PiEEG, a Scotland-based brain-computer interface (BCI) startup, announced it’s launching a facial interface for Quest headsets that aims to turn your brain signals and facial micro-expressions into real-time avatar control.
PiEEG has specialized in BCI since it was founded by Dr. Ildar Rakhmatulin in 2022, specifically to provide low-cost solutions for researchers, developers and hobbyists. Now the company says it’s getting ready to launch a Kickstarter soon for its PiEEG XR, a neural facial interface for Quest.
The device, which includes built-in electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, is of course targeting developers and researchers hoping to integrate EEG data into XR applications, although it’s also slated to arrive with native VRChat integration, letting users “control [avatars] directly from your brain and facial expressions,” the company says.
Notably, EEG sensors measure electrical activity generated by the brain. However, consumer EEG systems generally don’t “decode” specific thoughts. Instead, they can detect broad signals associated with states such as attention, relaxation, or cognitive workload, which can then be mapped to software actions.
That said, the company maintains its sensor-studded facial interface for Quest will enable more expressive avatars and additional hands-free input methods, which can be translated into various effects, modifying environments, or altering avatar animations based on attention-related signals using its ‘Focus-to-Action’ API.
And like its other BCI hardware, the company says PiEEG XR is set to be fully open-source, providing access to software tools and raw data streams for developers, educators, and researchers.
“Whether you are a developer looking to build ‘thought-controlled’ horror games, or a researcher studying emotional responses in VR, the VR-Link provides the raw data and tools you need to innovate,” PiEEG says.
The EEG facial interface itself is powered by the company’s IronBCI platform, which includes 24-bit resolution, 250 samples per second acquisition rate, Bluetooth Low Energy 5 (BLE 5) connectivity, and low-noise signal acquisition.
We’re hoping to learn more soon about pricing tiers and more use cases when the campaign goes live, which is expected soon. In the meantime, you can check out the Kickstarter here and sign up for launch notifications. You can also see a short demo of PiEEG XR below, showing an avatar animated via EEG signals.
Lightstorm Vision, James Cameron’s 3D production studio, has acquired STEREOTEC, a 3D camera maker that’s powered a number of films and multi-camera immersive concerts.
Details of the deal are still under wraps, however Lightstorm Vision says the acquisition will help integrate Stereotec’s technology directly into its 3D production pipeline, enabling capture, processing, and delivery of 3D video.
“By capturing consistent ‘ground truth’ depth data at the source, the technology unlocks downstream automation, AI processing, and the scalable 3D workflows that Lightstorm Vision is bringing to cinematic, broadcast, and immersive platforms,” the companies say in a press statement.
Stereotec is most recently known for providing the camera tech behind 3D concert ‘Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour’, which Lightstorm says was one the “largest and most complex live 3D capture deployments ever executed,” having included more than 17 stereo camera systems (34 cameras) across fiber and RF into a unified pipeline under live tour conditions.
That sort of tight integration allowed editorial teams to begin cutting synchronized 3D multi-cam footage while the performance was still underway, the studio says, something aimed at reducing reliance on post-production reconstruction and lengthy editing times.
“Capturing accurate depth at the source produces results no downstream process can recover after the fact—and provides the foundation for the scalable, production-ready 3D workflows Lightstorm Vision is establishing as the new standard across cinematic, broadcast, and immersive platforms,” the studio says.
Established in 2024 as Lightstorm Entertainment’s dedicated 3D studio, Lightstorm Vision’s stereoscopic tech has supported over 27 feature films, 9 concert films, and 140 sports broadcasts worldwide, generating in excess of $8 billion in global box office. It also most recently struck a multi-year deal with Meta to produce spatial content across multiple genres, including live events and full-length entertainment.
Founded near Munich by stereographer and engineer Dr. Florian Maier in 1997, Stereotec produces precision-engineered 3D rigs, having supported feature films including Ang Lee’s Gemini Man (2019) and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024), as well as immersive titles for Quest and Apple Vision Pro. To date, the company holds twelve Lumiere Awards from the Advanced Imaging Society for excellence in stereoscopic 3D production.
Spatial, the parent company to Animal Company studio Wooster Games, announced it’s closing down its own Spatial Creator platform, ending free and pro subscription tiers and discontinuing 3D world hosting next month—effectively ending the platform’s metaverse ambitions.
Spatial, which released its app at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, confirmed that Enterprise users won’t be affected, as the platform will remain operational and continue receiving support under existing agreements. Its Creator metaverse program however, which included both free and paid tiers targeted at individual users and small businesses, is getting the boot.
The company outlined the decision in a blog post, noting that it follows years of rising infrastructure costs associated with hosting and scaling its multiuser 3D worlds.
According to CEO Jinha Lee, Spatial explored alternatives including new pricing models, tiered hosting plans, and partnerships, but concluded that maintaining the platform would require “passing rising costs directly to you at levels that are not sustainable for independent developers and small studios.”
Courtesy Spatial
“We were not able to find a model that kept the Creator platform viable without compromising the experience you and your communities deserve,” Lee says.
Spatial says Creator-tier users will lose full access to the platform on July 27th, which will include the permanent deletion of and all creator-hosted files. Users will be allowed to export work before that date, as the company has already sent out download links for uploaded assets via email. The company is also refunding subscriptions for web users, while customers who subscribed through app stores must cancel manually.
The closure of its Creator program marks the end of Spatial’s nine-year effort to build an open platform for immersive social experiences, which notably supported a host of devices, including Quest and PC VR headsets, and mobile and flatscreen monitors.
This follows a number of other social XR platform closures, notably Rec Room, which closed on June 1st, and Meta’s own Horizon Worlds, which has pivoted to mostly focus on mobile users moving forward.
Spatial says the company is now putting more focus on its in-house game studio, Wooster Games, known for break-out free-to-play VR hit Animal Company, in addition to developing more original titles. At the time of this writing, Animal Company is the third best-selling game on Quest, featuring over 200,000 reviews at a [4.8/5] user rating.
According to an internal memo viewed by The Information, Meta is aiming to release up to four more smart glasses models this year. Meanwhile, the company is reportedly developing an AI pendant, with testing slated to start next year.
The memo, which thus far hasn’t been confirmed by Meta, was reportedly authored by Meta Wearable VP Alex Himel. In it, Himel details on some of the projects currently in the works at the company’s Reality Labs XR hardware division.
Amid expectations to sell 10 million wearables in the second half of 2026, Himel reportedly revealed the company is developing an AI-powered pendant set to go into testing next year, which is described similar to tech from Limitless, a startup Meta acquired in 2025 that built devices for recording, transcribing, and summarizing conversations.
Current lineup of Meta smart glasses | Image courtesy Meta
As per The Information’s report, the company also hopes to expand its AI glasses lineup beyond its current Ray-Ban Oakley models, which is said to include more brands, styles, and variants. Notably, Meta signed an agreement in 2024 with smart glasses partner EssilorLuxottica to extend their partnership to 2030.
Specifics are still under wraps, however the report maintains that Meta will debut at least four new pairs of smart glasses: ‘Modelo’ as soon as June, and ‘Luna’ and ‘RBM2 Refresh’ sometime this Fall, the latter of which suggesting a new Ray-Ban hardware refresh. In December, the company is also expected to release ‘Mojito VIP’. Meta is also reportedly testing models codenamed ‘Artemis’ and ‘SSG’ (“supersensing” glasses).
Like previous Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta glasses, the upcoming units are slated to include Meta’s AI models, however Himel’s memo also mentions bringing an AI agent called ‘Hatch’ to the company’s glasses.
Meanwhile, Meta is additionally aiming to launch a business-focused subscription called ‘Wearables for Work’, which could better position the company to generate recurring revenue instead of relying on one-off device purchases.
While Meta ostensibly hopes to sell 10 million wearables in the second half of 2026, it could exceed that figure if demand is strong. According to a Bloomberg report earlier this year, Meta and EssilorLuxottica have doubled the expected smart glasses production target, which would increase annual capacity to 20 million units by the end of 2026, with additional capacity capable of scaling to 30 million units.
Acer unveiled two new XR glasses, marking nearly a seven-year absence from the XR space.
The last we saw the ‘Acer’ brand emblazoned on an XR headset was its final Windows PC VR headset released in 2019, the OJO 500, which was mostly targeted at businesses. Since then, the company has been conspicuously absent from the XR space, seemingly investing more in its glasses-free 3D displays, laptops, and cameras, which it sells under the SpatialLabs brand.
Now the Taiwanese tech giant is stepping back in with two devices: tethered AR glasses, called the ‘AR Vision GR0’, and Meta-style smart glasses, called ‘GI0 AI Glasses’.
Acer AR Vision GR0
Image courtesy Acer
Acer AR Vision GR0 glasses tether via cable to iOS and Android smartphones and Windows PCs, serving up dual 1,920 × 1,080 microOLED displays with what appears to be bird bath-style optics similar to those used by competitors, including XREAL and VITURE glasses.
While Acer hasn’t released any actual field-of-view specs, the company says it delivers a “172-inch screen viewed from 6 meters away.” As you’d expect, Acer is targeting gaming and productivity, as well as privacy for work-related stuff in public spaces.
Acer AR Vision GR0 is coming soon to North America starting at $500 USD. It’s also set to arrive in EMEA in Q4 2026 for €600, and in Australia in Q3 2026 for $1,000 AUD.
Check out the specs below:
Name
Acer AR Vision GR0
Model
GR100F
OS Compatibility
Android, iOS, Windows
Display
dual microOLED, 200 nits, 1,920 x 1,080 per-eye resolution, 60 Hz refresh rate, DCI-P3 95% color gamut, 24-bit color, 50,000:1 contrast ratio
Audio
Stereo, one dynamic unit on each side
Power Charge
5.5 V 0.85 A
Connectivity
Wired
Controls
Swipe brightness, swipe volume
Dimensions and Weight
IPD: 64 mm, 69 g
Sensors
3DoF, accelerometers, proximity, magnetometers
Features
Detachable light shield, myopia magnetic lens option
Acer GI0 AI Glasses
Image courtesy Acer
It’s not clear whether Acer’s GI0 AI Glasses run Android XR, however the company does say they rely on Google Gemini for AI queries, which also means voice-activated interaction, real-time image analysis, and translation.
Much like Ray-Ban Meta, G10 AI Glasses include a built-in 12MP camera delivering 3,024 x 4,032 still images and 1,920 x 1,080 video at 30 FPS, which is admittedly a bit below Ray-Ban Meta’s (Gen 2) 3K, 30 FPS video capture. Notably, users will also need the Acer AspireSync companion app on a paired device—either Android or iOS—which connects via Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 5.
Acer GI0 is coming to North America soon starting at $300 USD. It’s also coming to EMEA in Q4 2026 for €400, and to Australia in Q3 2026 for $600 AUD.
Check out the specs below:
Name
Acer GI0
Model
GI100
AI Model
Google Gemini
OS Compatibility
Android 12 and above, iOS 15 and above
Companion App
Acer AspireSync
Camera
12M – Image: 3,024 x 4,032; Video:1,920 x 1,080 at 30 FPS
Audio
Stereo, one dynamic unit on each side, three microphones
Storage
32 GB eMMC
Battery
217 mAh
Power Charge
5V 1A
Connectivity
Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0 support
Controls
Capture button with short press and long press
Dimensions and Weight
46 g (frames only)
Features
Google Gemini AI voice assistant, status LED, side touchpad, AI translations, AI captions
Julian Reyes is an award-winning XR producer, with more than two decades of experience spanning immersive media, storytelling, music culture, and technology. He is the Founder and Director of the Virtual Worlds Museum, where he leads efforts to preserve, explore, and showcase the history, culture, and future of virtual worlds. This June, he’ll speak at the AWE USA 2026 panel discussion, “How We Can Preserve Online Worlds and Why It Matters”.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes when a virtual world sunsets.
It is easy for some to frame these closures as the disappearance of a product, a platform, or a failed business model. But those of us who have spent time inside virtual worlds know better. When a world goes dark, we do not simply lose connectivity. We lose places. We lose rituals, relationships, events, art, architecture, memory, and the transcendent sense of belonging that only emerges when a community spends enough time together to turn a platform into a home.
That is why the recent announcements from across the immersive landscape have struck so deeply:
Rec Room will shut down on June 1, 2026 at noon PT, sunsetting a platform that has connected more than 150 million players and creators.
Spatial will sunset its Spatial Creator Platform’s Free and Pro tiers on July 27, 2026, citing the growing cost of hosting open multiplayer 3D worlds.
Occupy White Walls and Nowhere, which also enjoyed some buzz a few years ago, have already sunsetted.
In Meta’s ecosystem, the uncertainty surrounding Horizon Worldshas become a symbol of a broader instability facing immersive communities. Even when the future of a platform is not fully settled, mixed signals and shifting priorities can leave world builders and residents unsure whether the spaces they have invested in will remain available to them. The problem is made worse by incessant tech news coverage which confuses Meta’s Horizon Worlds (one platform) with the metaverse, a concept that’s been instantiated across many platforms.
Taken together, these cases point to a deeper problem:
Virtual worlds can hold years of social, creative, and cultural life, yet too often they are still treated as temporary products rather than places worthy of stewardship. For the people who gather inside them, these are not disposable apps. They are lived environments.
This is not abstract to me. It is personal, and it is historical.
I have lasting memories of hosting events with Celeste Lear in BRCvr, now BurnerSphere, and AUREA Award after-parties in AltspaceVR. Thankfully, I recorded some of those events, but countless unrecorded hours of community life on the platform are now gone except for what its residents remember.
Three years ago, however, the communities and world builders of AltspaceVR were abruptly displaced when Microsoftshut the platform down on March 10, 2023. In its earlier years (around 2017), the platform saw roughly 35,000 monthly participants.
Yet the story did not end with the shutdown. A committed community carried its spirit forward into VRChat, which achieved a new all-time high of nearly 158,000 concurrent players earlier this month. Former Altspacers recreated familiar spaces in VRChat, continuing to gather, and recently hosting commemorative events marking three years since the loss of AltspaceVR while celebrating the builders, friendships, and cultural life that survived its closure.
That experience taught a lesson that our industry still needs to take seriously: platforms may close, but communities fight to endure. The question is whether the broader ecosystem will give them a meaningful path to do so.
It’s Not Just About Losing 3D Spaces: Itemizing What Disappears When Virtual Worlds Sunset
So what does the loss of a virtual world actually mean? It means the loss of digital culture in living form.
A virtual world is not merely code on a server. It is a social fabric woven from thousands or millions of moments: a first concert, a memorial gathering, a classroom experiment, a dance floor, a comedy club, a holiday celebration, a support group, a business, a community ritual, a world someone spent months or years building by hand. When that world disappears, all of those moments become harder to access, harder to document, and harder to pass on.
The losses happen on multiple levels at once:
We lose cultural expression: performances, architecture, customs, and shared practices.
We lose social continuity: communities, friendships, recurring events, and other forms of belonging.
We lose historical context: the record of how people lived, created, experimented, and connected inside these digital spaces.
A screenshot may survive. An exported asset may survive. But the social meaning that gave those artifacts life often does not survive intact.
Sometimes the world itself vanishes. Other times the deeper loss is less visible but just as profound. A community may migrate elsewhere, but the original atmosphere, affordances, etiquette, and cultural norms do not transfer perfectly. Migration preserves people, but it does not always preserve place.
For an apt real world analogy, imagine if the annual Burning Man festival unexpectedly closed down. It wouldn’t just be the end of the festival itself, but the end of hundreds of camps (worlds) and thousands of Burners coming together every year.
That is why sunsetting hurts so much. It reminds us that virtual worlds are not trivial entertainment, and they are not culturally neutral infrastructure. They are part of our shared digital record. As more education, performance, identity, collaboration, and community life move into immersive spaces, the loss of a virtual world is no longer a niche concern. It is part of the larger challenge of preserving digital civilization.
And yet, alongside the grief, we also see something else: resilience.
When Virtual Worlds Sunset, Their Communities Create Solutions
Again and again, communities try to emigrate to other worlds together; sometimes companies help assist with that exodus:
VRChat recently invited displaced users from Rec Room and Horizon Worlds to come over, offering not just a new platform, but a social refuge. After the virtual world There shut down (despite having one million registered users at its end in 2010) Second Life creator Linden Lab created a ‘Therian’ avatar name, giving former There users a recognizable identity marker so they could find one another again.
Former AltspaceVR users organized themselves, formed their own VRChat groups, and rebuilt worlds inspired by the spaces they had lost. They even held a week-long memorial in VRChat to commemorate the three-year anniversary of AltSpaceVR’s shutdown. These acts may not fully restore a vanished platform, but they show that continuity is possible when communities are given tools, welcome, and recognition.
In some cases, communities go even further. They attempt to reverse engineer the worlds they loved in order to preserve or revive them. We have seen this spirit in communities surrounding Club Penguin, There, and now, there’s groups of users working to do this with Rec Room.
These efforts arise from a profound truth: when people feel that a world mattered, they do not simply let it disappear. They rebuild it, emulate it, archive it, and carry it forward however they can.
That should be a signal to the industry. The demand for preservation is already here. The need for transition pathways is already here. The desire for continuity, interoperability, and cultural memory is already here. What has often been missing is not community will, but institutional support.
How Companies & Communities Can Create Better Solutions for Future Worlds
We need to do better at planning for the full lifecycle of virtual worlds. That means creating stronger migration paths for users and creators. It means building export options, archiving systems, and community handoff processes before a shutdown occurs. It means treating virtual worlds as places with social and historical value, not just as services that can be switched off without consequence.
Here are some specific practical suggestions for companies to consider—and for communities to consider demanding from the virtual world platforms they’re supporting:
Enable integration with Discord and other third party social platforms: Giving virtual world communities easy means to communicate with each other outside the immersive space is crucial for growing virtual world usage, enabling people to remain lightly engaged while away from their main device. It’s also a great way of helping ensure that these communities can persist even if a particular world is sunsetted. (As a promising example,VRChat recently enabled deep integration with Discord.)
Favor architectures that are open, portable, and independently hostable: Examples include self-hosted platforms like OpenSimulator and Overte, browser-based systems like Mozilla Hubs and Custom WebXR, and open engines like Godot. These approaches do not eliminate fragility, but they reduce dependence on a single corporate owner and improve the chances that worlds, objects, and communities can persist, migrate, or be reconstructed.
Explore Gaussian Splats and other export technology: While Unity-based virtual worlds enable some offline/backup capabilities, we need solutions which work across the many 3D engines on the market. We are seeing some promise with Gaussian Splat-based recreations of virtual world spaces. As an example, my team created this experimental Gaussian render of the Horizon Worlds central hub on Marble, the new platform from WorldLabs.
My own organization, the Virtual Worlds Museum, was founded to help encourage virtual worlds preservation through documentation, exhibits, and community storytelling. Our Sunset Exhibit preserves the memory of worlds that have disappeared, and our Teleportal helps visitors discover virtual worlds across the ecosystem. To better rally the virtual world community before Rec Room’s demise, we recently launched this crowdfunder to support these efforts.
But preservation alone is not enough. If the immersive industry wants to mature, it must begin treating virtual worlds not as disposable experiments, but as cultural spaces with legacies, responsibilities, and communities worth protecting. Because when a virtual world sunsets, what we lose is not only a platform. We lose a piece of human history written in digital space.
And if we choose to preserve that history, honor those communities, and build better paths forward, their light can still guide the future of virtual worlds.
Believe it or not, Beat Saber is turning eight years old, so to celebrate Meta has tossed out three new free tech-dance bass tracks.
The update, which is already live on Quest and SteamVR headsets, includes three songs: ‘Phantom Fangs’, an original in-house track from Zakka G, ‘KILLSHOT’ from Boom Kitty x MDK’s, and Astral Blossom from Skybreak & Daeya.
Notably, Zakka G is the block-slashing rhythm game’s official Level Designer, having joined the studio in 2020. While Zakka G has helped a number of artists bring their music to Beat Saber, Phantom Fangs is his first credited track on the game, which you can hear featured below:
The three new anniversary tracks are free to players on Quest and SteamVR headsets, and arrive automatically as standard game updates, which you’ll find over on the ‘Extras’ section. Sadly, PSVR 2 players won’t see the update since all new content has stopped since June 2025 on PSVR and PSVR 2.
This follows a pretty steady drop of content this year, including Bad Bunny’s ‘Me Porto Bonito’ Shock Drop in February, Twenty One Pilots’ ‘Stressed Out’ Shock Drop in March 2026, and The Prodigy Music Pack in April, which included six tracks: Breathe, Firestarter, Invaders Must Die, Omen, Poison, and Spitfire.
And it’s not stopping there. Meta says they have “plenty of great new songs and music packs in store for our ninth year,” so we’ll be keeping an eye out for more Shock Drops and Music Packs on the horizon.
That said, it’s no wonder Meta is keeping the content flowing to Beat Saber, as it’s been the number one top-selling game on Quest for multiple years in a row, sitting on top of Job Simulator, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, SUPERHOT VR, and Virtual Desktop.
