Virtual Reality

Skydance's Behemoth combines satisfying physics-based combat, immersive visuals, and dynamic mechanics to deliver a standout VR action-adventure experience, though its predictable story and occasionally artificial-feeling AI detract slightly from its otherwise polished execution. The game's intense Behemoth battles and well-woven locomotion mechanics combine for an impressive showcase of how a deft hand at VR-native design can elevate even mediocre narratives to monstrous heights.

When batteries in my VR controllers died, refusing to charge, I had to come up with a simple hack to bring them back to life, on a budget.

Xreal is back at it again with another set of augmented reality glasses. Today, the company officially announced the new One Series, the company's most ambitious effort yet in the AR space. The One Series encompasses two products: the One and the One Pro.

At the heart of the One Series is a brand-new spatial computing co-processor, the X1, developed in-house by Xreal. According to the company, the new chip allows for smoother playback thanks to a low motion-to-photon (M2P) latency of 3ms when the glasses operate at 120Hz (according to Xreal, the typical industry measurement is around 20 ms). The company also touts its superiority over the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro, which has a 12ms M2P.

A lower M2P means you shouldn't see any motion blur or visual lag, whether you're using anchored or follow-screen modes. If you need a refresher, anchored mode is where the picture displayed to your eyes within the glasses stays stationary in front of you, even if you move your head from side to side or up and down. The follow mode is when the picture follows your head movements. So, if you look left or right, the picture moves and keeps up with your head tracking. The One Series can switch between these two modes using the red button on the bottom of the right arm of the glasses.

As with previous Xreal AR glasses, the One Series features two 1080p displays, giving you a full 32:9 aspect ratio for viewing content. On the Xreal One, you get a 50-degree field of view, giving you a nearly 21 percent greater viewing area than the preceding Xreal Air 2 I reviewed last year.

The new Xreal One and One Pro are currently available for preorder, priced at $499 and $599, respectively. The former will ship later in December, while Xreal says that the latter will arrive in early 2025.

Data from Amazon US suggests that Quest headsets didn’t sell as well over Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2024 as compared to 2023.

Based on data from Amazon US, in 2023 about 170,000 Quest headsets had sold in the 30 day window surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2024, that number was around 146,000 Quest headsets, representing a drop in sales volume of 14%. This may not be representative of other retailers.

That’s a surprising outcome considering Meta just launched its new-and-improved Quest 3S, made a significant price cut to Quest 3, and had a flagship game with recognizable IP (Batman: Arkham Shadow) ready in time for Black Friday.

During the 2023 holiday shopping season, Meta was still selling its aging Quest 2 headset. That year’s Black Friday deal on the most popular version of the headset (128GB) was just $250 with a $50 gift card, making the headset essentially just $200.

That proved to be more popular at the time then this year’s deal in which Meta was pushing the Quest 3S (128GB) model for $300 with a $75 gift card, representing essentially a $225 purchase.

Sony is demonstrating controller-free hand tracking on PlayStation VR2 at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024. The booth describes the feature as "available with the latest SDK of PlayStation 5", suggesting that developers can already start integrating it in games. It also lists the tracking rate at 60 FPS, and claims the system "displays the hands smoothly" with "low latency". Controller-free hand tracking is a standard feature on Meta Quest, Pico, and HTC Vive headsets, offering an alternative to controllers for interface interaction, social experiences, and casual gaming. The feature arriving on PlayStation VR2 could lead to games that support hand tracking on Quest, such as Unplugged, releasing updates to support it. It might also entice developers to port over hand tracking focused games not yet on Sony's platform, such as Maestro.

A recent report from South Korea’s Yonhap News maintains Samsung is set to unveil a pair of XR glasses at its annual Unpacked product event, which is expected to take place sometime next month.

Samsung promised back in July we’d be hearing more about its forthcoming “XR platform” before the end of this year, which it’s developing in partnership with Google and Qualcomm.

We still don’t know precisely what form its “XR platform” will take, with previous rumors suggesting work on an Apple Vision Pro competitor in addition to a Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses competitor, as reported in October by The Information.

Now, a Yonhap News report (via Techradar) maintains Samsung is expected to unveil some sort of device on stage, coming in the shape of “regular glasses or sunglasses, and weigh[ing] around 50g.”

The report notes the device is expected to have a payment function, gesture recognition, and facial recognition, and further maintains industry insiders expect the product to launch around Q3 2025. Its Android-powered XR software is also expected to be unveiled sometime this month.

The full Halo: Combat Evolved campaign is now playable via PC VR. Available to download via GitHub, this Halo: Combat Evolved VR mod lets you experience the entire campaign with full 6DOF motion controls, a two-handed aiming mode for weapons, rebindable controllers, and more.

Today's VR technology primarily engages sight and hearing, with touch incorporated to a lesser degree through haptic controllers or vests. In contrast, the simulation of smell and taste remains largely unexplored and the focus of ongoing research.

A group of researchers has unveiled a device the size and shape of a lollipop that produces nine different flavors: sugar, salt, citric acid, cherry, passion fruit, green tea, milk, durian, and grapefruit. By combining this with a visual illusion in virtual reality, the researchers hope to trick the brain successfully into thinking it is tasting the real thing.

The flavors are produced by chemicals embedded in a pocket of agarose gel, writes IEEE Spectrum. When a voltage is applied to the gel, the chemicals are transported to the surface in a liquid that then mixes with saliva on the tongue, just like a real lollipop. If the voltage is increased, the taste gets stronger.

Vision Pro users know that immersive video is one of the platform’s strengths, but content has been relatively scarce. Apple is reportedly working on a big project to change that: upgrading a popular sports stadium with the tech necessary for live streaming games in immersive video on Vision Pro. Negotiations could enable Apple to live stream sports in immersive video Apple’s Vision Pro provides a variety of unique experiences you can’t get on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. But one of the most impressive is immersive video, and it’s especially eye-opening with sports. The problem, as of now, is that there is very little sports content available in immersive video. And what’s there is never live, only short highlight reels released months after the fact.

Apparently Apple has a solution for that: building advanced tech into a popular stadium’s ongoing upgrades. As reported by Marca, Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez shed light on the ongoing negotiations the club is having with Apple. Real Madrid’s famous Santiago Bernabéu stadium is in the midst of a costly transformation, and Pérez recently addressed the issue of the stadium regularly running out of capacity. The solution: live immersive video streams for Vision Pro. Here’s Pérez’s translated quote: Everyone wants to come to the Santiago Bernabéu, and that’s why we are negotiating with Apple to be able to wear glasses and watch the match as if you were at the stadium. It would be the Infinite Santiago Bernebéu. Understandably, Pérez doesn’t go into detail about the technical specifics of what’s being discussed with Apple. But based on what he does say, it’s clear that live immersive video for Vision Pro users is in mind.

Playstation VR 2 is currently reduced to $350, with or without Sony's big VR exclusive Horizon Call of the Mountain. Previously, the device cost up to $600.

Thanks to this big discount, Sony's VR headset is now priced between Quest 3S ($300) and Quest 3 ($500).

Does this make it a viable alternative to the Quest 3 family of headsets? It depends on what you're looking for in a VR headset.

Buy Playstation VR 2 or Quest 3(S)?

First things first: Playstation VR 2 requires a PS 5 (Pro) or gaming PC if you want to access VR games on Steam. Quest 3(S), on the other hand, is a standalone device with all the technology built in. If you want to use PSVR 2 on your PC, you will also need to purchase Sony's PC adapter for $50 and, and in many cases, a Bluetooth adapter to connect the PSVR 2 controllers to your PC.

Another important point that will probably play a role for you: The Playstation VR 2 is tethered to the PS5 or PC, which limits your freedom of movement while playing. This means that the headset cannot easily be used in another room or taken to a friend's house. Meta Quest, on the other hand, has no cables, and you can even play wirelessly on a PC.

Another selling point for Quest 3(S) is its support for mixed reality and hand tracking, two technologies that are changing the way headsets are used, and immersive gaming is experienced. The Playstation VR 2 offers nothing comparable. Another important point that will probably play a role for you: The Playstation VR 2 is tethered to the PS5 or PC, which limits your freedom of movement while playing. This means that the headset cannot easily be used in another room or taken to a friend's house. Meta Quest, on the other hand, has no cables, and you can even play wirelessly on a PC.

Another selling point for Quest 3(S) is its support for mixed reality and hand tracking, two technologies that are changing the way headsets are used, and immersive gaming is experienced. The Playstation VR 2 offers nothing comparable.

Models of Valve Deckard's 'Roy' controllers have been discovered in SteamVR driver files, revealing their design and inputs. Code references to Valve 'Roy' controllers were first discovered earlier this month by XR enthusiast Brad Lynch's Discord group of SteamVR dataminers. This code revealed that the controllers would include bumpers and a D-pad to be able to act as a gamepad for flatscreen gaming.

Now, the same group have discovered 3D models of Roy, revealing its design and confirming the inclusion of bumpers and a D-pad, as well as thumbsticks, buttons, index triggers, grip triggers, and system buttons.

Roy is almost certainly a reference to the antagonist of the movie Blade Runner, matching the apparent codename of the headset, Deckard, the protagonist.

The latest version of the Roy controller models show a ringless design, but the dataminers also discovered earlier versions with rings that resemble the original Oculus Quest controllers. These earlier designs seemingly first appeared in a 2022 Valve patent.

The findings suggest Valve is finally getting close to launching its next headset, almost six years after the release of Index. But what kind of headset will Deckard be?

In case anyone is interested, the Shiftall FlipVR controllers are in fact a real product. I decided to take the risk and order a set, they arrived today. Since they are such a new product and it's hard to find any real world info on them I figured I would share my initial impressions here in case anyone else is interested in them.

Getting the controllers paired went smoothly and only took a minute (just make sure you install the driver). Figuring out how to actually put them on took a bit longer, adjusting the wrist strap especially was a little tricky because you need to push part of the material up to get it to feed through. Or maybe there's a trick to it I haven't figured out yet. Regardless, after a bit of struggle I got them dialed in and they are very comfortable. The weight of the controller is noticeable but its balanced well enough that I'm typing this review with them on and it's not been an impediment.

Flipping the controllers in and out of your hands is as fun as it looks. You can adjust how far the controller part extends and adjust its angle so getting it into the exact right spot for my hand was easy and it feels surprisingly natural. It really is a very clever design that feels right when you have your fingers on the controller.

Quality wise I would say they are good but not quite great. They feel well made but the trigger buttons are a little more soft and wiggly than I would like and detract from the the overall impression. If the controller part is at the wrong angle I find the lower trigger can sometimes pinch the skin of my middle finger a little. If there's a future revision, improving the feel of the triggers would be my top priority. There's also a seam on the bottom part that doesn't feel great if you run your finger over it but there's no reason to ever touch that part of the controller so its really just me nitpicking. Other than that I can't find anything else to complain about.

Overall, I'm impressed with the controllers. Despite looking ridiculous, or like the prop from a 1990s cyberpunk movie, a whole lot of thought clearly went into these things and they feel much better than I expected them to.

Five years after its initial launch, Real VR Fishing is heading to Steam next month.

Developed by Devs United Games, Real VR Fishing is bringing the arcade fishing game to Valve's storefront on December 6 with "the same pricing policy and gameplay" as on Quest. The studio states it's supporting multiple VR headsets on Steam, including Quest 2 and the Quest 3 family, Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index.

Varjo Teleport launches today. The service costs $30 per month and is available for both professional and individual users.

Teleport digitizes rooms or outdoor locations so that they can be explored with a PC VR headset. The locations are first scanned with a smartphone. Teleport then reconstructs the scene with accurate lighting, shading, textures, and reflections using Gaussian Splatting.

Varjo headsets and other OpenXR-based PC VR devices are supported. Alternatively, the digital duplicates can be viewed on a smartphone or PC monitor.

You can sign up for the service on the official website.

Bigscreen Beyond, the slim and light PC VR headset released late last year, is getting its first ever Black Friday deal. Starting this week, you can nab a free Audio Strap with purchase.

Bigscreen Beyond is small, partly because it relies on the SteamVR tracking ecosystem and doesn’t need inside-out tracking sensors, and partly because it includes dual 2,560 × 2,560 micro-OLED displays, which are paired with space (and weight) saving pancake lenses.

In fact, it’s so light, it weighs in at just a few grams less than the optional Audio Strap itself: 127g Beyond, 160g Audio Strap.

As Soundscape recently announced, the immersive VR concert experience featuring deadmau5 is now available for free on YouTube. The one-hour concert film features the complete audiovisual performance that originally premiered exclusively on Soundscape's VR and PC platform in May 2024.

According to Eric Alexander, creator of Soundscape, the release on YouTube is intended to bring the concert experience to a wider audience. "This release allows anyone with an internet connection to enjoy the groundbreaking combination of music and technology," says Alexander.

The performance uses Unreal Engine 5 and proprietary technologies such as Soundscape's "Sonic AI" transformation system. The concert has already been nominated for five international XR Awards for its technical innovations.

Soundscape has already announced its next major collaboration for 2025: A collaborative project with DJs Chris Lake and Fisher is in the works.

By Grit Alone is simultaneously one of the best experiences I've had in a VR horror game, and one of the most in dire need of a final polish pass. The earnest creativity on display is so endearing that I can't help but fall in love, but I also recognize that some will be frustrated. By Grit Alone lives up to its name, feeling like a Herculean effort by a small team trying their utmost to deliver on a unique sci-fi horror that might one day stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of iconic classics like its primary inspiration, Dead Space. That is, if they ever get the balancing right.

By Grit Alone puts you in the shoes of a nameless passenger aboard a cryo transport. Waking up early due to a hazardous crash in an anomalous region of space that defies logical explanation, you're thrust into danger from the get-go. You're essentially trapped in a space-equivalent Bermuda Triangle, and you're here with some really twisted neighbors. Before you get a chance to meet them, you're dodging malfunctioning equipment and blowing up debris, only to suddenly be attacked by insectoid aliens deeply keen on removing your brain from your body. It's quite a wake-up call, and that's before we get to the gothic cathedral ship straight out of Warhammer 40k, an alien infested day spa, and a mad AI that may or may not be working in your best interest.

I don't make the positive Dead Space comparison lightly. Besides the obvious bona fides, like Dead Space (2008) scribe Antony Johnston himself co-writing alongside Emma Beeby, there's so much evident inspiration. Every weapon has dual-purposes, whether it's your ammo doubling as grenades, or your blaster serving as a modular shotgun/marksman rifle that changes firing mode based on if it's held in two hands or one. There are sections where you have to think like an engineer, manipulating ship subsystems to survive while hordes of enemies and other hazards encroach around you. Developer Crooks Peaks even translated the stomp attack over, and yes, it works on more than just the enemy.

Augmented World Expo (AWE) isn’t just one of the longest-running conferences focused on immersive tech, it’s also become the most important annual XR conference on our calendar.

In the early days there were many industry conferences that had a significant draw for the pioneers of XR’s modern epoch. There were XR pockets within big tech conferences like CES, GDC, and E3. There were company-specific events like Oculus Connect and Unity’s Vision Summit. And there were early grass-roots events like SVVR, VRLA, and a host of local meetups across the globe that built lasting networks of XR believers.

While many of these events have since faded, the connections they fostered have not. More than any other XR conference that I’ve attended, AWE USA feels like the event that has absorbed the spirit of those early conferences.

Since I started attending AWE USA in 2018, the conference has only grown and offered increasingly more interesting and valuable sessions, exhibitors, and networking. It has steadily evolved into what I consider the must-go event for the XR industry. Despite its scale, it carries the torch of passion that ignited the XR space back when it was little more than kickstarters, meetups, and those crazy enough to believe that immersive tech was not only possible to build, but worth building.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 provides players with a virtual reality recreation of Earth that offers a sense of unmatched realism. Despite initial launch setbacks, the game promises thrilling aviation adventures and limitless exploration.

Beyond the game's familiar focus on aerial navigation, the 2024 release of Flight Simulator allows players to land and explore on foot, enhancing the game's depth. There are still severe mapping imperfections at street level, but the ongoing improvements to this 3D mapping tech conjure up dreams of a future iteration of Flight Simulator where one day we hopefully get to exit our aircraft and walk among much higher detailed streets in any city across the globe. It's going to be a while before we see that level of realism, though, so don’t hold your breath on this type of detail appearing any time soon in games like this one.

With DLSS aiding performance for those players equipped with an RTX series NVIDIA GPU, maintaining the game's level of detail still requires significant computing power. The heft of this game sometimes stresses even high-end systems when flying in densely populated areas, so to experience the game at the highest visual fidelity and frame rates, a powerful PC is essential.

Running the game on a rig with the specs listed above, I still faced performance challenges in busy airspace when the game's VR graphics settings were dialed up to ultra. The sheer complexity and demands of this simulation reveal the need for some serious hardware, so if you don’t have a powerful PC, I wouldn’t recommend going above the low setting. Even though it might make the image quality suffer further, you might want to consider turning off any antialiasing options in the game. Performance will likely improve with updates, as it did with the 2020 version of the game, but until then, those without a top-end gaming rig will need to dial things back a bit.

Ultimately, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is more than just a game, it's an invitation for new generations of virtual pilots to chase their childhood dreams across an ever-expanding virtual world.

Pico 4 Ultra comes with Pico Motion Trackers, three games, and one month of VRChat Plus in ByteDance's Black Friday deal. Those three games are Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Pistol Whip, and Synth Riders, and the deal ends after December 2. Pico Motion Trackers, normally €90/£80, strap to your ankles to add leg tracking in supported titles, which includes Blade & Sorcery: Nomad and VRChat. They're an accessory Meta says it won't follow unless they turn out to be a massive success. The deal is available everywhere Pico 4 Ultra is sold, which still doesn't include North America.

For those in regions it is sold, ByteDance pitches Pico 4 Ultra as a higher-end alternative to Meta Quest 3, with 4GB more RAM and higher resolution passthrough, as well as faster charging and longer battery life. In our hands-on impressions we found it to be a comfortable headset with passthrough that is better in some ways than Quest 3, but worse in others, that's held back by lenses that are better than Quest 3S but worse than Quest 3. On the content side though, ByteDance is focusing far less on VR gaming now than it did with Pico 4, having canceled a Beat Saber competitor, handed off its would-be exclusive Just Dance VR to Meta, and not announcing any major exclusive titles. You'll find a decent percentage of Quest games on the Pico Store, sure, but what you won't find is just as notable. ByteDance's new focus appears to be making Pico OS a competitive spatial computing platform, and it's reportedly working on an Apple Vision Pro competitor. Still, this Black Friday deal offers great value for those already considering Pico 4 Ultra, and the leg tracking provided by Pico Motion Trackers is something you simply won't find on Meta's standalone platform.

VR manufacturer Pimax unveiled a number of updates and product announcements at its latest keynote. These included the final specifications and design of the new Crystal Super VR headset. According to Pimax, the Crystal Super achieves a retina-level resolution of 57 pixels per degree (PPD) and should therefore offer unsurpassed clarity.

Specs of the Pimax Crystal Super

The key data of the Pimax Crystal Super at a glance:

3840 × 3840 pixels per eye in the QLED version
120° horizontal field of view
Aspherical glass lenses with 99% light transmission and 280 nits brightness
Local Dimming 2.0 with 1000 zones per eye for high contrasts
Integrated eye tracking and inside-out tracking
Controllers are included in the scope of delivery
Pimax Play offers features such as dynamic foveated rendering and upscaling
Interchangeable optical engines, either Micro-OLED or 50 PPD QLED

The Crystal Super has been optimized in size and weight compared to its predecessors, the Crystal, and Crystal Light. The housing volume has been reduced by almost 30% and the ergonomics have been improved for greater comfort.

Thanks to Dynamic Foveated Rendering and upscaling, the VR headset should also run smoothly on mid-range PCs. According to Pimax, the high pixel density makes it possible to reduce anti-aliasing and thus save system resources.

Pimax is also lowering the entry price of the Crystal Super to $1,695. When the Crystal Super was announced in April, the VR manufacturer set the price at $1,799.

A new financing model is designed to make the purchase decision easier: You pay $999 upfront and then either $696 as a one-time payment or 24 monthly instalments of $32.99 each as part of the new Pimax Prime membership.

Kayak and Alyx at the Shiftall HQ with a pre-production MeganeX.

Almost four years after the original PS5 was released, the higher-end PlayStation 5 Pro is here with a mid-generation upgrade. Available now from $700, the PS5 Pro features a 2TB SSD, a 45% more powerful GPU with 2-3x faster ray tracing and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) - which doesn't support PS VR2 at launch but will in a future update - which is a neural upscaling technology similar to NVIDIA's DLSS.

This should allow developers to run PS VR2 games at a higher framerate or refresh rate. Sony only confirmed two PS VR2 games would have a PS5 Pro patch at launch, and more are continuing to emerge. We've also highlighted any upcoming games with confirmed PS5 Pro support. However, we've excluded games without dedicated enhancements that still have minor performance improvements.

Two additional games with PS VR2 support - Resident Evil 4 Remake and Resident Evil Village - have PS5 Pro patches, though it's currently unclear if these performance benefits are only for the flatscreen editions or if they extend to PlayStation VR2 as well. We've contacted Capcom for clarification but until we know more, we've left them off the list. For now, here's a list of PlayStation VR2 games with PS5 Pro enhancements that we're currently aware of.