Sony today announced it’s starting the clock on the production of physical discs, as the company is set to adopt a full digital marketplace at the start of 2028.
All new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028, Sony revealed in a blog post, putting an end to an over three decade-long tradition starting with the 1994 release of the original PlayStation.
Sony notes that while you’ll still be able to buy games at third-party retailers, these will be offered in digital formats only. It also won’t affect games scheduled to release in physical formats prior to the January 2028 cutoff, the company says.
“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Sony maintains. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
Although PSVR 2 has been essentially neglected by Sony shortly after its 2023 launch, the headset still gets a steady stream of both digital and physical disc releases, with the most recent of which being I, Robot, which released by Strictly Limited Games in April 2026.
Notably, producers like Strictly Limited Games, Limited Run Games, and Perp Games released many of the physical editions for PSVR 2, making for around 72 games released in total according to a Reddit thread dedicated to tracking physical releases. This comes in contrast to PS5’s over 1,000 physical discs released since its initial release in 2020.
This follows Rockstar Games’ decision to forgo a physical disc release for the highly-anticipated GTA VI, which is set to arrive this November on the PlayStation Store and in stores as an empty ‘collectors edition’ disc case with supplied digital download code.
Another Axiom announced Gorilla Tag, Quest’s most popular game, is coming to mobile devices in a standalone game, titled Gorilla Tag: Monke Mayhem.
The free-to-play sandbox game is slated to land on iOS and Android devices sometime next year, with other platforms planned to be announced at a later date. As it is, it seems the studio is keeping the original version exclusive to VR headsets.
Another Axiom says it’s still in deep development of the mobile title, although broad testing is expected to come in the near future. In the meantime, the studio showed off a work-in-progress version at GorillaCon 2026, which took place during VidCon last week.
For now, the studio says instances will support up to 50 players, although in the past the company has experimented with server architectures that have allowed them to support up to 75 players in its sci-fi sports follow-up Orion Drift.
As one of the most-downloaded Quest games several years in a row since its 2021 early access release, the arm-swinging game of monkey tag has a very good chance of appealing to its core audience—essentially teens and pre-teens—and more importantly taking the game’s revenue to new heights.
Granted, the mobile version will lose Gorilla Tag’s infectious locomotion method, as users instead rely on on-screen UI, although it’s clear word of mouth has gotten around the playground. Another Axiom hasn’t shared any recent figures since it first announced the game had topped $100 million revenue in mid-2024, which the studio said included around 3 million monthly active users.
Notably, this follows a recent trend of VR developers looking towards flatscreen users to boost engagement, with notable VR-to-flatscreen offerings including Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine, Polyarc Games Moss, and Meta’s own social VR platform Horizon Worlds focusing on mobile moving forward.
Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) startup Neuralink announced the company has successfully performed its first transdural brain implant surgery, which promises to increase scalability while significantly reducing surgical trauma.
The News
In a new video (seen below), Neuralink reveals it has implanted electrode threads through the dura—the brain’s thick, leather-like membrane that sits just below the skull—without cutting or removing it like in the company’s previous human clinical trials.
The procedure was carried out in May 2026 during a clinical trial at University Health Network’s Toronto Western Hospital, which is intended to make implantation safer, less invasive, and faster, the company says.
To do this, Neuralink redesigned its insertion needle to better penetrate the dura, which can be over 10 times thicker than the company’s electrode threads, which are thinner than a human hair. The key issue though is the brain beneath is constantly moving, and the dura obscures a dangerous network of blood vessels that need to be avoided.
Neuralink also developed synthetic dura models for extensive testing, allowing researchers to test new imaging systems to better view the brain below the dura.
As seen in the video, Neuralink’s new technique uses indocyanine green (ICG) video angiography, an imaging technique that uses a fluorescent dye to visualize blood flow in real-time, and optical coherence tomography (OCT), which can precisely measure the distance to the brain’s surface as it throbs and moves beneath the dura.
Neuralink says eliminating the step of removing the dura simplifies the procedure and is an important step toward more automated, scalable brain implant surgeries.
“We like to say ‘the best step is no step’ and deleting the durectomy takes one of the most delicate manual steps out of the procedure,” the company says. “This potentially means a safer, more repeatable surgery, and a real path to scaling Neuralink to the many people who could benefit.”
The result: the participant was controlling a cursor with their thoughts within an hour of surgery, and recovery is progressing as expected, the company says.
My Take
Neuralink’s latest breakthrough comes in stark contrast to Meta’s recent Brain2Qwerty v2 research. In short, Meta thinks implants are difficult to scale, which is why they’re investigating the limits of what non-invasive imaging methods can achieve when combined with AI-assisted signal decoding.
For now, both Meta and Neuralink are currently hoping to help people with neurological injuries, which impair speech or movement to some extent, although I can’t help but wonder at how both companies are really talking about scaling. At this stage, they’re most definitely talking about scaling to other similarly affected people, although the real target seems fairly implicit : BCI will eventually be a consumer product, and companies need to do the heavy research now to reserve a spot at the table.
Granted, it’s still very early days. Invasive methods, like those used by Neuralink, provide a much higher signal-to-noise ratio when recording and decoding action potentials, although they still require a surgeon to saw out a quart-sized hole in your skull and put needles in your brain. For consumers at least, it’s the sort of elective surgery that will need to approach LASIK levels of safety and precision before it comes anywhere near a ‘neurotypical’ brain. Actually, probably even more than LASIK, as it would need to be sufficiently reversible and potentially upgradable too.
On the flipside, non-invasive methods like Brain2Qwert v2 make use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging equipment strapped to your head, and rely more heavily on AI to decode signals from the respectively higher noise, since it has to infer action potentials from outside the skull. Meta says it can obtain better results than the more common electroencephalography (EEG) methods of imaging, although current MEG devices need to be used in a magnetically-shielded room to work.
I will continue to be impressed with the technical progress on both ends of the BCI spectrum, although I think it’s safe to say most people won’t have to worry about renting a piece of their brains to trillion-dollar market cap company for a little while longer.
Cave Crave(2025) developer 3R Games is bringing Thailand’s Tham Luang cave system to VR, the very same that gained global recognition in 2018 after a local junior football team became trapped inside due to sudden flooding.
The new addition is slated to arrive sometime next month following the 2025 release of the game’s Nutty Putty Cave update, promising to bring another real underground environment as a part of the studio’s expanding ‘Real Caves in VR’ initiative.
Having prompted a large international rescue effort in 2018, which tragically ended the lives of two cave divers attempting to rescue the 12 boys and their coach, the VR recreation of the Tham Luang system is focusing on the cave’s real structure and conditions rather than reinterpreting the event.
“Our goal remains the same,” said 3R Games CEO Piotr Surmacz, “we want to let players experience the scale, atmosphere, and complexity of iconic underground spaces from the inside.”
Surmacz says the team is “working to make the experience as authentic as possible,” while avoiding turning real events into traditional game mechanics; the Tham Luang update will arrive in Cave Crave’s ‘Tourist Mode’, which is designed for exploration rather than objectives or scoring.
The studio says it worked with specialists, including cave diver Vern Unsworth and 3D scanning expert Roo Walters, to bring the project to life, noting that the actual cave was captured using LiDAR-based scanning to capture geometry and spatial detail—something the team says will help preserve the cave’s “vastness, darkness, and unique underground character.”
The update will also offer the chance for players to swim in the game for the first time, as it will feature flooded corridors where limited visibility and restricted oxygen will create a “tense and challenging experience,” the studio says.
Meta has announced the next version of its AI system for non-invasively decoding brain activity into text. Called Brain2Qwerty v2, the company hopes its latest method will help people with neurological injuries or diseases that impair speech.
Meta’s latest brain-computer interface (BCI) builds off last year’s Brain2Qwerty v1, which initially showed that non-invasive brain recordings could be decoded into text with surprisingly high character-level accuracy. It used both electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG)—two non-invasive methods that measure the magnetic and electric fields elicited by neuronal activity—although it was only capable of decoding individual characters.
Now, the company has shown off its v2 model, which is said to improve nearly every aspect of the system by using an end-to-end architecture, large language models (LLMs), real-time decoding, and vastly improved pattern recognition.
According to the paper, Brain2Qwerty v2 was trained on approximately 22,000 sentences from nine volunteer participants, each of which were recorded for 10 hours wearing an MEG device while actively typing.
Meta says that instead of relying on hand-crafted pipelines to detect neural events, they used end-to-end deep learning to decode directly from raw brain signals—essentially meaning they could not only decode single letters like in v1, but also full words and sentences.
MEG user input via Brain2Qwerty v1 | Courtesy Meta
While v2 represents a pretty significant leap forward, it hasn’t approached 100 percent accuracy yet:
“Brain2Qwerty v2 recovers sentences coherently from noisy neural inputs, achieving a word accuracy rate of 61%, significantly improving upon the 8% word accuracy from other non-invasive methods,” Meta says.
Meta says its most performant participant achieved a 78% word accuracy, where “more than half of all sentences are decoded with one word error or less,” the company says.
“We also find that decoding accuracy improves log-linearly with data volume, suggesting that the remaining performance gap with surgical approaches could be further narrowed through data scaling alone.”
The project’s long-term goal is to develop communication technologies for people with neurological injuries or diseases that impair speech, notably without requiring invasive surgery, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink BCI startup, which expanded human clinical trials earlier this year.
Researchers highlight in Nature that while invasive methods are more efficient at thought-to-text, they expose patients to “nonnegligible risks of brain hemorrhage and infection.” Very real challenges in maintaining cortical implant function over extended time periods is also a risk, making invasive methods less scalable overall.
That said, there’s still a long way to go before we see anything approaching consumer-grade MEG devices. Many of the classical MEG devices of today are still very much “helmet in a hospital room” levels of massive, although there are smaller devices now that can operate at room temperatures, like Cerca’s optically-pumped magnetometers (OPMs).
The key limiter holding MEG back though for eventual consumer adoption is background magnetic interference, which requires even these much smaller systems to work in a magnetically-shielded environment; the magnetic fields generated by the brain are much weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field and the host of everyday tech like smartphones, Wi-Fi, and power lines which are all millions of times stronger.
Whatever the case, it’s heartening to see that patients who can’t qualify for invasive BCI could get a significant boost in quality of life someday, hopefully soon.
It’s heat wave season again, which means Meta is throwing out some pretty sweet deals on some of the best Quest games out there.
From now until July 5th, you’ll be able to grab some of our favorite VR titles in Meta’s Peak Summer Sale, including hits like The Climb 2, Synth Riders, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Arizona Sunshine II, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, and a heck of a lot more.
You’ll find links and prices for all of those and more below, alongside a list of games you might want to check out too. As always, you can find the whole stack of discounted Quest titles over on the Peak Summer Sale page.
Apple’s top executive in charge of Vision Pro and smart glasses is reportedly leaving the company to join OpenAI.
According to a Bloomberg report, longtime Apple hardware exec Paul Meade is leaving Apple for OpenAI’s hardware team, which according to people with knowledge of his departure will include work on OpenAI’s upcoming AI-powered devices.
In Meade’s 15-year tenure, he oversaw iPad, program management for the iPhone, and then eventually Vision Pro via its Vision Products Group, which he joined in 2017 and later took over as hardware engineering lead in 2019.
While the product group is principally responsible for the launch of Vision Pro, Bloomberg maintains Meade was also behind the development of Apple’s rumored audio-only smart glasses, which would be similar in function to Ray-Ban Meta and Google’s upcoming fleet of Android XR-running smart glasses, slated to release this year from partners Samsung, Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, and Gucci parent company Kering.
Meta Glasses | Courtesy Meta
Additionally, Meade reportedly led development on other AI-related wearables, which includes the company’s ongoing AR glasses efforts—expected to materialize sometime before 2030.
Fletcher Rothkopf, Meade’s deputy in charge of product design function for Vision Pro and its smart glasses, is reportedly taking over Meade’s responsibilities in the meantime.
Bloomberg maintains Meade will work alongside former Apple colleagues and luminary designers Jony Ive, Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, who respectively left Apple over the years to eventually found AI hardware startup ‘io’, which OpenAI acquired last year for $6.5 billion.
This follows the departure of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is set to be replaced by John Ternus, a long-time Apple veteran and Senior Vice President for Hardware Engineering. Ternus was also heavily involved in the launch of Vision Pro in addition to a slew of core Apple products.
Notably, prior to joining Apple in 2001, Ternus actually worked at Virtual Research Systems, a now-defunct VR hardware company making some of the first commercially available VR headsets.
Bloomberg characterizes Ternus’ ascension to CEO a controversial move within Apple’s hardware engineering unit, which has led to a shakeup that has reportedly sidelined a number of executives.
Apple has reportedly also deemphasized Vision Pro is recent months, cancelling a cheaper and lighter XR headset—previously expected for release in 2027—in favor of developing smart and AR glasses.
