‘VRChat’ Breaks All-Time Concurrent User Record with Japanese Anime Concert

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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! 

You can check out a clip of the concert below, courtesy YouTuber ‘Koge’s Game Streaming Channel’ (こげのゲーム配信ちゃんねる):

If you want to catch the act ‘live’ in VRChat, you’ll have three more occasions. Bookmark this link when it’s time:

• Sunday, March 1st 18:00 [JST]
• March 7th (Sat) 12:00 [JST]
• Sunday, March 8th 12:00 [JST]

Notably, the month-long festival will include performances from a host of VTubers and musical groups, and also includes a virtual theme park featuring Sanrio characters such as Hello Kitty.

This follows VRChat’s most recent record-breaking event, which took place during the recent New Year’s Eve celebration. Then, the platform welcomed in a peak of 148,886 concurrent users during the Central Time Zone ball drop.

While we don’t know the specific numbers for how the Japan time zone fared during the NYE ball drop, at the time Tupper said Japan-based users had “a strong showing,” noting the number “did surprise me.”

VRChat has long been a popular platform in Japan, however lately it seems to have broken through to mainstream Japanese culture. In June 2025, McDonald’s Japan opened an official VRChat world, which came as part of a larger marketing campaign involving popular VTubers.

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Vision Pro Finally Gets Native ‘YouTube’ App with Full Immersive Video Library

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Vision Pro users have been waiting over two years for a native YouTube app. Now, it’s finally here—thankfully also including support for immersive videos.

The News

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.

Image courtesy Apple, Google

What’s more, the official YouTube app also comes with support for viewing spatial videos, which including all 3D, VR180, and 360 videos on the platform. Vision Pro users can find them by navigating to the app’s dedicated ‘Spatial’ tab.

Additionally, Google maintains YouTube for Vision Pro also includes video playback up to 8K for the M5 version, which was released last October.

My Take

There’s no official explanation out there (yet), although there are probably a few reasons why YouTube didn’t come to Vision Pro up until now.

The most obvious to me: Apple’s $3,500 XR headset likely presented a limited return on investment for Google, which may or may not have been influenced by the companies’ historical platform rivalry. Notably, there is still no Gmail, Chrome, Docs, Drive, Photos, Maps—no Google-owned app on Vision Pro except YouTube right now.

That said, YouTube did make a spatial version of its app for Android XR, which was released with Samsung Galaxy XR last October. The relative timing makes me think the release on Vision Pro was more of a knock-on effect of having already built than leadership at YouTube specifically determining that now would finally be profitable, as I don’t suspect the M5 hardware refresh has significantly driven additional consumer interest.

Whatever the case, YouTube has now found itself on the hook for maintaining the app across three distinct XR platforms: Android XR, visionOS and Horizon OS.

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Meta Sold Over 7 Million Smart Glasses Last Year, Effectively Tripling Sales in 2025 Alone

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EssilorLuxottica reported its Q4 2025 financial results, revealing the company sold over seven million smart glasses last year.

The French-Italian eyewear conglomerate has been making smart glasses in partnership with Meta since the launch of the original Ray-Ban Stories in 2021.

Now, in its fourth-quarter results, EssilorLuxottica revealed it sold over seven million smart glasses last year—more than tripling sales since last reported.

In February 2025, the company announced it had sold two million Ray-Ban (Gen 1) smart glasses since release in late 2023.

Image courtesy Brad Lynch

It’s no wonder 2025 was a landmark year for the company though. Alongside Meta, EssilorLuxottica not only released a hardware refresh of its popular Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but also Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses—the company’s first smart glasses to include a heads-up display.

In addition to its smart glasses efforts, EssilorLuxottica maintains that 2025 marked a further acceleration in its “evolution from an optical company into a leading medtech and big-data group,” owing to growth across both its Nuance Audio hearing-aid glasses and AI-driven healthcare platform.

While Meta and EssilorLuxottica are current market leaders in smart glasses, the XR wearables race has really only just begun. As it appears today, companies largely see smart glasses as a first step towards creating all-day AR glasses of the near future, with  potential contenders including Google, Samsung and reportedly also Apple.

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‘Battlefield’-like VR Shooter ‘Forefront’ is Coming to PSVR 2 with Cross-Play

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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.”

Created by the same studio behind Breachers (2023) and Hyper Dash (2021), Forefront serves up an experience that should be pretty familiar to fans of the Battlefield series.

Boasting an expansive, semi-destructible environments, 16v16 battles include the ability to pilot everything from helicopters, tanks, humvees and boats as you push objectives.

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.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for official release dates, but in the meantime you can wishlist Forefront over on the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2.

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‘Star Citizen’ VR Support Isn’t Prime Time Yet, But It’s Getting There

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Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) added experimental PC VR support to Star Citizen late last year, taking a first step in fulfilling a more than decade-old promise. Things are getting increasingly serious though after the release of its second post-VR update.

Update Alpha 4.5 initially brought a VR theater and full VR mode to the game in December, which lets users play the bulk of the game in PC VR headsets for the first time, including walking, flying, EVA, combat, and using menus.

Granted, it’s still a (very) experimental mode, which initially required some users to even add VR config lines to the game’s directory to get it working, done in addition to keeping track of keybinds to cycle through VR modes on the fly.

Now the studio has released Star Citizen 4.6, adding for the first time an official VR option in the settings menu, making managing and enabling VR mode at startup a much easier affair.

Image courtesy Ray’s Guide

Although 4.6 doesn’t radically expand VR features, it’s certainly a vote of confidence that VR support is not only still on track, but moving closer to the core of the game. Still, it’s polished a number of usability issues, such as better menus and a smoother overall experience.

That said, as mentioned in a recent ‘Ray’s Guide’ video, players still need to carefully tune OpenXR settings, upscaling options, and in-game VR stuff, such as UI scale, distance, and IPD alignment just to get comfortable results. Users also typically need to switch between full VR and theater mode constantly for inventory and kiosk interactions, which is a definite immersion breaker.

That, and it doesn’t include VR motion controller support yet, making control remapping almost mandatory at this point, with many users relying on a mix of controllers, keyboards, HOTAS, and voice command software to manage the game’s enormous number of bindings.

As Silvan-CIG says in the 4.5 update announce in December though, all of its done in the spirit of open development.

“This is not our full VR launch. When that day arrives, we will make plenty of noise about it. What we are rolling out today is an opportunity for some early hands-on time, very much in the spirit of Open Development, so you can jump in, see how things are shaping up, and help guide what comes next.”

That said, creating a VR-native out of a Star Citizen is a tall order. Looking ahead, CIG’s biggest challenges will probably be centered around balancing those ambitions with the rest of the game’s development, which is constantly growing in scope and graphical complexity.

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Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Get Massive Utility Boost with Cool (but risky) ClawdBot Hack

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If you’re comfortable mucking around with a new open source project, you could be shopping on Amazon just by looking at an object with your Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are pretty useful out of the box, offering photo & video capture, calls, music playback, and your standard assortment of AI chatbot stuff. They don’t have an app store though, which means you’re basically stuck with a handful of curated services.

Now, indie developer Sean Liu released an open-source project called VisionClaw that links Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with OpenClaw (aka ClawdBot), essentially giving the autonomous AI agent eyes and ears.

Check out VisionClaw in action below, courtesy Liu:

now my clawdbot lives in my ray-ban meta glasses so i can just buy whatever i’m looking at pic.twitter.com/gWrijyTRhE

— xiaoan (@_seanliu) February 6, 2026

OpenClaw isn’t an AI model like ChatGPT or Google Gemini though. It’s an agentic layer—essentially a complex messaging layer built on top of an AI model that interacts with services on your behalf, like sending emails, managing shopping lists, or controlling smart home devices—just three of the 56+ tools OpenClaw can integrate with right now.

Basically, it works like this: VisionClaw uses Gemini Live for real-time voice and computer vision, which can do things like describe what you’re seeing and answer questions—basically the same sort of tasks you can do with the glasses’ native Meta AI.

Image courtesy Sean Liu

But once you want to actually interact with an app or service—like when you want to send a message over email or your favorite non-Meta messaging app like Signal or Telegram—Gemini Live hands off the request to OpenClaw, which takes action.

Users looking to run VisionClaw will need an iPhone, as Liu’s codebase is written as an Xcode/Swift app that specifically uses Meta’s Wearables Device Access Toolkit (DAT) for iOS to connect the phone to Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Beyond that, you’ll also need a fair understanding of the risks involved with running OpenClaw on your personal hardware.

While it can do some pretty amazing things, it’s a third-party bit of software that could require you to input passwords, API keys, and personal information, which can open the user up to malicious actors. Notably, OpenClaw’s skill integrations could be written by anyone, so users need to be especially vigilant.

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Studio Behind VR’s Most Popular Golf Game Aims to Solve a Key Challenge with Golf Training Sims

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The studio behind GOLF+ (2020) is aiming to expand the game this year in a bid to solve some of the most persistent problems in off-course golfing simulators: building real-world muscle memory in a virtual environment.

Golf+ CEO Ryan Engle announced that the studio’s popular golf sim is getting “major product updates” this year, which is set to include a new social lobby, UI improvements, and over a dozen new courses.

In addition, Engle showed off a fresh look at a mixed reality mode which ostensibly tracks real-world golf balls and clubs so players can work on driving, iron play and putting in a Sim Golf environment.

Check it out in action below:

Traditional golf simulators use large 2D impact screens and sensors to measure ball speed and direction. While they’re generally considered effective for practicing full swings and driving, they tend to be less reliable at the slower ball speeds used in putting and short-game shots.

Worse yet, these sorts of simulator screens lack parallax, as courses are projected at a fixed viewpoint. Looping in a mixed reality setup though could allow golfers to not only build muscle memory with a real ball and club, but have the benefit of golfing in a more realistic environment.

It’s unsure whether the studio intends on releasing the mixed reality implementation as an update to the current game, or releasing a separate version for location based golf sims.

Engle says however we should expect Golf+ on more platforms in the near future. Although it’s currently only available on Quest, the studio shared plans to expand the game to PC VR headsets.

Additionally, the studio says it’s exploring flatscreen PC gameplay, as well as offering a “unified experience with shared physics, multiplayer, and cross-play across all platforms.”

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