Virtual Reality

Combat Waffle announced it’s taking popular extraction shooter Ghosts of Tabor back to its 2024 roots with a separate version of the game, called Ghosts of Tabor: LEGACY.

Ghosts of Tabor: Legacy is essentially set to be the 2024 version of the game, before the studio pushed a number of major content updates, some of which drew community ire.

Combat Waffle says it’s reintroducing the game “preserved for the players who were there for it. The maps you mastered. The feel you remember. This is your raid, the way it used to feel.”

This includes a host of legacy stuff, such as maps in their original form: Old Island, Hex Bunker, Silo, and Matka Miest, as well as UX in its original state, such as backpacks with item collision, the older damage system, and more.

John Carmack, former Oculus CTO and co-founder of id Software, announced he’s still willing to put up $1 million of his personal money to help make VR versions of Id’s most famous retro titles—especially now that Microsoft has laid off a bulk of the studio’s employees.

Having left id Software in 2013 to join Oculus as CTO and help kickstart the VR consumer revolution, Carmack is still one of the industry’s most vocal advocates. Even after stepping down as CTO in 2019 and leaving Meta in 2022, he’s continued to push for open platforms and wider adoption of XR.

Now that Microsoft has essentially pared down Id Software though, resulting in what laid-off VFX artist Derek Best calls the size of “support studio”, Carmack is again reiterating the offer, hoping to make officially-sanctioned Id Software VR games a possibility.

“BTW, if the XBOX division is scrounging for loose change under the sofa cushions, I’m still willing to put up a $1M guarantee to allow TeamBeefVR to commercialize the legacy open source games on VR,” Carmack says.

By “legacy open source games,” Carmack is referring to classic Id Software titles whose game engines were released under open source licenses, such as the original DOOM (1993), Quake (1996), and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001). While the underlying code is freely available, the games’ assets, including levels, textures, audio, and other copyrighted content, are still owned wholly by Microsoft.

At least four hours every night Sarah Eggleton climbs into her motion rig and flies around the world in the Pimax Crystal Super.

She’s spent 4871 hours in Flight Simulator 2024 from Microsoft directly and another 394 hours in the version she bought on Steam. She spent every minute in VR — she doesn’t play flat. Based in England, she has no other games installed on her PC.

During his latest AMA on Instagram, in response to a question asking if Meta was abandoning VR, Boz reiterated what we already know: that the company is still working on various headsets and that they are focusing on economic sustainability more than before. Then he added that they’ll share more about all of this at Connect.

I’m pretty excited to know more about this headset. I remember a little bird telling me some months ago that it is going to be a very interesting device. And the leaked renders confirm it: it looks very lightweight, and resembles more a pair of ski goggles than a shoebox on the face like Quest. I’m really curious to see what Meta has cooked up when designing this device.

While the announcement or tease of Phoenix is going to be good news, I don’t think it will make us exit the Winter we are in. The last big Winter we had was in 2017-18, and we could go out of it only with a full change of paradigm, a big blast that increased the sales numbers of VR by a lot: that blast was the Oculus Quest (and later, Oculus Quest 2).

The truth is: I don’t see this big blast happening now. Meta Phoenix is basically a variation of the Vision Pro. It is not a new paradigm; it is basically just Meta taking an existing paradigm and making it cheaper, lighter, and more open.

TactGlove is a haptic glove, meaning it provides the sensation of texture to your fingers and palms through the use of vibration motors. To be clear, though, it isn't a resistive glove – it can't make you feel as if you're holding an object. Compared to the previous iteration the new DK3 increases the number of motors in each hand from six to eight, adding two new contact points in the lower part of the palm of your hand. At release they will come with a set of inner gloves, but for the demos at AWE, the reps were using disposable gloves. I was thankful for this when I finished my demo and noticed how sweaty my hands were.

Hand tracking in XR has come a long way and some developers like Owlchemy Labs are bullish on it, but it is fair to say controllers will remain the predominant input system of choice in VR gaming for the near future. It feels like a tough ask, in the current VR gaming ecosystem, to expect game developers en masse to not only adopt hand tracking as a primary input, but take it a step further and devote time and resources to adding support for a fairly reasonable, but still costly accessory in a struggling market. It is telling that many developers who have already added hand tracking support to their games, like Owlchemy Labs and Resolution Games with the Demeo series, have not already taken this step. That all said, the DK3 gloves are great, addressing the user feedback that the haptics were limited to fingertips and thankfully offering enough size options to fit most players. Like all of bHaptics' products, modded game support is available for those willing to put in the time to develop it as well.

Tomáš Mariančík aka Frooxius is the singular mind behind Resonite — a PC-based VR service where people can create together in VR.

He started up Resonite upon exit from Neos, a virtual universe that “exploded” a few years ago when one of the other people involved in the organization focused on introducing crypto concepts to the service.

“It was hard,” Frooxius says on the Good VR Podcast. “One of the hardest things I ever did.”

The fresh start of Resonite has done wonders for Mariančík’s mental health.

“Being able to exist without a lot of the constant anxiety and fear and just kind of focus and be like, what I’m building is my own and nobody can take it from me,” Frooxius said. “It was hugely impactful on my mental health in general.”

The developer identifies himself as a furry and joined the Good VR Podcast from the freedom of PC VR wearing a Vive Pro Eye with Project Babble facial tracker attached as well as Index controllers for finger tracking. The course of our conversation covers what furries are, what Resonite is, how the service sets itself apart from VRChat, and the unique power of VR as a medium.

“Virtual reality is about putting people into your imagination and visiting imagination of other people,” Frooxius said. “To me VR is a medium that lets you take the imagination out of your head and make it into a world that you can share with others and where it can mingle with imagination of other people.”

We spoke for about 46 minutes which I edited down to 21 minutes for video and almost 16 minutes for audio. The video version takes a trip to the Shadowed Cove world by Team VibeZ in Resonite.

“The goal of Resonite is to give people as much control over the world they’re in as possible,” Frooxius said. “Let people shape the universe the virtual universe they inhabit. It’s almost like if you took VRChat and the Unity editor and smooshed them together into one thing….whatever you change you see the impact of it inside of VR instantly.”

When I first played STARVAULT during early access, I thought it was good. Polished, well made and full of potential, certainly, but not a game I expected to spend much time with. Well, fast forward about a year and I have somehow logged more than thirty hours into the Steam version in just two weeks. Considering MOBAs are usually my least favorite type of online shooter, that should tell you everything you need to know. Theia Games have crafted something genuinely special here and, much to my surprise, I have found myself completely hooked.

The sixth iteration of the VR Games Showcase just wrapped up, delivering massive new game announcements including the reveal of Breachers: Outbreak and DRIFTERS: Blackout Crew as well as new looks at Payday: Aces High, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades 2, and Korea. IL-2 Series!

While various companies providing this type of hardware are mainly focused on the enterprise sector (e.g. Senseglove), bHaptics focuses on both enterprise and gaming. Its accessories are usually quite affordable, and bHaptics works a lot with game developers to integrate its hardware with games available on stores like the Meta Quest Store or SteamVR. When I was working on the fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded, I worked with them, and I have to say it is one of the best companies I’ve ever collaborated with: they provided us with the hardware, plus all the facilities to have a smooth integration. We integrated everything in a few hours. If you are a game studio, I would really advise considering a collaboration with them.

When I was at their booth, I was able to go hands-on with the latest iteration of their Haptic vest and Haptic gloves. The main focus of the experience was the gloves, though, so I will focus my review on them.

I tried these new gloves by bHaptics for around 10 minutes (so consider this article a “first impressions” post and not a complete review). Wearing them was very easy, and the fact that the closing strap was magnetic and not with velcro made it incredibly easy to put them on and off. I can’t comment on the sensations of the gloves’ material on the skin, because I was wearing an internal hygiene glove. But overall, the fit was good, and the glove felt pretty lightweight. My only complaint on the comfort side is that you can constantly feel the little vibrational engines touching your fingertips. It is like always having a watch battery strapped to your finger. I don’t know if this sensation goes away with the constant use of the glove, but for sure, in my short demo, I kept having it.

bHaptics showed me a demo about repairing a spaceship (which also contained a cat I could pet, so it was definitely good). In the demo, there were buttons to touch, knobs to rotate, and elements to grab. After the demo, there was a playground where I could keep interacting with various objects to test the sensation given by the glove.

I have to say that compared to when I last tried bHaptics gloves a couple of years ago, the product made a big jump ahead. The purely “touch” sensations were now definitely good. Touching buttons, touching objects, touching the table… all felt much more immersive with bHaptics gloves than without. Compared to the past, it seems the haptic sensation is much more nuanced. In the demo, I could touch a sphere hanging from the ceiling and then a similar-but-heavier sphere, and I could clearly feel the difference in haptics. All buttons in the experience were incredibly nice to touch. I can’t say the haptic sensation was the same as in real life, but I can say in some cases it started to go towards the “believable” stage. The sensation the haptic motors can give on the fingertips is now not the one of “vibrating”, but the subtle sense of “touching”, and this is simply amazing. It has been one of the best haptic sensations I had on my fingertip in the last times.

Valve announced the Steam Frame alongside the Steam Machine last year, and though we still don't have firm release dates or final pricing information (likely delayed because of global memory shortages), Valve has been jumping through hoops on its way to release day. That includes FCC certification, which gives us official filings to pore over. These have revealed some intriguing information about the headset and its accessories.

Mentions of the Enthusiast Kit appear in the health and safety manual. It reads that the "controller triggers, face gasket attachment, and the Enthusiast accessory battery pack include magnets." It goes on, "The Frame Enthusiast kit also includes a hot-swappable lithium-ion battery pack," and warns users to "use only the battery pack that came with your Enthusiast kit, or an authorized replacement battery pack."

The standard Frame has its own battery, but it sounds like the Enthusiast Kit upgrade pack will include at least one additional battery that can be hot-swapped during use. It's not clear whether an additional internal battery will prevent hardware shutdown when the standard battery is removed, or whether the Enthusiast Kit will replace the standard battery with a swappable one.

At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I met with Alvin Wang Graylin for an in-depth discussion looking back at the last decade of attempts to create a mass market for consumer VR headsets.

He left HTC in 2025 after joining the organization in 2016, a few months before the launch of the PC-based Vive headset powered by Valve’s SteamVR technology. That means he had a front row seat to the effect of Meta’s competitive strategies, from funding VR developers to acquiring them to undercutting HTC’s consumer headsets on price.

“These are things that are just not healthy for the industry, and nobody was really making money,” Graylin said.

If the VR market suffers from a “chicken and egg” problem in that consumers won’t buy headsets because developers won’t make content and developers won’t make content because there are no consumers to buy them, then Graylin’s perspective suggests Meta’s aggressive approach over this decade made it practically impossible for anyone else to help grow the ecosystem that would allow chickens and eggs to flourish.

VR Games Showcase is set to return next week, bringing another lineup of new trailers and updates from this season’s most anticipated VR games.

The Summer 2026 edition of the VR Games Showcase is slated to kick off live on YouTube on June 23rd at 11am PT (local time here).

This time around we’re getting another avalanche of VR gaming news, coming to Quest, PC VR and PSVR 2, which VR Games Showcase co-creator Jamie Feltham says will include Payday: Aces High Korea. IL-2 Series, Guardians Planetfall, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2, and The Lightkeepers.

Pay at least $18 for these 9 items

VTOL VR 98% Positive on Steam

Zero Caliber 2 Remastered 80% Positive on Steam

Metro Awakening 71% Positive on Steam

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow 77% Positive on Steam

Tactical Assault VR 85% Positive on Steam

Ancient Dungeon 95% Positive on Steam

Arizona Sunshine Remake 89% Positive on Steam

Among Us 3D: VR 75% Positive on Steam

Zero Caliber VR 81% Positive on Steam

When Subside first arrived on PlayStation VR2 and SteamVR, it quickly established itself as one of the most convincing underwater experiences available in virtual reality. Rather than focusing on survival mechanics or typical game concepts, Subside's solo developer has instead created a diving simulator that simply captures the wonder, serenity, and occasional fear inherent in exploring the waterways of our world.

With the arrival of the Makoa Shelf expansion, which the developer describes as the game's largest environment yet, Subside is even better than ever. I've spent the past week exploring the game both alone and with my kids, and it's immediately become a favorite activity in our house. To put it succinctly, Subside and the Makoa Shelf expansion are breathtaking experiences and a must-buy for every VR player.

Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers up to 60% higher GPU performance, up to 30% increase in CPU performance, and up to 160% higher NPU performance1, giving developers greater flexibility to push immersive XR experiences further, including with richer visuals, faster responding interactions, and more complex mixed reality scenarios. These added gains support demanding use cases such as immersive content viewing, mixed reality applications, and real‑time spatial perception, while maintaining power efficiency designed for comfortable, extended wear.

The platform supports visuals up to 4.4K per eye at 90 frames per second, enabling sharper detail, smoother motion, and improved color fidelity. Enhancements to video see‑through (VST) reduce latency and improve image quality, helping digital content blend more naturally with the physical world. These advances are enabled by IP hardening, including the EVA block, which provides hardware acceleration for demanding computer vision workloads.

These performance and graphics improvements are paired with increased power efficiency, delivering up to 20% longer battery life1 at the same workload and up to 12 degrees Celsius cooler chipset under load. This enables lighter, cooler headsets and tethered glasses that can be worn comfortably for extended periods.

As always, this week-long festival features a mix of demos for upcoming games and games that have already released on other VR platforms, like Loop One Done, Fixer Undercover, and Peak Rhythm.

We received this list from Valve nearly two weeks ago, so it is subject to change. Some developers may have registered for the event and subsequently dropped out. We have already seen some participants developing hybrid titles release a demo that is not VR supported. We do our best to catch these ahead of time and exclude them from the list below.

Other developers may also release demos for their games despite not being a part of this event. Games can also be erroneously tagged as VR when they are not planned to have VR support. As always, we will update this list if we come across any changes.

For now, here's the full list of participants we are aware of:

• Amelia's Escape
• Axe Gang
• Biodetention
• Blind Touch VR
• Bodian's Bay Wash
• Bramblefort
• Construcubes
• Crawler
• Dart Racer
• Dead 4 Now: Rebirth of Survivors
• D.E.C.A.Y.
• Driving Test Simulator
• Edd Skeleton VR
• Exoshock
• Fixer Undercover
• Fruit Golf
• Fuel Cell
• Grab Your Friends
• Gunshot Survivors VR
• Hyperstacks
• King Archer VR
• Kosmass
• Loop One Done
• MechPit
• One Day To Live
• Outpath VR
• Paranatural
• Peak Rhythm
• Snooker Billiard
• Streets of Miami VR
• Tomboy Adventure 2
• Unmourned VR
• Voxel Playground
• Wade
• ZipRush: Surf the Void

I think we all need a way better solution for VR input to core legacy input devices. Floating keyboards are ass and we all know it. Using gestures is also bad and solves nothing.

Hardware needs to finger register better. Make grooves or lines on the capacitive controllers so that fingers don't get mixed up, and just have people type like normal. Let me play world of Warcraft in emulated flatscreen in vr. Have triggers of the controllers count as touchpads to work as both touch mouse clicks and micro adjustments for virtual mousing. Maybe even have dual actuation or multi level haptics on the trigger mechanism so that you can actually click the topmost or bottommost of the trigger.

I'm sick and tired of actual normal pc I/O besting VR and being something to fear while in VR, that's dumb. VR is supposed to be better in every way, not a trade-off. The answer to "can it do x?" Needs to be YES. VR isn't a console, it's an evolution of I/O. So until keyb+mouse doesn't need to be used, VR needs to get its shit together. And I don't know about you, but a pretty gd big part of language and using a computer requires letters, and numbers. Phones are 90% of the way there and good enough. VR is not, it just tries to avoid it by design, but it always inevitably needs it, because at the end of the day, at least for now, that's how stuff actually works.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. /rant

As spotted by XR analyst Brad Lynch, Valve has imported a large number “virtual reality devices” to its US-based warehouses, which can be none other than its long-awaited Steam Frame standalone VR headset.

As per the public records, Valve has imported some 32,000 kg (~35 US tons) of the VR devices in question, which was notably one week after the company imported 40,000 kg (~44 US tons) of “game consoles,” unmistakably its Steam Machine Linux-based PC.

According to video discovered in Pico’s public SDK, it appears the company’s next flagship headset has just been leaked.

What it reveals: a headset very much inspired by Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR, as it appears to include a separate battery unit and woven headstrap à la Vision Pro, and a body similar to Galaxy XR.

The creator of Virtual Desktop recalls the Tuscany demo as his first VR experience and Senza Peso as his favorite moment of presence in a headset.

Guy Godin’s recollections are from a different time in the VR industry. Enthusiasts launched their VR experiences by clicking around with their mouse on a PC outside VR instead of selecting from a menu inside. Watching videos of people doing that led him to start work on Virtual Desktop.

His work in VR has both been sought by Facebook and also competed with the work Meta built, leading to some tense and frustrating interactions over the years.

“There are some good engineers at Meta that care,” Godin says on the Good VR Podcast. “What sucks for them is that they’re not incentivized to ship quality software and fix bugs. I wish they were, because some of them are really good and they’ve done some incredible things.”

I spoke with Godin using Riverside for just over 45 minutes and cut the conversation to about 38 minutes recounting his path through VR.

VisionOS 27, available to developers starting today, adds new support for actively-tracked accessories like motion controllers, which Apple is calling ‘spatial accessories’. Prior updates to visionOS allowed for passively-tracked objects which were tracked by their appearance but did not actively communicate with the headset. On the other hand, visionOS 27 allows Vision Pro to track accessories based on known IR LED patterns and positional data streamed from an accessory’s on-board IMU via Bluetooth. Spatial accessories can also send input data from things like buttons and thumbsticks, as detailed in a newly released developer session from Apple.

Valve offered a sentence of new guidance for Steam Frame shipments after blowing out the original early 2026 guidance offered late last year.

The new page on Valve’s Steam begins with the following sentence:

“Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer.”

Summer begins June 21 and ends September 22 for Valve’s U.S.-based offices.

Supernatural was originally created by Within, the immersive technology company founded by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, before being acquired by Meta in 2023. The new company, called Supernatural Health, says it plans to launch a new Supernatural experience on Quest this fall. In its FAQ, the company describes the new version as retaining the “same coaches, same DNA, same mission” as the original service, while also making clear that the transition will not simply continue the existing Meta-owned platform unchanged.

The announcement comes five months after Meta halted development of the service. In January, the company said Supernatural would no longer receive “new content or feature updates” as part of a restructuring that also saw multiple VR studios shut down. At the time, UploadVR reported that subscribers could continue accessing the existing workout library, but the coaches who helped define the service would no longer appear in new content.

While the existing workout library remained available, Meta's decision left the platform's long-term future unclear. UploadVR later reported that Supernatural continued ranking near the top of the Meta Quest charts even after Meta paused content updates and laid off much of the team behind it. The same report noted that Supernatural’s subscription model, brand recognition, and strong engagement made it one of the few clear consumer success stories in VR fitness, even as users began exploring alternatives.

Since the launch of the original Vision Pro, the iPad version of Steam Link has been available on visionOS through the App Store. While this allowed for easily playing your flatscreen Steam library in the headset, it limited you to having a window with the 4:3 aspect ratio of an iPad, yet streaming the wider aspect ratio of your PC, leading to black bars on the top and bottom of the window – something entirely unnecessary in XR.

The iPad app also limited the window's resolution to that of an iPad, around 2732×1537 for 16:9 content.

With the visionOS app, released on the App Store a few weeks ago, the Steam Link window supports up to 4K streaming resolution, dynamically matches the aspect ratio of the PC you're streaming from, and lets you adjust the curvature of the window to your liking.

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.”