Virtual Reality

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.

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.

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.)

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.

March is chock full of existing games finding homes on new platforms, games we first got a look at during the first Steam Next Fest in 2026, and the VR return of one of the most popular sci-fi franchises ever.

These dates were sourced from a combination of developer posts, store listings, and press releases and are subject to change. We will update this article if and when any dates are changed.

“Many of the people who might say I failed them would say so because they loved things that I gave them, and are mad that the gravy train has come to a stop. But I still respect that,” Bosworth says.

But it’s not the first-party studio closures and near full-stop on VR game funding that Bosworth thinks is the failure: it’s customer acquisition.

“I don’t think I failed them because obviously they’re already fans. They love the work. The people that argue that I’ve failed are not yet VR gaming fans, who I think could be—who we hoped would be by now, but who aren’t.”

The failure, in Bosworth’s eyes, is not having created the right product for people who haven’t already adopted VR.

“And I haven’t built the right thing, or the right software to get them into the ecosystem. That is the failure. That is what we’re trying to attack in new and different ways: is to grow the base, to make this thing sustainable.”

Virtual reality is incredibly effective at making you feel immersed in the fiction of games. Rather than watching events unfold on a screen a couple of meters away, there’s a sense of being part of the action in a way that simply isn’t possible using a TV. Not all genres are affected equally though, and while shooters, driving games, and flight sims can all lay easy claim to being radically enhanced in VR, how does that work with tower defence?

A bit like playing Sony’s classic platform game, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, which placed you in the middle of its charming robotic world, hopping your bot rescuing droid around the space where you were sitting, the original Iron Guard had you roaming a virtual battlefield about the size of squash court. In your right hand you held a drone with a laser you could use to help defend your base, while your left hand held a controller that let you build and upgrade turrets.

Scudding about the battlefield, you could quickly move towards any area causing you trouble, adding towers or using your miniature spaceship to pump rounds into mobs. But there was always an odd tension between holding what felt like a toy-sized ship, and a disembodied game controller of a similar size, while hovering over industrial sites that were meant to be a representation of the real world.

In Short: Absorbing VR tower defence that improves on the original game in almost every department, but is let down by a pointless, tacked on narrative.

Pros: Good variety of enemies, mission goals, and turrets. Graphically crisp with detailed structures and attractive settings. Impressively polished all round, in terms of gameplay and visuals.

Cons: Abysmal dialogue and voice-acting; glitched conversations have characters interrupting each other. No multiplayer.

Score: 7/10

Firmware dataminers Luna and Samulia discovered a "hilariously" low resolution depiction of the headset from the rear side (see above), as well as a silhouette of the frontbox from behind. The pair were also able to activate and run the eye tracking calibration setup on a Quest Pro.

While the resolution is indeed comically low, it still clearly depicts a compact headset with glasses-style nose pads instead of a classic VR-style face pad. Discovered strings also reference adjusting the nose pads for comfort. What we don't see is the back of the device, so it's not yet clear whether it has glasses-like arms or a cradle for the back of your head.

This is the first chance for many players to try popular upcoming titles for the first time like Beyond Frames' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City.

Some of the participating games released demos prior to the start of Next Fest, like Echoes of Mora, Alliance Tales: Battle For The Frontier, Birdseed VR, and How To God.

Please note that this list was provided two weeks ago by Valve and is subject to change. Developers can (and previously have) drop out of Next Fest if their demo is not ready or release a demo on short notice.

Meta, after laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closing three VR studios, stopping new content for VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinuing its metaverse for work, is announcing a major change for its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform. Instead of attempting to make the 3D social platform work for both VR and mobile, Meta is “explicitly separating” its “Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform” and “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile,” Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs’ VP of content, says in a blog post.

The new approach sets Meta up to better compete with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, which also offer user-generated experiences that can be played on your phone. Horizon Worlds originally launched for VR, but “to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”

Project Swan is going to be Pico’s next flagship XR headset, the company says in its GDC session description, which is also slated to run PICO OS 6, the next version of the company’s Android-based operating system.

While the company hasn’t expressly said it will also reveal Project Swan’s hardware at GDC in March, Pico says it will provide “an overview of Project Swan’s graphics performance, multimodal interaction system, and developer toolchain, as well as practical guidance on bringing existing apps or games into spatial computing workflows,” which is set to include “concrete examples and live demos.”

“This session introduces the core OS and platform capabilities that enable developers—from XR specialists to non-XR app, web, and game creators—to build or adapt content for this emerging medium,” Pico says. “It presents a new paradigm for spatial experiences in which games and apps coexist, allowing a primary experience to run alongside companion applications in a shared environment.”

Before you continue reading, note that foveated streaming is not the same as foveated rendering, though the two techniques can be used alongside each other. As the names suggest, while foveated rendering involves the host device actually rendering the area of each frame you're currently looking at with higher resolution, foveated streaming refers to sending that area to the headset with higher image quality than the rest of the frame.

It's a term you may have heard in the context of Valve's Steam Frame, where it's a fundamental always-on feature of its PC VR streaming offering, delivered via the USB PC wireless adapter by default.

Given that the video decoders in headsets have a limited maximum resolution and bitrate, foveated streaming helps prioritize resolution and compression quality where you're currently looking.

Triangle Factory, the maker of the popular 32-player Battlefield-inspired VR FPS Forefront, has announced that the price of their game will increase at the end of February, alongside what the team calls "a major update."

The updated price has not been revealed, but Forefront is currently available on Meta Quest, Steam, and Pico, at a cost of $22.99.

Since launching in Early Access, Forefront has been well-supported by its makers, receiving several updates to add new maps and weapons, address balancing issues, provide graphics updates, and more.

VRChat announced it just topped its all-time user peak, bringing in over 150,000 concurrent users to attend a Japanese language concert.

VRChat Community Head ‘Tupper’ confirmed on X that the social VR platform hit a new all-time high of 156,716 concurrent users over the weekend.

The platform played host to Sanrio Virtual Festival, a music and anime culture festival taking place from February 8th to March 8th, although it was the main act that drew in glut of the fans though—a musical performance by Kaguya, the main character from Netflix anime series Cosmic Princess Kaguya!

Google first announced that a YouTube app was “on the road map” shortly after Vision Pro’s February 2024 launch, although it never gave a specific release window, leaving users searching for alternatives beyond simply opening YouTube in Safari, which notably didn’t include native support for spatial video.

The official YouTube app, which is now available on the App Store, now gives Vision Pro users access to every YouTube video and Short, which includes access to all of the regular YouTube features, such as subscriptions, playlists, and watch history.

Triangle Factory announced that its Battlefield-inspired VR shooter Forefront is finally coming to PSVR 2.

There’s no release date yet beyond the studio’s initial announcement, however Triangle Factory has confirmed that when it does, the 32-player shooter will “support cross play with other VR platforms.”

Currently, Forefront is available in early access across all other major VR headsets, including Quest, SteamVR, and Pico headsets. And it’s done very well for itself in the last three months since it launched into early access.

ThrillSeeker covers Fluxpose and how it works for full body tracking using magnetic tracking.

He discusses the history of magnetic tracking and the pros/cons of the tech.

He found that 3 trackers didn't do too well, 5 trackers were okay, and 8 trackers were great.

The head tracker has to be in a very specific spot, otherwise tracking will suffer.

It uses some EMF filters to try to minimize interference with metallic objects and does okay with it, even better if you have more trackers.

Tracking is comparable to a base station.

He recommends that you don't buy the Vive Ultimate Trackers (you'll be dealing with problems unless you own a very modern Vive Headset).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/58929215