The Champions’ the same day,” Perez said. “We played that up [to] say we’re not going away from this platform. We were day one launch on Apple Arcade with Apple Vision Pro via Apple Arcade with Synth Riders there. We have a demo on Spectacles…and then we were day one partner on Galaxy XR as well with Android XR. So we’re not making a secret that that’s what we like to do. We like to be there first, everywhere that Beat Saber’s not.”

The podcast follows recent talks with artist Ashley Pinnick, VR evangelists JoyReign and JDun, and Gravity Sketch founder Oluwaseyi Sosanya joining for unrehearsed conversations covering the kind of focus, patience, passion and curiosity that drives exploration in virtual reality.

Perez and I cover a lot of ground across the 1 hour and 17 minute conversation as we talk about everything from work outside VR to ideas like eye tracking that may become necessary in next generation headsets.

“We’re not stopping…we’re not going away,” Perez said.

Maze Theory, the XR studio behind Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom and Doctor Who: The Edge of Time, announced it’s working on a mixed reality game based on Andy Weir’s novel and recent film, Project Hail Mary (2026).

Gravity Sketch co-founder Oluwaseyi Sosanya joined the Good VR podcast from London for a 50-minute conversation covering their path into VR and spatial computing.

We cover the founding story, investors, headcount, an overview of the product and come back to advice he has for others looking to develop and build in this space.

“Stay patient and be practical,” Sosanya said. “Spatial computing is so exciting. It’s really going to evolve over time. The hardware is going to change, the platform is going to shift, but it’s gonna take time because this isn’t a technology that replaces something that’s existing. Like a phone replaced the phone, the watch replaced the watch, the headphones replaced the headphones, even the laptop replaced the typewriter. This is a brand new paradigm for humans to interface with a computer. There’s never really been an equivalent. I think like the smart glasses is probably the closest thing, but even then it’s not obstructing your vision, right? So I think patience and really trying to understand where the space is going and grow with that space is really important.”

There’s a brand-new update for Android XR, and Google has been showing off its new features. The operating system was first launched alongside the Samsung Galaxy XR headset in October 2025. The update ships with the ability to pin apps to walls in your AR/MR space, view your real hands while you interact, and have an easier time resuming old sessions.

One of the stand-out features of the latest Android XR update is the introduction of Auto-spatialization. This feature is all about making 2D content stand out by visualizing it in 3D. It can make websites appear more immersive or give your favorite 2D games a 3D makeover, to a certain extent. Google says it works in “almost any app game, website, image, or video”.

Despite a lighter touch on outright terror than some horror fans might wish for, Star Trek: Infection succeeds as both a survival horror game and a Star Trek experience. It captures the unsettling horror that has occasionally appeared within Trek and centers it to great effect in VR. It's a tonally perfect fit for fans of the franchise, and an atmospheric sci-fi scare for everyone else.

“In case you were wondering, VRChat is not going anywhere,” studio co-founders Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey say in a recent blog post.

According to Gaylor and Joudrey, who founded VRChat in 2014, some of that confidence comes from the platform’s ability to consistently bring in record numbers of visitors across Quest, SteamVR, Pico headsets, PC, and mobile devices.

“Last New Year’s Eve, nearly 150,000 people were in VRChat at the same time—celebrating a worldwide event for yet another year. Most of those folks had visited us for New Years multiple times before, but for some, it was their first time,” the studio founders say. “It’s been three months since, and we’ve broken that user record twice since then. Our latest record? Nearly 160,000 people in VRChat at the same time.”

We have all read from tech magazines and LinkedIn posts that VR is dead and the metaverse is dead. It’s definitely over, like 3D TVs or the Spice Girls. We all VR enthusiasts are so sad about this, so we are going to say farewell to our beloved technology today, in a big event: the VR Funeral, or like we are already nicknaming it, the MRourning.

Born thanks to a collaboration between multiple VR institutions, companies (Pico, Meta, HTC, etc…), and VR events organizers (like AWE, VRAR World, XRCC, etc…), the VR Funeral will be the final event of virtual reality. After that, there will be no more events about immersive realities, and all companies will shut down the production of VR headsets. All VR runtimes will enter life support and will be discontinued in the upcoming weeks (please refer to the pages of the manufacturers to see the roadmaps of the various vendors).

The technical side of installing VR mods can be a daunting task, especially for users who may not be the most tech savvy among us. It recently came to my attention that someone had released several all-in-one VR Mod Installers for every Resident Evil game currently playable in VR. These installers simplify the process of installing custom VR mods for various Resident Evils, allowing you to play your Steam copies of Resident Evils in VR with full 6DoF motion controls.

The Seattle, Washington-based studio says it had to reduce the size of the company after the cancellation of a major project and lack of funding.

In a statement on its LinkedIn company page, Polyarc Games, the makers of the Moss games and most recently Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss, announced it has to reduce its staff. The specific passage in the statement reads as follows:

After an unsuccessful team-wide effort to secure funding following the cancellation of a major project, we had to make the decision to significantly reduce the size of the company. This means we’re saying goodbye to many talented people who have been a meaningful part of what we’ve built.

The startup behind Rec Room announced the imminent closure of its network on June 1.

In the closure note, copied below in its entirety to save for posterity, Rec Room promised a tool available from Steam in about a week allowing creators to download their room and invention data “in formats that can help you recreate the room elsewhere if you choose." It’s important to note that while Meta leadership changed course to keep Horizon Worlds online after first announcing closure on a similar timescale, they still have made no similar promise that would allow creators to download their work for use elsewhere.

Dr. Ruth Diaz noted in a post on this site that Meta still needs to make amends to its Horizon creators, writing that it should “give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.”

As long-time believers in VR feel the air sucked out of their lungs at the 10-year anniversary of PC VR, Good VR reached out to VRChat for comment and received the following statement:

These are hard times for the space, and our hearts go out to the Rec Room team and their community. For Horizon Worlds, regardless of where it lands, this instability is tough on its creators, players, and team. Building social platforms is really difficult work, and these moments deeply affect real people. VRChat is in a strong position. We're continuing to grow, hitting new concurrency records, and actively investing in the platform. What's kept us here is our community -- their creativity, their ingenuity, and the fact that they show up every single day. We don't take that for granted. VRChat is not going anywhere. We're hiring, and we're building for the long term.

The top news of the week is one that hurts me to write… but it is my job to inform you all, so I’ll go on. Lynx, the promising French startup producing standalone MR headsets, has entered the liquidation phase. I found the news on Reddit and was able to confirm it on some French websites dedicated to companies and their status.

The news makes me very sad: the team at Lynx was nice and talented (I personally know a few of them, including the CEO), and they were making the only standalone MR headset made in Europe. It’s frustrating that such a company was not supported enough, in this period where Europe is trying to become relevant in the technology field. They also made their share of mistakes with the launch of the first headset, but I was hoping that they could use the lessons learned to have a smoother launch of the second device.

Many people are wondering if the promised Lynx R2, announced just a couple of months ago, will ever see the light of day. Well, having been part of a company that went through a liquidation, too, I can tell you that the only hope we have is that the assets related to the headset get bought by another company interested in launching the device under its umbrella. I sincerely hope this happens, and I also hope this new eventual company re-hires part of the original Lynx team. Let’s see what is going to happen.

The report from VRcoast claims that micro-OLED display maker SeeYA Technology plans to clear its existing production lines to dedicate its full capacity to the display for Meta's next headset.

SeeYA is the provider of the micro-OLED displays in Bigscreen's Beyond headsets, both generations, which are also 2560×2560.

It's unclear whether, if the report's claims are true, the dedication of SeeYA's production lines would affect Bigscreen's supply availability. We've reached out to Bigscreen to ask about the report's claims and we'll update this article if we get a response.

If the report is accurate, this will be Meta's first ever headset to use micro-OLED, and its first non-LCD headset since the original Oculus Quest all the way back in 2019.

Horizon Worlds, Meta's first pass at a metaverse, will be inaccessible via virtual reality headset after June 15, 2026. The company shared plans to separate Horizon Worlds from Quest VR platform and focus exclusively on the smartphone version of the app in February, and now in a new post on its community forums, Meta detailed when the VR version of Horizon Worlds will be deprecated.

By March 31, Meta says individual Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer be listed in the Quest's Store and headset owners will be unable to visit worlds like "Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju and Bobber Bay." Then, after June 15, the app will be removed from Quest headsets and worlds will be completely unavailable to visit in VR. From that point on, the easiest place to visit Horizon Worlds will be in the Meta Horizon app for iOS and Android.

A hardware hacker group previously behind the PSVR2Toolkit says it’s effectively “jailbroken” PSVR 2 for PC.

When Sony released its PC adapter for PSVR 2 in 2024, it released the headset from PS5 exclusivity, allowing users to play SteamVR games on VR-ready PCs for the first time.

Still, Sony didn’t release enable every hardware capability, with tethered PC gameplay notably lacking features such as eye-tracking, HDR, and headset rumble.

Now, the hardware hacker group previously associated with the PSVR2Toolkit—an open source driver toolkit interfacing with Sony’s PSVR 2 PC support—claims to have “jailbroken” the PSVR 2.

Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e were announced almost exactly a year ago, with preorders opening immediately. Originally it was set to ship in April 2025, but a PCB design flaw led to a roughly 3 month delay, with shipping finally beginning in late June.

The startup has spent the 9 months since then fulfilling the backlog of preorders, with new orders taking months and then weeks to ship. Now, Bigscreen says it has completed this phase, with new Beyond 2 shipping within days. The exact shipping time depends on which facial interface you opt for.

The fastest option, Bigscreen says, is ordering with the Halo Mount and Universal-Fit Cushion. Priced $60 higher than the Custom-Fit Cushion, this option gives you a halo strap and a cushion designed to suit anyone's face. Bigscreen says it now ships within 1-2 days, and sometimes even on the same day.

If you want the Bigscreen signature Custom-Fit Cushion instead, customized for your face based on an iPhone TrueDepth face scan you provide, that should take slightly longer, 2-3 days on average.

"In some cases due to SKU, color, accessory, or regional variability, orders may take a week to ship", the startup notes, and orders with prescription lens inserts will still take multiple weeks.

If you're not familiar with the Little Nightmares franchise, it is a series of puzzle-based platform horror games played in third person. Altered Echoes bridges off the stories of the first two games. Without getting too deep into spoilers, Altered Echoes stars Dark Six, the dark corrupted version of Six, who starred in the first game and is a prominent part of the second. As it was explained to me, Dark Six is on a journey to reunite with Six.

Overall, this demo was terrific. Visually, the game looked great in the PS VR2. The closest adjacent experience I have played in VR is Out Of Sight, which similarly plays with world scale and would be a good primer to check out before Little Nightmares drops next month. Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is scheduled for release on April 24. The game can be wishlisted now on Quest, PS VR2, and Steam.

Prolific VR modder Luke Ross has re-released his R.E.A.L. VR mod suite following a DMCA takedown issued by CD Projekt in January for his paywalled Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod—this time making a bulk of the work free for anyone to download.

The Daily Dot reports Muppet*Vision 3D is coming to the Apple Vision Pro and other VR headsets. The virtual reality rendition of the show, which Disney filmed ahead of its shuttering, will (almost) recreate the real thing. The show was actually a 4D experience, as it involved not only animatronics but a live action performer and bubbles. While we’d still like to see it return in a new recreated Muppet Theater someday, as Brian Henson recently said during a Q&A, this version is “better than it not coming to VR.”

According to Henson, the virtual reality show will also let users “sit” anywhere they want while watching. That will matter when we turn our heads around to look behind us. (As the kids say, IYKYK.)

Enver Studio has announced that its popular multiplayer VR motocross racing game MotoX is now free-to-play on Quest. Since launching in 2023, MotoX has built a strong reputation and collected over 23,000 reviews and a 4.9-star rating on Meta's platform.

The decision to move to a free-to-play model comes alongside a wider industry trend: multiplayer-focused VR titles that prioritize social interaction are increasingly outperforming traditional paid releases.

Valve’s upcoming standalone VR headset Steam Frame is still shipping sometime this year, the company says, as it is now marked as “coming soon” on the Steam backend.

In a hardware news update last month, Valve announced that Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all being affected by the wider RAM and storage component shortage. Parts woes notwithstanding, Valve said in February that its goal was still to ship in the first half of 2026.

Now, according to the Steam backend (via SteamDB), Valve ha marked all three of its forthcoming products as “coming soon.”

Whether that means “soon soon” or “Valve soon” remains to be seen, although the company gave another vote of confidence in release plans in last week’s 2025 Year in Review.

Every month, Sony publishes a blog detailing the top ten downloads of the month on all of its platforms, with separate lists for US/Canada and the EU. On PS VR2, there are some games that appear every month: Beat Saber, Job Simulator, and Pavlov are mainstays on this list, with others like Horizon Call of the Mountain, Metro Awakening, and Creed: Rise To Glory drifting in and out of the top ten month to month.

Alien: Rogue Incursion, from developer Survios (Creed, Puzzle Bobble, The Walking Dead: Onslaught), has also been a steady presence in the top 10 since its release in December 2024. It ranked fourth in the US/Canada and fifth in the EU in January 2026, and fifth on both lists for December 2025.

Veteran developer nDreams has announced another mass restructuring that will result in two of its three studios shutting down and a staff reduction of up to seventy-eight employees at all levels, 'including senior leadership.' This is the troubled studio's third round of layoffs, following similar restructurings in 2024 and 2025. nDreams Compass and nDreams Near Light will be closed with nDreams Elevation remaining as the core business focus moving forward.