MyOpinion

During a talk at the TED Humanity Reimagined conference in Vancouver, Canada, Shahram Izadi and other Google executives demonstrated a prototype pair of AI glasses.

The smart glasses look like normal glasses and have a miniature display built in, writes Axios.

Nishta Bathia, product manager for Glasses & AI, demonstrated several use cases, including a feature called Memory, in which the Gemini AI assistant uses a built-in camera to track what the user sees and remind them where they've placed certain objects like keys. The glasses can also record, translate or transcribe conversations in real time. In English or other languages such as Hindi.

"These glasses work with your phone, streaming back and forth, allowing the glasses to be very lightweight and access all of your phone apps," Izadi said..

The Project Moohan mixed reality headset, which is set to release in 2025 and is being developed by Samsung, was also demonstrated. Both the headset and the smart glasses are based on the AndroidXR operating system announced last December.

Pico Motion Trackers launched alongside Pico 4 Ultra last year, though they support the earlier Pico 4 and Pico Neo 3 headsets too.

Until now Pico Motion Trackers have been sold in a pair for €90/£80, with a relatively short strap intended for attaching them to your ankles to enable leg tracking in supported titles, including VRChat.

Now, ByteDance is also selling Pico Motion Tracker Waist Version for €50/£40, a single tracker with a longer strap so you can attach it to your waist.

The new waist tracker requires you to already own the ankle trackers for full body tracking, meaning the total cost for adding full body tracking to your Pico headset is €140/£120. There's currently no bundle, so you have to buy the waist and ankle trackers separately.

Adding the waist tracker, ByteDance says, significantly improves the quality of body tracking compared to only having the ankle trackers, offering a true orientation for your waist.

In addition to enhancing social expressiveness in apps like VRChat, this could enable torso-relative thumbstick movement, an option that's preferable to head-relative or controller-relative movement but requires body tracking.

Pico Motion Trackers are currently supported in VRChat, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Les Mills Dance, Racket Club, and PC VR via the built-in Pico Connect feature or the paid third-party app Virtual Desktop.

Like Sony's Mocopi, each Pico Motion Tracker features an inertial measurement unit (IMU) containing a tiny accelerometer and gyroscope. But unlike other IMU trackers, Pico Motion Trackers also feature 12 infrared LEDs each, which are tracked by the headset for two purposes.

The first is rapid initial calibration. You simply stand still and look down, and the base position of your legs and torso are measured. From then on, they're used to provide true 6DoF positional tracking whenever a tracker is within view of one of the headset's tracking cameras.

When they're not in view of a camera, the IMU data is fed into a skeletal model to produce plausible (but imperfect) estimated body poses, providing a higher quality output than pure IMU trackers at a significantly lower cost than Vive Trackers.

ByteDance claims an "average position error of 5 cm, an average angle error of as low as 6°, and an accuracy of not less than 98% for stepping action judgment and restoration" with a latency of less than 20 milliseconds.

Developed by Combat Waffle Studios (Ghosts of Tabor, GRIM) and published by Beyond Frames Entertainment, Silent North is a new PvPvE VR shooter set in the Alps. Tasked with fending off the harsh winter environment and zombies alike, you'll need to survive against the infected hordes and other survivors as you fight for the scarce supply of resources.

Survival in this harsh environment involves managing basic needs like sustenance and warmth, all while looting different villages for supplies. You can form alliances with other players if you wish, and the developer states the day and night cycle provides strategic opportunities like offering the cover of darkness for stealth or spotting enemies from afar in daylight.

Next month's launch follows the recent early access alpha for GRIM, a Rust-inspired VR survival multiplayer sandbox game. Co-developed by Spoonfed Interactive and Combat Waffle Studios, this PvPvE game sees you trying to survive while fighting for resources after efforts to colonize Mars failed. Today also brings news that GRIM has now entered its beta after numerous post-launch updates. Silent North's early access alpha is out now on Quest and Steam.

Last year, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman made an interesting statement, saying that “Apple Inc. is probably at least 18 months away from launching a second-generation Vision Pro.” At the time, it seemed like a long wait for some, but you’d be surprised to know that we're now just three months away from this launch window.

And just as we approach this timeline, a new report from PowerPlant has surfaced, suggesting that the second-generation Apple Vision Pro 2 has entered the mass production stage and is expected to be released later this year. Interestingly, Apple’s first-generation XR headset, the Vision Pro, was officially released in June 2023, just a month before the July 2025 launch date that's been circulating for the Vision Pro 2.

A report on Chinese outlet ITHome states that multiple independent sources have confirmed that the panels, shells, and other key components of the second-generation Vision Pro are already in production. Specifically, Lens Technology (蓝思科技) is exclusively supplying the glass panels for the Vision Pro 2, Changying Precision (长盈精密) is providing the exterior components, and several electronic circuit component manufacturers are rushing to complete orders.

VR enthusiast and software developer whatdahopper aka Kaitlyn has managed to get the Playstation VR 2's eye tracking to work on a PC. At least rudimentarily.

On X, the developer shows the first video footage of eye tracking in action.

"Yes, I am working towards getting the PSVR2 eyetracking/gaze working on PC, nothing is ready yet, it's still uncalibrated and I only just got ET data from the headset last night," writes whatdahopper on X.

Should the developer release his eye tracking software, it will be free and open source, just like all their projects available on Github.

"What I will say is that my software is just a mod of the official PSVR2 SteamVR driver released by Sony, it injects support for ET into the driver, my plan is to release an SDK so people can integrate stuff," writes the developer.

Alta, the studio behind A Township Tale (2021), showed off the latest work on its upcoming dungeon-crawler extraction game REAVE, revealing more about its various systems in addition to a new dungeon and enemy—all of it very much still a work-in-progress.

The game’s latest dev log (seen below) shows off a number of newly updated systems and areas, the largest in the game so far, a massive room called ‘The Fallen Bastion’.

“What we have here is a blend of open space, tight spaces, as well as well-lit areas and those pitch black areas to ambush other players, and […] hide from enemies,” says lead environment artist Sean Ellis.

At its center is a magical pedestal, where the player can summon a boss battle—in this case a giant spider, which is currently being used for testing purposes.

You can get a chance to become a tester by joining the game’s Discord, which periodically offers up limited slots. There’s no word on when the game will release, however the studio has confirmed it’s targeting Quest 2 and above and PC VR headsets at this time.

VR games under $10

    Creed: Rise to Glory for $4.49 — an absolute steal
    Superhot VR — time-bending action
    A Fisherman’s Tale 2
    Additional VR deals under $10

Must-play VR games at half price

    No Man’s Sky — Infinite universe in VR
    Arizona Sunshine 2 — enhanced zombie action
    Metro Awakening — atmospheric horror
    Additional VR Deals at half price

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate is a greatly expanded remake of the VR game Wanderer, released in 2022 for the first Playstation VR and PC VR headsets.

After many delays, Mighty Eyes' ambitious project has been released today for Quest 3, 3S, 2 and Pro as well as Playstation VR 2. The PC VR version will launch at a later date. The exact date is not yet known.

This article is not a review of the VR game. I'm going to focus on the graphics and performance and discuss the differences between Quest 3 and Playstation VR 2, both in writing and in the form of a video that shows the same section of the game once on PSVR 2 and once on Quest 3.

Considering the graphical splendor of the console version, I was afraid that Meta Quest 3 would have major graphical compromises. These fears were unfounded.

The Quest 3 version lacks visual treats like elaborate lighting and particle effects, post-processing, real-time shadows, and transparent water, and the textures aren't quite as sharp, but overall the visual appearance remains intact.

However, Mighty Eyes had to make other compromises to achieve a smooth frame rate on Meta Quest. According to the developers, both Quest 2 and Quest 3 use Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW), which can cause artifacts by artificially doubling the frame rate: from 36 to 72 frames per second on Quest 2 and from 40 to 80 frames per second on Quest 3.

The studio has clearly optimized the game for the most powerful VR platforms and has not compromised on the graphics because of Meta Quest. Graphics fetishists will get their money's worth with this title.

Those who only have a Quest 3 will also enjoy the game. Mighty Eyes has somehow managed to bring these worlds to the standalone headset without any major compromises. The biggest trade-off is in performance: Wanderer doesn't feel quite as smooth on the Quest 3, and ASW artifacts can spoil the overall good impression.

In the Quest 3 section of my video, the game sometimes stutters. Please note that this is because I'm recording a video, and that the game normally runs more smoothly.

Mighty Eyes writes that the Quest performance will be further improved in the coming weeks. A day 1 patch is also planned for Meta Quest, which I have not yet been able to try out.

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate can be purchased from the Horizon Store and the Playstation Store for $50. If you own the original game, you will receive a 20 percent discount on the upgrade. If you buy the Quest version, you will receive the Rift version (PC VR) for free as soon as it is released, and vice versa.

The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 beta now has fixed foveated rendering, and the sim will get eye-tracked foveated rendering support in the future. The beta channel of the simulator has a Foveated Rendering toggle in the VR settings, with the following description: When active, uses quad views rendering technique to improve your GPU performance. The the higher resolution, the higher the gain. Can add some CPU overhead. Can be combined with Eye-Tracking when available for best use.

The toggle isn't mentioned anywhere in the beta changelog, but testing it I can confirm that it currently activates fixed foveated rendering on any VR headset, netting a 5-10 FPS performance improvement, with the tradeoff of some pixelation at the edges of my view. However, eye-tracked foveated rendering doesn't yet appear to be working, suggesting that it will be added at a later point in the beta cycle. I confirmed this by testing with a Quest Pro, and VR Flight Sim Guy also found the same with a Pimax Crystal headset with eye tracking.

When it does arrive, eye-tracked foveated rendering could bring significantly greater performance gains for headsets with eye tracking, on the order of dozens of frames per second.

Virtual Desktop rewrote its macOS streamer from scratch, letting you spawn extra monitors and offering higher framerate and lower latency than even Apple's Mac Virtual Display.

While Virtual Desktop doesn't support its now-flagship PC VR streaming feature on macOS, since neither Meta's PC VR runtime nor Valve's SteamVR even support macOS, it does stream your monitors as 2D virtual surfaces, which was actually the app's original feature before VR streaming.

Since June of last year, Virtual Desktop has even been able to spawn extra monitors for Windows PCs, but doing so on macOS required using third-party solutions like BetterDisplay. Now, with the new update, Virtual Desktop, can do this on macOS itself.

Scientists at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center have demonstrated VR's effectiveness in managing cancer pain while developing a new method for measuring pain objectively. Their study, published in Scientific Reports, used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to analyze brain activity and classify pain into three levels: mild, moderate, and severe.

The research team worked with three distinct groups: healthy participants without VR exposure, cancer patients using VR, and cancer patients without VR intervention. All participants wore wireless fNIRS headgear to monitor their brain activity. The VR group experienced "Oceania," a nine-minute relaxation program on Meta Quest, with pain levels measured before and after the session.

The results were impressive: over 75% of patients reported pain reduction exceeding 30% — a threshold considered clinically meaningful. The team's pain classification model achieved 74% accuracy in predicting pain intensity based on brain activity. Additionally, they observed significant changes in brain connectivity, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which handles cognitive functions and emotional regulation.

I saw the tracking system occasionally slip out of position during this aggressive testing. If the strap slips out of place in any way on my body, it seemed enough to confuse the system and trigger the need for a recalibration. That's a quick process, but one that could be annoying if you had to do it multiple times during a play session. I suspect that for high-intensity movements, mocopi Pro might need a more robust harnessing system to ensure reliable tracking.

Overall, though, I was impressed testing mocopi Pro, and it seemed to have solid performance to my eyes. Of course, incorporating Sony's software ecosystem into the workflow of a professional would be an entirely different question.