Meta announced a major update to its open-source Immersive Web SDK (IWSDK) framework, which lets developers build VR experiences on the web using WebXR—now including an “agentic workflow” powered by AI coding assistants which aims to reduce
Originally launched at Meta Connect last year, IWSDK aimed to simplify VR development tasks like physics, hand-tracking, movement, grab interactions, and spatial UI, something Meta says allows creators can focus on ideas instead of low-level engineering.
The new addition, which Meta announced in a developer blog post, now includes an “agentic workflow” powered by AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Codex.
“In practice, agentic workflows mean the AI does more than generate code; it also tests and validates it. This closed-loop system is essential for high-quality, reliable results. IWSDK’s AI integration closes this loop entirely, offering developers maximum productivity,” Meta says.
To demonstrate the system, Meta rebuilt its 2022 VR gardening demo ‘Project Flowerbed‘, previously made up of tens of thousands of lines of custom code. Using IWSDK’s AI workflow and existing art assets, the entire application was recreated in only 15 hours, the company says, noting the tool isn’t about “fixing a typo or generating boilerplate. It’s a full, interactive VR experience for web, rebuilt by AI using IWSDK.”
Meta’s main reasoning behind its latest (and certainly not last) injection of AI is mainly centered around ease of deployment. Web-based VR can be tested instantly in a browser without lengthy compile times, and can also be deployed across desktop and VR headsets via a simple URL, bypassing app stores and downloads. Notably, the company says over one million monthly users already access WebXR content on Quest.
If you’re looking to learn more, or explore Meta’s new AI workflow, check out IWSDK here. You can also find the open-source project (under MIT licensing) over on GitHub.
We got an eye-full of VR stuff during today’s Creature and VR Games Showcase livestream, which showed off a bevy of new VR games and updates coming to a headset near you.
Here’s the full drop, frontloaded with a very obvious headliner: the upcoming sequel to Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades.
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Sequel
Get ready to shoot, loot, and scoot as a sentient hot dog in the sequel to Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades (H3VR), the award-winning, best-selling immersive FPS. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 is heading to Quest 3/3S and Steam.
Trebuchet just announced its open world VR flight adventure Compass now has a release date on Quest 3/3S & Steam: May 28th.
Wordbound Coming to VR and PC
Viral words-to-life puzzler Wordbound prepare you to become a powerful wordsmith. Canadian studio Kettle Games unveiled a brand-new gameplay teaser trailer for its language puzzler Wordbound and confirmed a Steam release. Wordbound is also heading to Quest 3/3S and SteamVR.
Janet’s Planets Revealed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tn4lH3kx6k
Welcome to the best VR terraforming service in the Milky Way! Really Interactive (Toran, Virtuoso) revealed its next game, intergalactic narrative adventure Janet’s Planets, is heading to Quest 3/3S and Steam.
Crêpe Master!
The colorful VR beat ‘em up adventure from indie French Developer Halluination Studio shared a timely reminder that the game releases tomorrow, May 7th, on Quest 3/3S.
Crêpe Master! sees you play as Hana, a magical girl who embodies the reincarnation of the Crêpe Goddess. Wielding her Sacred Pan and performing magic by striking poses, you must defend your home from an alien invasion and stop the ruthless tyrant threatening the Earth’s most beloved treat.
Sock Puppet Superstar
Creature has announced that the next game from Brandon Montell, Sock Puppet Superstar, will be published by the Creature Label.
Control a singing sock puppet with your hand in VR on Quest and Steam. Open the mouth to make it sing, and match the notes flying towards you to stay on pitch. Perform solos or two-handed duets, unlock ridiculous voices and accessories, and put on the greatest sock concert of all time.
Laser Dance ‘Mimic Update’
Thomas Van Bouwel (creator of the critically acclaimed VR game Cubism) announced that Laser Dance, currently out in Early Access on Quest, will be getting a new update, which adds six new levels to Laser Dance, the MR game that turns your living room into a laser obstacle course. These levels feature a new green laser, which moves only when the player moves.
The Mimic Update is planned to be released later this summer, but players who already own Laser Dance can join the Discord (invite link) to try an early beta.
Deadly Delivery: The Goldmoon Update
Indie team Flat Head Studio (We Are One) today announced their VR horror co-op Deadly Delivery, where you avoid monsters, drop off packages, and pray you reach the quota, is getting new content today on Quest and Steam.
CROSSINGS Updates
Indie developer Neat Corp (Budget Cuts, Garden of the Sea) showcased a developer interview for VR Norse epic CROSSINGS, showcasing a number of post-launch QOL updates and improvements to multiplayer.
Delve into the afterlife and take on the weavers of fate in this Norse-inspired first-person VR soulslike. CROSSINGS is out now on Steam and Quest 3/3S.
Sweet Surrender Update
Image courtesy Salmi Games
Indie VR studio Salmi Games announced that Sweet Surrender is getting a brand new update today. This is Update 16 for the game that is out now on Quest, PSVR 2 and Steam and includes a third chip slot, 55 new chips, including medical precision, cross contamination, and after shocks, among TONS more.
Sweet Surrender is a frenetic roguelite shooter fully in VR. Battle to the top floor of a dystopian megatower using a vast array of weapons, tools and upgrades, pushing through treacherous environments and waging war against an army of hostile machines.
Beat the Beats Level Editor
Image courtesy Parallel Circles
Get ready to feel the rhythm with Beat the Beats, the VR rhythm game that’s out on Quest, Steam and Pico 4. In today’s teaser trailer, Parallel Circles (Flat Heroes) revealed that the game will be getting a Level Editor, coming soon to Steam Workshop.
Beat the Beats is an electric mix of rhythm and boxing. Use realistic punches to pound your way through over 90 musical arcade levels across 45 electronic tracks, all in hypnotic VR. Get pumped, get moving and beat the beats.
Spymaster Coming Tomorrow
Spy fans, get ready, as InnerspaceVR’s Spymaster is preparing its first mission briefing for you! In the world of counterintelligence, where every second counts, Spymaster arrives tomorrow, May 7th, as an Early Access title for Quest and SteamVR.
Spymaster is a high-stakes action-narrative VR game filled with exciting set sequences, puzzles and humor. Step into the shoes of operatives TIC, Mulligan, and OSCR, each with their own skills, gadgets, and irreverent dialogue. From NODE’s secret command center hidden inside a trawler boat, you’ll be assigned missions taking you all over the world.
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (H3VR) is one of those silly, but surprisingly realistic PC VR shooters that kept on giving well after its release on Steam Early Access in 2016. Now, developer Rust Ltd announced a sequel is coming, and it’s a “full fledged” extraction shooter.
Revealed during the Creature Feature & Friends 2026 showcase, H3VR2 is coming to Quest 3 and 3S as well as PC VR headsets via Steam. Since the original is a PC VR-only game, this means Quest users will finally get a crack at operating the game’s highly realistic gun models when it releases—when, we still don’t know.
Alongside the announcement trailer, the studio says the upcoming VR extraction shooter will challenge you to “master an arsenal of the best guns in VR, fight your way through an endless procedurally generated megastructure, or just chill out and plink on the range.”
And like the original H3VR, you can of course expect hot dog-based enemies to battleagainst, as the game’s ‘Facility’ mode sees you take on missions, extract resources and gain loot for subsequent runs.
“Test those skills against other players in the competitive Combat mode, giving each player the same run as you fight across online leaderboards. Combined with daily challenges, runs and leaderboards you’ll find a ton of guns, gear, cosmetics and toys to unlock and collect as you go,” the studio says.
That means the sequel will not only include a tactical action roguelike, which comes with procedural-generation for endless runs, as well as guns, gear, cosmetics and toys to unlock and collect—but also all of the sandbox stuff on the side too.
We sat down with Rust founder and principal developer Anton Hand to learn a little more about the upcoming sequel, and why it’s now targeting Quest after years of Hand maintaining H3VR couldn’t run on the standalone platform.
Image courtesy Rust Ltd
To Hand, Quest 3 has finally crossed a critical threshold of processing power to make it possible. He tells Road to VR however it isn’t just raw processing power.
“Yes, Quest 3 is 100% an ‘over the power threshold to be truly interesting’ device. Granted, to make something as sophisticated as we have run on it, it’s still taken a significant, absolutely top class engineering team to make it happen,” Hand says.
There were also several major ‘ah ha’ moments along the way to developing the sequel for Quest 3, which Hand reveals has been in development over the past two and a half years.
“I basically heard from dev friends once [Quest 3] came out ‘yo you need to check this out, it’s easy more powerful than you think. I think the stuff you’re interested in making can (barely) run on this’.”
To boot, Hand says the studio is targeting 72 fps on Quest 3, which means the game won’t need to in constant space-warp to run.
Image courtesy Rust Ltd
Although there are “plenty of things about the Quest platform” he thinks could be radically improved, to Hand, it’s also about meeting users where they’re at: Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
“[I]t’s where the larger audience of customers are for sure, and shipping there for us is about targeting two modern devices that are for sale, as opposed to other contexts. In the end it’ll probably end up being the least stressful platform to ship on, even if the technical constraints of standalone make things properly challenging.”
Hand also revealed that Meta gave the studio “a significant amount of support” to build the H3VR2, which is notably “not a port. It’s not a ‘mini’ version of H3VR1 shushed down into standalone.”
As for H3VR1, which is still in early access, Hand says they’re still working on the 1.0 release, which is “all about making sure modding and user generated content using our custom tools is setup to have the community make cool stuff for H3 for as long as they love to,” Hand says.
The studio will also continue supporting the original game with bug fixes, maintenance related to platforms and new devices “for the foreseeable future,” noting there may be a “little holiday thing here and there,” Hand says.
There’s no specific release date yet for H3VR2, although you can wishlist it now on the Horizon Store for Quest 3 and 3S, and Steam for PC VR headsets.
It’s been a little over a year since Meta revealed its top 50 best-selling games of all time. Here’s the rankings as they stand today, and why they haven’t really changed that much.
Not a lot has changed in Quest’s top 50 best-selling games list, which is partially to be expected since Meta’s list ostensibly covers sales since the original Quest was initially released in 2019.
Note: If you want to skip the analysis, you’ll find the full list at the bottom of the article.
Some of those oldies (but goldies) have years of sales behind them, which makes it tough for newcomers to break through, especially since the list doesn’t reflect the money earned from DLC or in-game purchases, just initial sales. That means those high-earning free-to-play games aren’t represented.
Those oldies also make for great first-time experiences that newcomers can instantly latch onto. Granted, with Meta increasing Quest 3 and 3S prices by $50-$100 last month, that may not be such an important factor moving forward, as it’s bound to have some effect on Quest adoption.
Still, in comparison to this time last year, only three games have managed to crack the top 50: NightClub Simulator VR (2022), Green Hell VR (2022), and MotoX (2021)—none of which are technically even new. That’s right. Not a single game released in 2026 has broken the top 50 yet.
What is interesting though is those three high-action games just so happened to have bumped three decidedly more chill puzzle games off the list: Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs (2019),Moss (2019), and Please, Don’t Touch Anything (2019).
Although many games only traded places by a few spots up or down, there were some big movers too. Games with notable upward momentum included a handful of sims: delightful kitty cat sim I Am Cat (2024), seminal boxing sim Thrill of the Fight (2019), nightclub bouncer sim I Am Security (2024), and team-based shooter Pavlov Shack (2023).
There were also a few that dropped a fair bit too. Travel sim Wander (2019) and fruit-slicing Fruit Ninja (2019) both showed a downward trajectory.
As promised, here’s the list, which includes rankings as they are today and movement from last time we checked in last year.
Cyan Worlds announced it’s finally bringing remakes of the studio’s most iconic puzzle adventures, MYST (1993) and RIVEN (1997), to PS5 and PSVR 2 this month.
Like the remakes on PC, which were released in 2021 and 2024 respectively, Myst and Riven will support both flatscreen and VR gameplay at launch, which is coming May 19th.
As you’d imagine, both games are very much products of their time, as original puzzles are faithfully recreated alongside adapted visuals, which transforms the games’ original point-and-click still frames into fully explorable 3D environments.
They really are classics for a reason too. If you’ve never played either, you may be surprised to find out just how much of a head-scratcher a majority of puzzles are, often requiring pen and paper so you can keep track of everything.
In case you’ve never actually heard of either game: Myst is a first-person puzzle adventure where you explore a mysterious island by solving intricate, logic-based challenges with almost no hand-holding, piecing together the story through environmental clues and journals.
Its sequel, Riven, builds on that formula with a more complex, interconnected world and deeper narrative, which you might find demands even more careful observation and deduction as you uncover the secrets of a fractured, surreal civilization.
If augmented reality glasses are the future, AR contact lenses are probably a bit farther away. Still, smart contact lens startup XPANCEO says it’s hoping to address at least one of the technology’s main issues with the inclusion of miniature solid-state batteries.
In partnership with France-based solid-state battery startup ITEN, XPANCEO announced it’s developing a proof of concept AR contact lens with a built-in microbattery—something the companies hope will solve a main challenge in ocular wearables right now: conventional batteries are thick, not durable enough, and aren’t suitable to be used in in devices worn directly on the human eye.
XPANCEO has been developing smart contact lenses with AR and health monitoring capabilities since its founding in 2021. Along the way, the UAE-based unicorn has been attempting to address the sort of strict design constraints inherent to XR contact lenses, such as thickness, mass, heat generation, and material selection, with biocompatibility and user safety.
When it comes to powering smart contacts, the company says that a number of tasks can be powered by simply harvesting energy from the user’s body, like the mechanical energy from blinking, thermal differences across the lens, electrochemical reactions with tear fluid, and integrated solar cells.
Prototype Microbattery for smart contacts | Image courtesy XPANCEO,
High-energy functions, like displaying AR imagery, require sustained “milliwatt-level power,” the company says, making high-density energy storage a must for future AR contacts. And at least one part of that challenge could be overcome with solid-state batteries, the companies maintain, which unlike lithium-ion cells, cannot leak, swell, or explode.
“If a failure occurs, the system simply stops supplying power. ITEN solutions can be engineered in ultra-thin, flexible formats compatible with soft contact-lens substrates, while still providing high enough power density for the short bursts of energy required by AR displays and wireless connectivity, without rapid degradation,” XPANCEO says.
Although promising, and potentially safer and more energy-dense than current battery tech, solid-state batteries are also expensive, hard to manufacture at scale, and not yet widely available despite active development by companies like Toyota and QuantumScape.
ITEN isn’t producing the sort of solid-state batteries you might find in future electric vehicles or home energy storage though; the Dardilly, France-based startup specializes in nanomaterial fabrication to produce fully ceramic electrodes with a patented “mesoporous structure”—essentially allowing small batteries to deliver higher power and charge and discharge more efficiently.
Since May 2025, ITEN has been mass-producing its first-gen solid-state ceramic microbatteries, which will find its way into XPANCEO’s in-development smart contacts.
“The ITEN–XPANCEO proof of concept demonstrates that high-power-density energy storage can now be manufactured in volume production and safely integrated into a contact lens, marking a crucial milestone in making smart contact lenses commercially viable,” XPANCEO says.
“By combining ITEN’s solid-state energy storage technology with cutting-edge smart lens innovation, the ITEN partnership with XPANCEO opens a new frontier in compact, high-power energy solutions,” adds Vincent Cobée, CEO of ITEN. “Together, we are enabling a new generation of intelligent and highly integrated systems that demand both performance and reliability—delivering power where space is limited and expectations are high, with the added assurance of full safety enabled by inherently stable, non-flammable product architecture.”
This follows XPANCEO’s latest (and largest) funding round to date, a Series A round last July which brought to the company $250 million in addition to giving it a $1.35 billion valuation.
Survios, one of VR’s most senior game studios and developer behind Alien: Rogue Incursion (2024), is reportedly shutting down, as a majority of staff have been laid off.
While Survios hasn’t publicly announced the shutdown at the time of this writing, the reduction in headcount appears to be drastic enough to all but confirm that the VR veteran studio is closing up shop.
Dylan Ralston, previously a Combat Designer at Survios, says in a LinkedIn post on Saturday the studio is “essentially shuttered, with all of the team members responsible for development being let go, including myself.”
Tim Schumann, Senior Technical Sound Designer at Survios, also maintains the studio is shutting down.
Survios released over a dozen games since its founding in 2013, which started with breakout co-cop combat game Raw Data (2016), notably one of the first VR games to pass $1 million in revenue.
As a pioneer of the space, Survios explored a variety of genres, some of which were based on its own IP, including foot racing game Sprint Vector (2018), immersive song-making game Electronauts (2018), and ship-based battle arena Battlewake (2019).
The studio also released a number of VR games based on popular franchises and IPs, including boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory (2018), narrative-driven adventure Westworld Awakening (2019), zombie shooter The Walking Dead: Onslaught (2020), puzzle game Puzzle Bobble VR: Vacation Odyssey (2021), an upgraded re-release with Creed: Rise to Glory – Championship Edition (2023), and Alien franchise shooter Alien: Rogue Incursion (2024).
In late 2024, Survios announced the sequel to Alien: Rogue Incursionwas already in development, which was slated to resolve the game’s cliffhanger while offering up what the studio called “deadlier enemies and more difficult challenges.”
Shortly after the game’s release on Quest 3 in early 2025, Survios paused work on the sequel to release a flatscreen version of the game, which saw a measure of success across console and PC. Worryingly enough, the studio hasn’t publicly spoke about the game’s sequel, even after launch of the flatscreen adaptation.
This follows a broader industry trend of studio shutdowns and mass layoffs, the largest of which was Meta’s revelation earlier this year it was shutting down a number of internal VR studios amid a wider shift in its Reality Labs XR division to instead focus on AI and smart glasses.
More recently, social VR platform Rec Room, once valued at $3.5 billion, announced it will be shutting down in June. Additionally, Meta says its own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, will be focusing “almost exclusively” on mobile in the future as Quest players will no longer have access to future content.
