Virtual Reality

Valve announced that Steam Deck is getting a sizable price hike, bringing an increase of $240 to $300 to its handheld gaming PC–not exactly a vote of confidence for those of us waiting for Steam Frame, its upcoming standalone VR headset.

The company revealed the 512 GB OLED Steam Deck has increased from $549 to $789, while the 1 TB variant is going from $649 to a whopping $949, making for a 44% and 46% price increase respectively.

What’s more, the cheaper 256 GB LCD Steam Deck is no longer listed on Steam, which suggests the company may have retired it after months of being out of stock.

In a Steam news post, Valve explains what’s become an all too obvious occurrence in consumer electronics by this point: component prices are out of control.

“Steam Deck itself hasn’t changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole,” Valve says. “We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.”

There is a particular kind of grief that comes when a virtual world sunsets.

It is easy for some to frame these closures as the disappearance of a product, a platform, or a failed business model. But those of us who have spent time inside virtual worlds know better. When a world goes dark, we do not simply lose connectivity. We lose places. We lose rituals, relationships, events, art, architecture, memory, and the transcendent sense of belonging that only emerges when a community spends enough time together to turn a platform into a home.

If the immersive industry wants to mature, it must begin treating virtual worlds not as disposable experiments, but as cultural spaces with legacies, responsibilities, and communities worth protecting. Because when a virtual world sunsets, what we lose is not only a platform. We lose a piece of human history written in digital space.

And if we choose to preserve that history, honor those communities, and build better paths forward, their light can still guide the future of virtual worlds.

The latest installment of the Ruff Talk VR Gaming Showcase is here, bringing with it another avalanche of VR game reveals, trailers, updates and more.

Ruff Talk VR is a VR-focused podcast hosted by father-and-son team Damien and Bryan Ruffy, who release podcasts each week in addition to their regular VR Gaming Showcase. This is now the duo’s fourth showcase, following the December 2025 show.

We rounded up what we think are some of the top highlights, although you can catch the entire showcase for the full drop, which includes a whopping two dozen trailers and announcements.

Project Titan is the codename for the upcoming PC mixed reality headset by DPVR. Even if it is not super well-known in the West, DPVR is one of the most famous Chinese brands of virtual reality headsets. There was a time when most of the shipments of 3DOF VR headsets in China were delivered by DPVR to schools and enterprises.

Project Titan is poised to have some interesting specifications:

It is small and lightweight, weighing only 110g It features a 4K MicroOLED display per eye (Marketing says this is 8K, but we know it is not…) Expected FOV is around 100° It can connect with both Windows PCs and Android phones.

What is amazing about it is especially the design: this headset really looks like big sunglasses. It’s a design that is not scary and isolating like the classical shoebox on the face, but it just looks like the user has big glasses. And this does not compromise the resolution (4K per eye is a lot), but of course, it has to sacrifice a bit of the FOV.

Hey everyone on Lemmy.world!

If you are obsessed with the absolute immersion of racing in virtual reality, I’ve got something for you. We’ve just kicked off virtualreality, a space completely dedicated to SimRacing in VR.

Whether you are trying to squeeze every last frame out of your headset, tweaking telemetry dashboard overlays, dialing in your wheel base settings, or just looking for great VR racing content, this is the place.

What we are bringing to the grid:

VR Optimization & Specs: Finding that perfect sweet spot between graphics and performance (because 90 FPS is non-negotiable).

Hardware & Immersion: Talking setups, motion, telemetry, and how to make the cockpit feel as real as possible.

Gameplay & Reviews: Racing across different sims [e.g., iRacing, Assetto Corsa, Automobilista 2] entirely from the virtual cockpit.

If you love racing in the virtual driver's seat, or just want to support a new independent creator/space in the Fediverse, we would absolutely love your support!

Hit that subscribe button and drop a comment below to let us know: What's your current VR headset and favorite sim?

👉 Subscribe / Watch here: [(https://www.youtube.com/@sim_racers?sub_confirmation=1)]

Thanks for the support, see you on the track! 🏁

Among Giants is difficult, uncompromising, and occasionally frustrating. Its combat can feel brutal, and its refusal to guide the player will undoubtedly alienate some. But it's also one of the most atmospheric, ambitious, and immersive VR games I've played in years.

Few modern games trust players as completely as Among Giants does. Fewer still are willing to let mystery remain mysterious. Among Giants demands patience, curiosity, and perseverance, but for players willing to meet it on its terms, it offers something increasingly rare: the feeling that you've stepped into a truly new world.

I promised to keep you informed about the cool things I could have tried in China. And I’m keeping my promise with this article in which I tell you about my hands-on with the GravityXR reference design VR headsets. I’m pretty sure you will love it, because one of these headsets is incredibly small… probably the smallest VR headset I’ve ever tried until now!

GravityXR is a Chinese company based in Shanghai that specializes in the design and production of chips for AR/VR headsets. I thought in the beginning that this company was a sort of headset manufacturer, but actually, they don’t do headsets; they create the chips and the reference designs for the OEMs to use to produce their own headsets.

Imagine it as a sort of “Chinese Qualcomm”. The two companies don’t exactly do the same things (for instance, I’ve been told that Qualcomm does System-on-Chip devices, which GravityXR usually doesn’t do), but I guess the comparison conveys the idea. The company can cooperate with vendors in various ways. For instance, they can just provide the chips, and the companies can build a whole headset around it. Or they can provide the chips and the reference designs, and the OEMs may start from this to create their own XR products more easily.

The company was established in 2021. Since then, it has received various funding rounds and now is able to offer a few chipsets and reference designs.

Behaviour Interactive, the studio behind asymmetrical multiplayer Dead by Daylight (2016), announced it’s developing an immersive experience based on iconic cyberpunk sci-fi Blade Runner.

The studio revealed it’s working with original IP holder Alcon Entertainment as well as Montreal-based PHI Studio, known for co-producing location-based VR experience Space Explorers: THE INFINITE and mixed reality theater experience BLUR. The news was first reported by Heise Online.

According to the experience’s description, Blade Runner: The Immersive Experience will include a “multisensory exploration blending dystopian environments with deep storytelling.”

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades development studio RUST LTD. revealed a sequel during the Creature Feature.

I’ve told people I’m not really into VR shooters, but the more nuanced truth is that nothing in the category interests me the way Pistol Whip grabbed me with its rhythm focus in about 30 seconds and then kept me playing there for years. Now, I’m anticipating Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 in a way I haven’t any other VR game.

H3VR2 has been in development for some time and it is funded in part by Meta, with the reveal made during Doug North Cook’s latest VR gaming showcase. Some of the most accomplished VR developers in the world have joined RUST LTD. to devote their time to the project including SUPERHOT VR for Quest developer Mark Schramm and Vertigo 1 & 2 creator Zach Tsiakalis-Brown.

“I see these people around me, many of whom are like my dear friends, who are capable of building some of the most incredible experiences that I think anyone has ever made,” North Cook said in February on the first episode of the Good VR Podcast. “And I am just desperate to ensure that they keep being able to build those things.”

In case you are unfamiliar with H3VR, the work from Anton Hand and his colleagues at RUST LTD. exists in a category by itself on Steam. The VR sandbox game has been in development for a full decade of early access accruing more than 20,000 reviews over that time and an overwhelmingly positive rating. Never put on sale below its $20 starting price, its 1.0 version is still in ongoing testing to support the robust modding community after more than 150 updates across the decade adding new game modes, features, and guns focused around shooting targets or human-sized hot dogs.

TCL has revealed its latest OLED and micro-LED displays aimed at AR and VR headsets. The company claims to have achieved new benchmarks for pixel density.

Shown off at the SID Display Week event, TCL’s new 2.24-inch display is claimed to be the “highest pixel density real RGB G-OLED display,” at 1,700 PPI (pixels per-inch), for a total resolution of 7.2MP (2,600 × 2,784) and refresh rate of 120Hz.

While there are OLED displays out there with higher PPI, TCL claims it’s got the highest PPI among glass-based OLED displays that use a “real RGB” subpixel layout. We take that to mean that the display is using an RGB stripe layout where every pixel has an equally sized red, green, and blue subpixel. That comes in contrast to many OLED displays that use different subpixel counts, sizes, and patterns (which can impact image quality).

Developed by Trebuchet, Compass is an open-world flight exploration game in which you play as a "scout" piloting an upgradable cargo ship through pastel skies full of beautiful clouds, floating islands, and incredible danger. You'll scout ahead of a roving airborne Caravan, charting a safe course through turbulent skies, solving puzzles, delivering cargo, and completing missions.

Today is May the Fourth (Be With You), an annual celebration of all things Star Wars. PlayStation, Meta, and Steam all have sales running on Star Wars Games, so don't miss out. Most of these sales end on May 5 (aka Revenge of the Fifth).

Here are all of the Star Wars VR games with prices and discounts for SteamVR, PlayStation VR, Meta Quest, and Pico.

Whenever Apple releases a new product category, there seems to be this industry drive to find its weak points and jab at it until it dies. Apple Vision Pro may not be a blockbuster, but it is the entry point to Spatial Computing, which Apple still believes to be its future.

According to a report from MacRumors, Apple Vision Pro hardware as it stands in April 2026 may truly be dead. The story suggests that Apple has likely given up on the platform due to a lack of consumer interest after the M5 update.

The evidence presented is an anonymous tip about changes to the Apple Vision Pro team. Apparently, Apple has redistributed the team to other projects, including Siri. We believe what MacRumors has been told, and we know our friends over there do good work.

Speaking to Polygon, Valve revealed that it’s only releasing Steam Controller next month for a pretty important (and slightly obvious) reason: Steam Controller “doesn’t have RAM in it,” Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali told Polygon.

“We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch,” Cardinali maintains.

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is the best VR horror game in quite some time. Much like Batman Arkham Shadow, Half-Life: Alyx, and Metro Awakening before it, Altered Echoes stays faithful to its series while still shining in VR.

The gameplay is nothing groundbreaking, but the same can be said for the series as a whole. Altered Echoes keeps it simple and executes at a high level, getting nearly everything right with the exception of limited VR options. These ultimately do not detract from a top notch VR horror experience.

Schell Games head Jesse Schell joined the Good VR podcast and recapped his path in VR from working on Disney’s pioneering VR attraction Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride in the early 1990s to the studio’s recent explorations in generative AI.

Along the way, we discuss the seated I Expect You To Die trilogy, the physically active Until You Fall sword fighting game, and the ambitious effort to transition the mobile multiplayer game Among Us to fully immersive embodied virtual reality.

“The business of watching your back, the fact that in VR, you literally have to turn around to see…is someone behind me?” Schell said. “Like, ooh, that does feel kind of like a match. And so we were excited by the idea of it in conversations with Innersloth, this was something that was interesting to them. And so we ended up kind of being able to team up to get it done. They were very interested in having us be a part of that. And it definitely has been the most, in terms of number of players, the most successful VR experience that we’ve been a part of.”

Most recently, Schell transitioned development of Among Us back to original developer Innersloth. The title represents perhaps the only multiplayer title in gaming to transition across all those platforms and modes of play, essentially going full circle from a flat map on a flat screen to a 3D map on a 3D screen and then, finally, back to a 3D map on a flat screen. Schell says what “shocked us” was that, as the title moved from VR back to flat, they expected more players to enjoy the game in that final mode of play.

“As many players as we have in VR, I don’t know, we’ll probably have three times as many in flat? Of course we will,” he said they thought. “And the answer was no, that hasn’t been true. The VR part of it has been more successful for us than the flat version, which was a little surprising.”

Forefront, a 32-player Battlefield-style VR FPS, launches in full on April 23. Ahead of the release, Mike and I were invited to playtest the game's new weapons, gadgets, and attachments with 30 other content creators, journalists, and game devs all vying for dominance of the new map, Clearwater.

What followed was an hour of sprawling FPS warfare that hearkened back to the golden era of massive multiplayer Battlefield. We laughed, we cried, we bled, and lived to tell you about it.

Apple announced that CEO Tim Cook is stepping down, and John Ternus, a long-time Apple veteran, is set to take his place. As head of hardware engineering, Ternus oversaw the launch of Vision Pro in addition to a slew of core Apple products over the years, although the new CEO may have some reservations about the company’s premium XR headset moving forward.

Fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in mechanical engineering, the soon-to-be Apple CEO actually did a four-year stint at Virtual Research Systems, a now-defunct hardware company making some of the first commercially available VR headsets.

Virtual Research’s PC VR headsets were decidedly of a different era, although they helped spark the latest generation. Just three years prior to the release of Oculus Rift DK1, in 2010 Oculus founder Palmer Luckey even called an owner of a Virtual Research V8 a “lucky bastard”, noting the device’s 60-degree field-of-view was “pretty fantastic” more than a decade after the headset’s release.

Like last year, I’m one of the media partners of the event. For this reason, I asked if I could have a preview of the event by speaking with some relevant Chinese XR companies, and so I had the opportunity to have a mini interview with Pimax, INMO, FXG, and DPVR! They will explain to us not only what they do but also what the view of the current immersive market is from people who live in the Far East.

Sunny Chen [DPVR]: Chinese ecosystems excel in scenario agility, while Western ecosystems dominate in rule-defining power.

Strengths of the Chinese ecosystem: scenario-driven innovation and extreme efficiency. Backed by world-leading supply chain clusters, rapid hardware iteration, and exceptional cost-control capabilities, Chinese companies demonstrate extraordinary commercial agility. We excel at diving deep into specific vertical scenarios, validating business models quickly, and closing the loop from lab prototypes to large-scale commercial deployment. Simply put, we possess strong realization and transformation capabilities.

Strengths of the Western ecosystem: platform logic and ecosystem definition. Leading Western companies still hold profound technological sovereignty and first-mover advantages in underlying operating systems, developer ecosystem building, global content systems, and the ability to define consumer rules. They tend to start from underlying protocols to build a platform consensus on a global scale.

However, the endgame of the future XR competition will not be regional rivalry, but complementary strengths from a global perspective. Companies truly capable of riding out industry cycles must be inclusive and integrative: they need China-style speed of innovation, delivery efficiency, and scenario depth, as well as global platform thinking, brand heritage, and ecosystem synergy.

The future of XR will inevitably be one of deep integration. We are committed to seamlessly linking China’s hardware advantages with global application scenarios, creating value for users worldwide in a more open ecosystem.

The studio announced last month its ‘Sim 5’ update was coming in April, which is set to bring PSVR 2 support to the PS5 version of the game alongside a number of other improvements, although it wasn’t clear exactly when the update was planned to release.

Now, in the studio’s April 2026 Developer Stream, Asobo confirmed the game has now passed Sony certification, and is “down to three must-fix bugs or something” Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann says.

The studio isn’t ready to say just when it plans to launch the update, although Neumann says they’re “super close.”

Sock Puppet Superstar features hand-tracking and a custom voice synthesizer built in FMOD to transform players into sock puppet performers. Using hand tracking or traditional controllers, players control one or two sock puppet singers, raising and lowering them to control vocal pitch in an attempt to sing as accurately as possible. The result is a mix of rhythm gameplay and utter silliness that looks and sounds refreshingly hilarious.

meetings in VR can revisit the birthplace of the organization.

Two organizers of VR meetups for AA, Paul and Mike, estimate hundreds of people have been put on the path to recovery from their meetings in virtual reality as they find themselves protected by the total anonymity of a headset connected over the Internet.

The two co-founders of AA are known as Bill W and Dr. Bob and a home in Akron, Ohio is considered the birthplace of the organization back in the 1930s. Paul hopes to be able to visit that place physically soon to scan it with headsets and a 3D camera. Using a platform like Horizon Hyperscape, nearly 100 years later people may be able to revisit that place in VR.

“We want to create the ability to tour that home, which is so important to many people in AA, that will never be able to get there,” explained Paul during the Good VR podcast. “And we’ve got friends and people in Costa Rica and France and England and even other parts of the United States who are not going to travel to Akron but would really like to see, if you will, the birthplace of AA.”

Across a 39-minute conversation, Paul and Mike explain the organization and its principles as well as their journey through virtual reality as well as the fellowship they’ve been able to foster across various platforms, from Altspace to Horizon Worlds to new platforms they’re exploring today.