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While Quest 2 remains in stock in most other supported countries, the US is Meta's biggest market and this news suggests the headset could be in its final weeks on sale. […]

There's been strong evidence over the past 15 months that Meta is preparing to release a cheaper alternative to Quest 3 to replace Quest 2 in its lineup, which may be priced around $300 new.

The ChatGPT app for Mac is now available to all users, OpenAI announced today. The app first came out in mid-May, but it saw a slow rollout that was limited to ChatGPT Plus subscribers until now.

Currently Horizon Worlds is only available in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Ireland, and Iceland. Now the platform is coming to the remaining Quest supported countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan.

Meta says this "rollout" will begin this week and take a "few months" to complete, so it could be quite a while before users in these new countries actually get access.

In Mark Gurman's latest report he claims Apple is "considering" making the upcoming non-Pro Vision headset "reliant on a tethered Mac or iPhone". […] But at closer inspection, there are a number of reasons this probably couldn't work, and it's simply a bad idea even if it could. […]

The real issue is that devices without a cooling fan like smartphones cannot sustain their peak performance for more than a few dozen minutes at the absolute most. […]

Even if this problem could be magically solved by some future cooling system, an iPhone's battery is three times smaller than the battery attached to Apple Vision Pro, which weighs almost twice as much as an iPhone.

With Apple Vision Pro however, temperature doesn't seem to be the only factor in fan speeds. According to Max Thomas (aka Shiny Quagsire), the main developer of the visionOS port of the SteamVR streaming tool ALVR, the headset also sets the maximum fan speed based on how loud the fans are, measured with the headset's microphone array.

The idea is presumably that in louder environments, those with more ambient noise, the fans will be harder to hear. So the overall goal of ensuring you rarely hear any fans can be maintained while maximizing performance.

This all leads to the bizarre conclusion that Apple Vision Pro should perform better in noisy environments […].

We don't know exactly why VR studios are (almost) giving away their games. But one reason is obvious: they hope to get more visibility on social media and on the Quest Store.

The new Meta Quest Software Update Tool is a webpage that uses the WebUSB API to sideload the latest update to your USB-connected Quest headset.

WebUSB works on Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, and even Android via Chromium browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Samsung Internet. That means you can use the Meta Quest Software Update Tool on almost any host device except an iPhone or iPad, and if you're using a Mac you'll need to use a browser other than Safari.

Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features -- iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence -- to our EU users this year.

Meta CTO and head of Reality Labs Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth announced the reorg in an internal memo to employees, stating that all teams in Reality Labs are being merged into either a central ‘Metaverse’ organization, responsible for Quest, and a new ‘Wearables’ organization to dedicated to other hardware, including its Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses.

[…] Bosworth says the company’s smartglasses were “a much bigger success than we expected,” spurring the XR division to put more focus on the product.

Of course, the lack of tracked controllers means Apple Vision Pro isn't a practical way to play the majority of SteamVR games out of the box. […] Even without controllers though, Vision Pro could still prove an excellent headset for use with untracked input devices such as racing wheels for sim racing or HOTAS setups for flight simulators.

Another Axiom confirmed Gorilla Tag has seen over 1 million daily active users, over 3 million monthly active users and over 10 million lifetime players. The studio statedthat these users spend "an average of nearly 60 minutes per play session" on the free-to-play VR multiplayer hit. […] Another Axiom revealed that the multiplayer game's revenue is now totaling over $100 million.