Sandbox VR Shows that ‘Social’ Beats ‘Spectacle’ at VR Attractions

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Sandbox VR is a longstanding VR attraction chain featuring unique VR experiences for up to six players in a large, shared playspace. I recently got a chance to check out one of Sandbox VR’s newest locations and try two of its latest experiences—Squid Game Virtuals and Deadwood Phobia.

Sandbox VR is one of the original VR attraction companies. After nearly going out of business during the Covid-19 lockdowns, the company has rebounded, now operating nearly 60 locations worldwide and recently surpassed $200 million in lifetime revenue.

Driving its success is a focus on high-quality first-party content, like Deadwood (which has turned into a trilogy of Sandbox VR experiences), and deals with recognizable IP from Netflix (like Squid Game Virtuals, Rebel Moon the Descent, and an upcoming Stranger Things experience).

I recently visited one of Sandbox VR’s newest locations in Philadelphia, PA, and I brought three ‘non-VR’ friends along to see what they thought.

Photo by Road to VR

The four of us played two of Sandbox VR’s newest experiences: Squid Game Virtuals followed by Deadwood Phobia.

VR expert or newbie, one underlying theme emerged for all four of us: gameplay involving interactions between the real players was the most fun and memorable part of it all.

Would You Like to Play a Game?

Like the TV series it’s based on, Squid Game Virtuals exclusively pits the real players against each other across a variety of mini-games.

For instance in one game there was a giant bomb hanging from a rope in the middle of the platform, with the four of us positioned at each corner. The goal was to slap the bomb away (and toward the other players) instead of having it blow up in your face. It felt like a deadly game of hot-potato mixed with tetherball. Seeing my friends duck, dodge, and slap the ball back and forth was surprisingly entertaining, and reinforced that we were all in there together, sharing this otherworldly experience.

Another one of the mini-games had four platforms, each with a different symbol on it. Every round, one or more of the platforms was swing down, dropping anyone unlucky enough to be standing on it. But before that happens there are coins you can collect that will reveal hints about which platforms will drop and which will be safe.

Since not everyone could grab all the coins, the full knowledge about which platforms were safe and which were not was spread between us. But since we were competing with one another, there was an unspoken aspect of trying to trick the other players into thinking you were on a safe spot and then perhaps jump away at the last minute to make them fall (or to fake a move to another platform so they jumped first, only to plummet into the void!).

This ‘shared knowledge’ scenario turned out to be really fun, especially because it all culminated in one or more of us getting dropped to our deaths each round. Although, as a VR expert, I have a few critiques about the underlying Sandbox VR technical experience in this moment we were all fully lost in the world of Squid Game and furiously trying to discern if we were on the right platform while we waited to find out which of us was doomed.

Image courtesy Sandbox VR

One especially memorable moment came in the final round when two of us thought that platform A was safe, and two of us thought that platform D was safe. With the group split 50/50, we were anxiously staring at each other as we awaited the countdown, not knowing who would be left standing. I instinctively put my arm around the friend next to me, knowing that if it was our time, we would face the end together.

3… 2… 1… the platform across from us dropped and we watched two of our friends scream as they plummeted into the darkness below. It was an exhilarating climax and hilarious too, leaving the four of us laughing together as we transitioned to the next mini-game. That moment felt like something out of a movie, but it was purely organic, thanks to game design built around social interaction rather than just pointing and shooting.

Shoot’em Up, Down, and All-around

While Squid Game Virtuals used only our hands and bodies for gameplay, Deadwood Phobia saw us equipped with VR gun controllers.

This action-horror experience has impressive graphics and it’s clear that a lot of time went into the look and direction of it. From a gameplay standpoint, the vast majority of Deadwood Phobia involved trying to stop hordes of zombies from overrunning us. And while there were interesting variations in enemies and environments that spiced things up a bit, for the most part the four of us were all looking out at the world around us, instead of directly interacting with one another (save for occasionally calling out high priority targets or trying to cover one another).

Through much of the Deadwood Phobia experience we were back-to-back in static playspaces, but I especially enjoyed a segment where we rode a moving platform with obstacles—like spinning blades—that forced us to dodge carefully. Since there was limited space on the platform, we all had to be somewhat aware of each other in order to dodge the obstacles without crashing into one another.

With zombies flying at you from every direction for the majority of the experience, the gameplay felt very intense. The shooting felt satisfying but there was a lot of it. My index finger literally got tired from pulling the trigger so often (speaking as someone who probably has more finger stamina than most, considering that I type for a living), and I heard the same complaint from companions who also had semi-automatic weapons like mine.

For a runtime of only about 20 minutes, I have to say that I’m impressed that it felt like we had gone through a whole adventure, with several scenes and a narrative arc, by the end of the experience.

After the Headsets Come Off

Photo by Road to VR

Squid Game Virtuals wasn’t as intense as Deadwood Phobia. It wasn’t as graphically rich. It didn’t even use the tracked gun controllers. But all four of us agreed at the end that Squid Game Virtuals was our favorite of the two experiences.

That’s not to say that Deadwood Phobia wasn’t fun. As a VR experience I was impressed at its visual quality, structure, and presentation. But we all agreed it would have benefited from more moments of direct player-to-player interaction.

Adding a few moments of downtime where players must communicate—solving a puzzle, opening a complex mechanism, or tackling other cooperative tasks beyond just shooting at the same target—would improve pacing and create more of the organic social interactions that made Squid Game Virtuals so memorable.

Photo by Road to VR

In the end, the nice part is that you can pick and choose which kind of experience you want, because a single Sandbox VR room can be used for a large number of experiences (at the location I went to there were nine different titles to choose from).

After reflecting on the experience with my three ‘non-VR’ friends, we all agreed that we’d love to go to Sandbox VR again, and we’d be especially interested in trying more experiences that emphasize player-to-player interactivity—something closer to an escape room than a simple shooter.

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Disclosure: Sandbox VR invited us to visit the Philadelphia location and covered the cost of admission for the session. It was a standard booking as far as the attendants at the location could see, so we got to the ‘retail’ experience without any extra fluff.

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An Infamous Cave Sealed After a Fatal Accident is Being Reopened for Exploration – in VR

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Cave Crave (2025) is a VR game where you explore caves. No monsters, no treasure chests, no puzzles—just the oppressive cave interiors tightening around you as you traverse further underground. Now, developers 3R Games are doing something few would expect: they’re purposefully recreating a now inaccessible cave system where a man died.

Next month, Cave Crave is releasing an update on Quest and PSVR 2 that brings to the game a recreation of Nutty Putty Cave, the infamous Utah-based cave system which attracted amateur and professional cavers alike before being permanently sealed shut in 2009, following a fatal accident that killed 26-year-old John Edward Jones.

In short, Jones was caving through Nutty Putty with a group when he broke off to go solo, finding himself trapped in a vertical fissure just 10 by 18 inches wide. What resulted was 27 hours of rescue attempts that ultimately failed to save him. You may have seen the image below, showing Jones’ route, as the haunting story has reverberated around the Internet ever since.

Rescue map of Nutty Putty | Image courtesy Brandon Kowallis

You can’t go there today in any capacity. In the wake of the disaster, explosives were used to collapse the ceiling of the section where Jones’ body was, and all entry points to the cave were permanently sealed off by filling them with concrete so nothing of the sort could ever happen there again.

To recreate Nutty Putty, 3R Games says they’ve used public documentation and an official cave map provided by Brandon Kowallis, a rescuer in the incident who later wrote a detailed account of the efforts to extract Jones. Kowallis’ recounting is a harrowing read that I won’t recap here.

Profit, Ethics, and the Virtual Tourist

Critically, the studio says its recreation of Nutty Putty “avoids gamification of the tragedy,” ostensibly by allowing users to visit in ‘Tourist Mode’, an option that removes bits like environmental hazards, collectibles, and player death.

“Our goal is to give VR explorers access to a place that can no longer be visited in reality—nothing more, nothing less,” says Piotr Surmacz, CEO of 3R Games and director of the title.

But recreating Nutty Putty raises questions. To the studio’s credit, they seem to be handling the recreation with grace, since it won’t be gamified. Still, I’m conflicted.

Dark Tourism isn’t anything new. Purposefully visiting a place you know has a history of misery and death can be for remembrance, exploring your own feelings on the matter, or simple morbid fascination. None of it should be penalized when it’s done with respect, and especially not when done in such a low stakes arena as a single-player virtual reality game.

I don’t take issue with the recreation. Ideally, some platform at some time in the future will recreate the whole world in detail, maybe even including the past and present so we can explore it virtually. To this day, one of my favorite apps is Google Earth VR, which lets you do that to an extent, admittedly with much less granularity since it only integrates 3D building, geographic scans, and Google Street View 360 photos.

Google Earth VR is free though, which somewhat abstracts profit motive from the equation—knowing full well Google makes money in other unseen ways, but not directly from me popping my head into some of the most gut wrenching places on Earth, like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the crematorium at Buchenwald, or public memorials to tragedies of all sorts—many of which are captured on Google Street View.

While the update is free, Cave Crave is a paid game. In a way, it could be seen as profiting off the misery of Jones’ death to some extent. 3R Games hasn’t made any indication that it’s associated with any sort of charity or caving association, which you might expect given the nature of the update.

That difference—between exploration as public service and as commercial product—is where things get murky.

This will be the first real cave 3R Games is recreating for the game. Since launch on Quest and PSVR 2 in June 2025, Cave Crave has exclusively included fictional caves, which offer players challenging and memorable paths to traverse. Many popular caves have been involved in tragedies, albeit less publicized than Jones’, so recreating any cave may come with similar moral grey areas.

The whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers, which feels unsettling.

Is this a somber homage to the real world risks of caving? Or is it a publicity stunt to attract eyeballs to the studio’s game? I think it’s a little of both.

And how is stepping into Nutty Putty different from playing any game based in history, like World War II? Companies profit off those motifs all the time without any whiff of controversy despite the real implication that the events undoubtedly saw the deaths of thousands.

I’m still not sure. Maybe because it was more recent. Maybe because we can relate more directly to Jones; if he were alive today, maybe he’s be playing Cave Crave right now. Maybe I’m partially wrapped up in the taboo of reopening something that was purposefully closed, not only for safety, but as a memorial to a man who died in the most gruesome way any caver can think of. Maybe having it featured in a game, and not as a part of a public tool, feels just a little too off-color.

Whatever the case, in writing this, I’ve become part of the same dark tourism circuit as Cave Crave. And by reading it, so have you.

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Mixed Reality’s Best Laser Tag-style Multiplayer Gets Better Spatial Stability, New Enemies & More

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Spatial Ops (2024) is a bit like laser tag for Quest, letting you set up barriers and squad up with your friends for everything from room-scale to arena-scale mixed reality shootouts. Now, developer Resolution Games released an update today that brings more stability to co-located gameplay, more enemies, support for bHaptics gear, and more.

Called ‘Pulse Protocol’, the update brings a bevy of updates for the Quest version of the game, supporting Quest 2 and above, and a few things for the ‘Campaign Edition’ available on Pico headsets too.

The game’s multiplayer ‘Arena Mode’ on Quest now features an in-game spatial marker system, which the studio says will let you generate, print, and place spatial markers in your environment, and then use them to create maps.

Resolution Games says the markers ensure “reliable, precise alignment of both maps and player positions during matches,” something that can be tricky when matches get hectic and Quest struggles to keep up with spatial awareness.

Pulse Protocol is also bringing more enemy types, including Hatchet Corp soldiers and their Infected counterparts, each with their own unique weapons and tactics like revolver-wielding Guards and RPG-armed Rocketeers.

And if it weren’t high enough stakes, the update also introduces Permanent Death Mode, so you can setup matches with one-team or both-teams permadeath.

So far, these updates are only available on Quest, however both Quest and Pico headsets are getting a few additional quality of life enhancements. Users with bHaptics kit will be able to link up their TactSuit, TactSleeve and TactVisor to the game for the first time with native support, upping the realism of getting tagged by a stray bullet.

Additionally, Both Quest and Pico versions are getting an in-game achievement tracking system, horizontal grip angle offset for better weapon handling beyond the default grip angle, and a much requested in-game floor level adjustment tool, letting you do quick adjustments without using the system menu. You can check out more on Pulse Protocol here.

In the meantime, you can find Spatial Ops over on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above, and the ‘Campaign Edition’ over on the Pico Store for Pico 4 and above.

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Meta’s Reported $800 Smart Glasses with Display Won’t Shoot for the Stars, Claims Respected Analyst

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Meta’s smart glasses with display, codenamed ‘Hypernova’, are reportedly slated to cost less than initially expected, with Meta allegedly slashing price expectations from the rumored $1,000 – $1,400 range to $800. Now, respected supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Meta is nearly ready to begin mass production, although sales expectations aren’t very high.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that Hypernova will be cheaper than initially reported, delivering a pair of smart glasses with a single display and a wrist-worn electromyography (EMG) based controller for input at “about $800,” Gurman says.

Notably, a number of recent leaks provided by data miner ‘Luna’ have also seemingly unveiled the glasses in full, suggesting not only is Hypernova (also referred to as ‘Celeste’) real, but it may be a Meta solo launch—i.e. not a partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley parent company EssilorLuxottica.

Image courtesy Luna

Kuo, known for releasing insider info on Apple products, recently posted on X (machine translated from Traditional Chinese) that Hypernova is expected to enter mass production in Q3 2025.

Ostensibly sourcing supply chain info, Kuo says Hypernova will have a two-year product cycle, with shipments over the next two years estimated to be around 150,000 to 200,000 units in total—significantly less than the over two million Ray-Ban Meta units sold since release in 2023.

“Based on Qualcomm chip shipment forecasts, global smart glasses shipments in 2026 are estimated at about 13 to 15 million units, which shows that Hypernova’s market share is negligible, hence it seems more like Meta’s experimental product,” Kuo maintains.

Continuing:

AI will be the most important selling point of Hypernova, but the exploration of applications integrating AI and AR is still in the early stages, and with a selling price of about $800, this should be the main reason Meta is conservatively viewing Hypernova’s shipment volumes. Additionally, to pursue mass production feasibility, it adopts LCoS, but this also brings hardware design challenges such as appearance design, brightness, response time, and battery life.

Kuo posits that Hypernova holds a few strategic implications for Meta: to preempt Apple’s release and build brand image, accumulate ecosystem experience as early as possible, and understand user behavior.

Truly, the addition of a ‘simple’ display to its smart glasses platform changes things from both a user and platform holder perspective. As with early entrants into the ‘smart glasses with display’ segment, such as Rokid’s recently pitched Glasses, users won’t just be snapping photos and video, taking calls and listening to music, or talking with LLMs.

Rokid Glasses | Image courtesy Rokid

People will expect display-clad smart glasses to do things smart things like turn-by-turn directions, live text and audio capture real-time translation, and more interaction with apps, given Hypernova is supposed launch with more articulated input beyond simple swipes, button presses, and voice input can provide. Getting that right is no small feat, as Kuo suggests Meta may simply not be ready for the sort of wider adoption Ray-Ban Meta has driven.

Meta sees smart glasses as a stepping stone to all-day AR, likely making hesitancy the right move. The company needs to not only feed all of those learnings into a bigger and better AR platform down the line at some point, but also create something that won’t frustrate the glut of consumers with half-baked experiences or hardware limitations that could tarnish the segment before it even gets off the ground.

After all, Meta is banking on owning a sizeable piece of AR as it hopes to eventually generate a return on its multiple billions of dollars spent per year on Reality Labs, its XR research and product division, so rashly jumping into the coming wave of smart glasses may do more harm than good.

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‘Horizon Worlds’ is Getting AI-powered NPCs Soon That Talk, Guide and React in Real Time

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Meta laid out the next step of its AI integration strategy for social VR platform Horizon Worlds, noting that “very soon” creators will be able to add AI-powered NPCs to their worlds.

Earlier this year Meta introduced non-embodied NPCs, essentially letting Horizon Worlds creators plug in ‘background’ AI agents, which were meant to offer help, but not exist as avatars.

Now, Meta announced in a developer blog post it’s soon rolling out “fully-embodied conversational [large language model] NPCs”, which means makers will soon be able to populate their Horizon Worlds creations with NPCs ostensibly sourcing responses from Meta’s latest Llama LLM.

Meta says this will allow NPCs to hold dynamic, unscripted conversations with players, mix scripted dialogue with LLM-generated replies, and use different AI-generated voices from a built-in library. Check out the character builder in action below:

Creators will also be able to define NPCs by name, and include things like backstories, personality traits, and specific dialogue styles, which Meta notes could serve as quest givers, guides, lore-deepening characters, shopkeepers, or bosses that react dynamically.

Meta isn’t stopping there either. Later this year, the company says they’re also adding the ability for NPCs to trigger in-world actions, dynamically converse with real players, and “more.” We’re sure to learn more at the company’s annual developer conference, Meta Connect, when it kicks off September 17th.

This comes amid continued efforts to boost engagement in Horizon Worlds, and further differentiate it from other platforms too—like Rec Room, Roblox, and VRChat—all of which feature scripted NPCs.

To boot, earlier this month Meta released two major generative AI features (Creator Assistant and Style Reference) for its Horizon Worlds desktop editor, aimed at streamlining the development of user-generated environments.

In all, Meta is striving to arm Horizon Worlds creators with better desktop maker tools that require less technical knowledge, effectively letting them build more visually-rich (and soon) more narratively-rich games and experiences.

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‘No Man’s Sky’ Brings Massive Multi-crew Starships in Latest Update

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No Man’s Sky (2016) is well beyond its redemption arc now, having just shipped ‘Voyagers’ across VR and flatscreen platforms, making for one of its biggest updates yet.

Starting today, you’ll be able to step aboard even bigger starships that you can crew with your friends. From the trailer, it certainly feels like No Man’s Sky is finally delivering on the sort of hardcore Star Trek/Star Wars space fantasy players have always wanted.

Called ‘Corvettes’, the massive customizable ships come replete with hulls, wings, landing gear, cockpits, engine parts, thrusters—everything you’d expect, but also real interiors you can kit out and customize with friends.

Image courtesy Hello Games

Inside, you’ll find med-bays, sleeping quarters, war rooms, radars, and teleporters, Hello Games says in a post on Steam.

“By design, Corvettes are encountered a little way into the game and veteran players will be able to unlock them reasonably swiftly,” the studio says. “But we wanted to give all players a taste of what they can expect, so the accompanying ‘Corvette’ expedition is specifically designed to get you to the workshop as quickly as possible and to take you on a journey which unlocks some of the parts you’re going to need to build out your sci-fi fantasy.”

Image courtesy Hello Games

Notably, there are a few perks for VR users too. PSVR 2 players can now take advantage of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution for better graphical fidelity. And PC VR users with compatible NVIDIA RTX graphics cards can also now enable DLSS4, serving up faster performance and improved rendering.

Here’s a quick recap of VR specific stuff in the game’s latest patch notes, also including some things to heighten visual immersion:

Rendering & Visuals

• NVIDIA DLSS 4 support (PC VR): boosts FPS, reduces latency, and improves clarity in VR on RTX GPUs.
• PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSVR 2): AI upscaling for sharper, more detailed VR visuals on PlayStation 5.
• Intel XeSS 2 support: AI upscaling option for Intel GPU users, also helps VR rendering.
• Moment-Based Order-Independent Transparency (MBOIT): upgrade to glass, windows, aquariums, and cockpit transparency, improving visual stability.
• Hero Lighting: player character is lit independently of the environment, so your suit looks clearer even in dark scenes.
• Improved rendering stability: fixes flickering and corruption issues in VR, especially with distant or semi-transparent objects.

Performance & Optimization

• Multi-threaded rendering on PC: significant CPU performance improvements, especially noticeable in VR.
• Occlusion culling & optimizations: higher framerates in caves, buildings, and indoor environments, reducing in-headset discomfort.
• Reduced load times & memory optimizations: faster transitions in and out of VR-heavy areas like large bases.

Gameplay & Immersion Features

• Fully traversable Corvettes: fully walkable ship interiors are naturally more immersive in VR.
• Spacewalking & Skydiving: now fully supported, letting players float outside their ships and navigate with jetpacks.
• Improved mission HUD timers: better readability of estimated travel times.

You can find No Man’s Sky over on the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2 and over on Steam for PC VR headsets where it’s currently priced at $24, 60% off its regular $60 MRSP.

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‘Aces of Thunder’ Still Coming in 2025 Despite Recent Store Glitch Showing September Release

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If you recently spied the September 2nd release date for VR combat flight sim Aces of Thunder on the PlayStation Store, sorry to burst your bubble: developer Gaijin Entertainment says it was “a malfunction at the store.”

Gaijin Entertainment says in a recent X post that while the PlayStation Store release date was indeed a flub, the game is still coming this year, “just not that exact day.”

No. We never planned to release the game on that date, there was a malfunction at the store that led to this misunderstanding. We do plan do launch in 2025, just not on that exact day.

— Aces of Thunder (@acesofthunder) August 26, 2025

While announced in late 2023 and initially expected to launch in late 2024, earlier this month the studio announced Aces of Thunder’s release as “imminent,” which probably didn’t help temper player expectations concerning the recent gaff.

Still, the studio, which is also behind popular flight combat sim War Thunder (2013), did further confirm at that time that Aces of Thunder will indeed include a solo campaign alongside full-featured multiplayer gameplay, which you can see in the trailer below.

Some healthy (and suitably unverifiable) speculation here as to the overall situation: Gaijin announced back at the game’s unveiling it was creating Aces of Thunder “specifically with capabilities of PlayStation VR2 in mind.” All things considered, PSVR 2-focused multiplayer gameplay may not have been the right horse to bet on.

Following the game’s 2023 announcement, Sony has acted uncharacteristically anemic in its support for PSVR 2 post-launch, even going as far as cutting the once console-bound headset from PS5 in 2024 by officially supporting PC play via SteamVR and a separate adapter.

While a Steam listing for the game appeared in late 2023—suggesting those PSV2 capabilities maybe weren’t so fundamental after all—the studio further announced in April 2025 that it would also support flatscreen gameplay in a post-launch update. Granted, the plan may have been to support as many headsets as feasible from the start, although the timeline does raise questions.

That said, Aces of Thunder is supposed to land on PSVR 2 and SteamVR headsets sometime this year (even if not imminently), so we’ll be following the game’s X account and official blog in the meantime. Fool me once.

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Rokid Glasses Kickstarter Tops $500K Amid Growing Demand for Smart Glasses with Displays

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Chinese AR startup Rokid launched a Kickstarter campaign yesterday for Rokid Glasses, a new version of the company’s smart glasses with green monochrome displays which previously launched in China. Now, after 24 hours, the project has already garnered over $500,000, marking an undeniable demand for smart glasses that go beyond the audio-only experience of Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN glasses.

Starting at the base tier of $479, representing a 20% discount of its $599 MSRP, Rokid Glasses boast a bevy of familiar features, including AI voice queries (via ChatGPT), music listening, calls, and photo and video capture.

Rokid Glasses’ biggest feature though is undoubtedly its integrated dual waveguides, which output a monochrome green heads-up display for things like turn-by-turn directions, teleprompter, and real-time text and voice translation with 89 languages (five offline via Rokid’s own LLM).

Image courtesy Rokid

Notably, there are a few smart glasses coming to market promising ostensibly similar heads-up displays. Google is promising future availability in its slate of forthcoming Android XR smart glasses. Meta is also rumored to release a display version of its smart glasses, likely also built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica like Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta. Reports also point to Apple developing smart glasses, although rumors haven’t specified whether these also include display(s).

But Rokid is one of the first big names in the XR space looking to serve consumers with its display-clad smart glasses. And the results so far suggest we’re going to see multi-million dollars flood into its Kickstarter campaign, which is slated to continue until October 10th.

Billed as the “world’s lightest full-function AI & AR glasses” (they aren’t actually augmented reality, more on why here), the device is built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 and NXP’s RT600 processors, featuring dual micro-LED displays delivering 1500 nits of brightness.

Image courtesy Rokid

Sporting a single 12MP Sony IMX681 camera sensor, which captures a 109° field of view via its f/2.25 aperture, promising low-light HDR and digital video stabilization.

Through both voice prompts (“Hey Rokid!”) and pressing the right-mounted shutter button, users can shoot photos in multiple formats—3:4 at 1,200p, 9:16 at 900p, and 4:3 at 680p—and video in 3:4 at 1,800 × 2,400, 9:16 at 1,350 × 2,400, and 4:3 at 2,400 × 1,800. Yes, it also has internal and external capture lights, which indicates when a user is recording.

Integrated audio comes via near-ear AAC speakers, also featuring a four mic array that boasts integrated noise reduction for wind noise.

As for battery life, Rokid Glasses feature a 210 mAh internal battery, which the company says will offer 8–10 hours of mixed use, 5–6 hours of music, 2 hours of always-on display, and 45 minutes of “intensive recording.” A 3,000 mAh charging case is available in some tiers, or as a stretch goal provided the campaign reaches $1 million.

What’s more, the 49 gram smart glasses also feature a magnetic clip-on frame design for prescription lenses, which Rokid is supplying in its $519 backer tier.

Image courtesy Rokid

We haven’t gone hands-on yet, although Tyriel Wood previewed an early unit (seen below) that suggests Rokid Glasses are indeed the real deal. As it is, Rokid is an established name in AR, having delivered multiple devices over the years following its founding in 2014.

Notably, shipping for Rokid Glasses is estimated for November 2025, which could leave some space before year’s end for other creators to announce their own competitors in the space.

Events to watch out for include is a rumored follow-up to Samsung Unpacked (reportedly on September 29th) and Meta Connect (September 17th). Its uncertain when Google and its eyewear partners hope to unveil the first slate of Android XR glasses, coming from Warby Parker, South Korea’s Gentle Monster, and ostensibly Google themselves.

In the meantime, you can learn more about Rokid Glasses over on the Kickstarter campaign, which goes until October 10th.

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Social VR’s Most Powerful Creator Platform Just Got a New Lease on Life

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When it comes to social VR platforms, Resonite isn’t exactly a household name, although the studio behind it is making some serious efforts to change that. The powerful PC VR social creation platform just got its biggest update yet, bringing massive improvements to performance across the board.

Launched into early access on Steam back in 2023, Resonite is a PC VR-only app, which has critically limited it from hitting the glut of VR users over on Quest. Its worlds can be pretty big and complex, making PC VR the only real fit in its current form.

Still, developer Yellow Dog Man Studios has carried on, further refining the app’s admittedly dizzying array of tools so its users can build, create, and script anything—all in-world, meaning users don’t technically need to rely on third-party software, such as Blender, AutoDesk Maya, or the Unity game engine.

To boot, in its August 20th performance update the studio is actively trying to uncouple from Unity altogether, as the studio has moved its native ‘FrooxEngine’ out of Unity and onto the modern .NET 9 runtime, which is said to have dramatically improved framerate, reduced hitching, and sped up startup and loading times.

According to the app’s latest update on Steam, Resonite is essentially shifting toward a fully independent engine, enabling deeper optimizations like multi-threading, variable rate updates, and potentially replacing Unity’s renderer entirely at some point in the future.

Beyond raw performance, the update introduces a host of bug fixes, as well as a new Help Tab in the dashboard to ease onboarding, although that really only touches on some of what’s keeping Resonite squarely in its current niche.

Besides being a PC-only social platform, the app can be intimidating for users not used to the sort of depth its in-world tools can bring, notably its ‘ProtoFlux’ visual scripting tool, or its ability to import assets from third-party creation tools. In short, the truly amazing things you see still require an advanced skill level to create, which is ameliorated somewhat by the fact Resonite encourages social creation, and not just solo, offline tinkering.

It’s difficult to say whether Resonite will ever truly be able to scale to the size of its main competitors one day, such as VRChat or Rec Room. It’s a different animal, albeit one with a core foundation of hardcore maker types and contributors via the app’s Patreon. As it is, the app’s Patreon is bringing its creators over $11,000 per month—a testament to the community’s commitment to keep Resonite their social platform of choice.

You can find Resonite over on Steam for free. Hardcore users looking for more storage space for their avatars, items, assets and worlds can opt for paid tiers, ranging from $5 to $75 per month.

The post Social VR’s Most Powerful Creator Platform Just Got a New Lease on Life appeared first on Road to VR.

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Social VR Platform ‘Rec Room’ Lays Off Half Its Staff Amid Surge of Low-Quality Content

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Social VR platform Rec Room announced it’s laying off around half of its staff, citing low-level content which has flooded the platform from users on mobile and console.

Founded in 2016, the studio was once valued at $3.5 billion following its most recent funding round in 2021, which brought the Seattle-based company $145 million, making it one of the most valuable XR companies to date.

As an early adopter of user-generated content (UGC), Rec Room was also one of the first in the space to incentivize creators by letting them sell their creations for in-game tokens, which could be exchanged for real cash—following a monetization strategy similar to Roblox.

Now, the company has announced wide-sweeping layoffs in a blogpost, authored by company co-founders Cameron Brown and Nick Fajt. According to a statement provided to GeekWire, Rec Room now has just over 100 employees following the cuts.

The studio says departing employees will receive three months of pay, six months of health benefits, and the option to keep their computers.

According to Rec Room leadership, layoffs stem from its overly ambitious attempt to make the app a universal creation platform across VR, PC, consoles, and mobile. Top creators on PC and VR drove growth, however efforts to expand creation tools to mobile and consoles underdelivered, creating technical strain and financial instability.

“While we did see creation happening on mobile and consoles, we never got to the point where those devices were good for building stuff that other players engaged with. And some of our efforts to bridge that gap (e.g., Maker AI) just frustrated our more impactful creators,” Brown says in the blogpost.

In short, user-generated content created through its mobile and console pipelines tended to be numerous, but fairly low in quality and optimization:

At the same time, those lower-powered devices still produced millions of pieces of content. This put a huge strain on the team, who had to figure out tools and procedures to review it all. Making all this run across every device was a massive technical challenge and burden. While our most skilled creators optimized their content cleverly, most creators didn’t – couldn’t, really, because we didn’t provide them with the necessary tooling. Supporting all this scope stretched us way too thin, and our attempt at building one big scalable platform (Rooms 2.0) didn’t land like we needed it to. The vision made sense, but we got crushed under the scale.

So we ended up in a tough spot. Too small to realize the “anyone can build anywhere” vision, but too big to pivot to a more focused experience that was more reactive to what our players wanted and would pay for. The result was that we started to dig a financial hole that was getting larger every day.

Rec Room says moving forward it will empower its best (most revenue-generating) creators in an ostensible bid to refocus the core of its content.

“These folks are driving most of the growth and revenue already. In July, players spent more on [user-generated content] than ever. Creators had their highest earning month ever. This segment is actually growing nicely, but it’s heavily focused on PC – so that’s where we’ll focus our UGC efforts,” Brown says.

Brown further notes Rec Room is “not abandoning UGC,” however “narrowing our focus away from ‘everyone can create’ in favor of serving our very best creators.”

The company says it also hopes to boost the platform not only by improving PC-based tools, but by hosting more curated events, featured content, and fewer but higher-quality updates.

This follows a layoff round in March 2025, which affected 16 percent of staff. At the time, Rec Room leadership maintained layoff were necessary to control costs to ensure the platform’s long-term survival. The studio said fifficulties included a slowing gaming market growth, higher interest rates, and a tougher fundraising climate.

You can read Brown and Fajt’s full statement on the recent layoff round here.

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Samsung’s Answer to Vision Pro Reportedly Landing First in Korea This October for Around $2,000

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Samsung’s upcoming mixed reality headset Project Moohan has largely been out of the spotlight since its unveiling late last year. According to South Korean outlet Newsworks (Korean), the headset’s launch could be right around the corner.

Citing industry sources, Project Moohan is reportedly set to be featured at Samsung’s upcoming Unpacked event, which is expected to take place in South Korea on September 29th.

The report maintains the headset is set to launch soon thereafter, coming first to South Korea on October 13th, and later to global markets. There’s no word on when or how the alleged global rollout will work.

The device is expected to be priced somewhere between ₩2.5 and ₩4 million South Korean won, or around $1,800 and $2,900 USD, Newsworks maintains.

While markedly cheaper than Apple Vision Pro, which still sells for its early 2024 launch price of $3,500, that still puts Moohan pretty squarely on the prosumer end of the spectrum.

Samsung Project Moohan | Image courtesy The Verge

Ostensibly looking to serve up competition to Vision Pro, Project Moohan is set to be the first mixed reality headset to run Google’s Android XR operating system.

According to its current spec sheet, the headset sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 + Gen 2, Sony-sourced micro‑OLED panels (no resolution specs yet), pancake lenses, automatic interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment, and support for eye and hand-tracking. It’s also set to support VR motion controllers of some sort, although we haven’t seen them yet.

Make sure to check out our hands-on with Project Moohan from December 2024 to learn more, including notes on comfort, display clarity, and our experience with Android XR—which really looks a lot like Horizon OS combined with VisionOS.

Newsworks reports that Samsung is only expecting to ship “around 100,000 units” of the device this year—significantly less than Apple’s alleged 2024 targets for Vision Pro, which third-party analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported last year ranged between 400–450k units. Granted, Samsung doesn’t have a lot of runway left until year’s end, so there’s no telling what it hopes to achieve with Moohan.

Still, industry sources expect Samsung’s XR headset to act as more of stepping stone to its wider smart glasses ambitions, Newsworks says.

Notably, Samsung has yet to announce its own smart glasses amidst a flurry of companies looking to enter the space, including Google’s Android XR smart glasses launching in partnership with America’s Warby Parker and South Korea’s Gentle Monster.

Following the recent launch of Oakley Meta HSTN, Meta is also reportedly expected to release a new pair of smart glasses, this time including a built-in display and wrist-worn controller, according to a recent report.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi also recently launched its own smart glasses, which go toe-to-toe with Ray-Ban Meta, although appear to be exclusive to Mainland China.

Meanwhile, HTC unveiled its ‘VIVE Eagle’ smart glasses, which is shipping first in the company’s native Taiwan at NT$15,600 ($520 USD).

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‘BeamXR’ Returns Quest’s Lost Livestreaming Functionality – No PC Required

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Meta quietly dropped support for native livestreaming from Quest to Facebook a few years ago, and never got around to officially supporting other platforms. Now, early access tool BeamXR Live is available for free on the Horizon Store, letting you do just that—and all without needing a PC to act as a middleman.

Okay, so it doesn’t let you stream to Facebook, although BeamXR users can stream VR or MR gameplay directly from their Quest to the two most popular livestreaming platforms: Twitch and YouTube.

Notably, the app works across the entire Quest game library, making it a simple plug and play solution to capture any game and have your chat floating next to you. Check it out in action below:

Since it’s a native solution, you don’t need a PC either, which is typically done by jumping through a few hoops to cast to those platforms via OBS, or any number of PC-side capture software using Link or Air Link.

Developer BeamXR says that while the app is in its early access phase, the team is “actively building and implementing new features, encouraging users and the streaming community to help shape the roadmap of the product with feedback directly influencing upcoming features.”

What’s more, all of its currently available functions are free to use. BeamXR says the studio is building “Pro level features”, however the app will “always have a free access tier for streaming with no usage limits.”

In the meantime, you can find BeamXR over on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above.

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Apple Code Suggests M5 Hardware Refresh of Vision Pro Could Come Later This Year

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Code shared by Apple and discovered by MacRumors has seemingly confirmed that Vision Pro isn’t getting a massive overhaul in its next generation, instead pointing to a hardware refresh that will feature Apple’s upcoming M5 chipset.

This follows previous reports from last year, including those from independent analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that suggested Apple was getting some flavor of Apple’s M-chip in its next release; Kuo reported it was M5, and Gurman reported M4.

Additionally, MacRumors reports that the refreshed Vision Pro “isn’t expected to feature any design changes or hardware updates aside from the new chip,” although it could feature a new, more comfortable head strap.

Considering Vision Pro might include the company’s flagship mobile chipset, we probably shouldn’t expect it to be any cheaper than the original, which went on sale in February 2024 for $3,500, and included its older M2 chipset, which was released in June 2022.

Vision Pro officially supporting PSVR 2 Sense Controllers | Image courtesy Nathie

Notably, in Kuo’s report from late 2024, he suggested a cheaper version of Vision Pro was delayed “beyond 2027”, which conflicted with an earlier report from The Information in mid-2024 that alleged Apple was on track to release something more affordable first, and then release a more powerful Vision Pro 2 at a later point.

And while releasing an M5 refresh of Vision Pro could be seen as ‘kicking the can down the road’ somewhat, having Apple’s latest and greatest chipset may be a bigger deal than might think.

Besides better overall performance, M5 would effectively be the most powerful standalone headset to date. It would allow XR developers to not only port previous controller-focused games to the headset, thanks to official support for Sony’s PSVR 2 Sense controller, but also develop even more visually rich XR games and apps for the device.

It also effectively aligns Vision Pro with Apple’s core products for the first time. Apple’s M5 is also reportedly coming to iPad Pro, Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro, which would let developers build apps that perform consistently across its latest devices—maybe even including things like access to desktop-class apps running natively on the headset, such as Final Cut Pro.

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Varjo Secures $5.8M Investment to Accelerate Military-Grade XR Hardware

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Varjo, the Finland-based maker of high-end XR headsets, announced it’s secured a €5 million (~$5.8 million) minority investment from THEON, the Greece-based manufacturer of military imaging systems.

Structured as a convertible loan, the €5 million investment also includes the option to secure an additional €5 million under the same terms, the companies say in a joint press release. Additionally, as a result of the strategic partnership, Varjo and Theon have agreed to collaborate closely on multiple product and business initiatives.

Founded in 1997, Theon develops and manufactures customizable night vision, thermal imaging systems and Electro-Optical ISR systems for military and security applications in Europe.

Varjo says the investment will strengthen the company’s capabilities to deliver “military-grade realism through next-generation immersive technologies.”

Varjo XR-4 | Image courtesy Varjo

“We are proud to welcome THEON as a strategic investor in Varjo,” said Timo Toikkanen, CEO of Varjo. “Since our inception, we have been creating the most advanced VR/XR military systems globally. THEON’s extensive experience and leadership in the defense sector make them an ideal partner as we expand our impact in mission-critical training and simulation, enabling unprecedented levels of realism, readiness, and operational effectiveness.”

Theon CEO Christian Hadjiminas says the investment “deepens our reach into the European innovation ecosystem and gives THEON access to unique capabilities in visual display systems and projecting technology. Together, we are pushing the frontier of digital defense technology.”

Theon’s investment in Varjo comes as part of its broader ‘THEON NEXT’ initiative, which is taking the company beyond imaging, as Theon seeks to expand into digital and AR-driven soldier systems.

Through Theon Next, the company has also invested $15 million in US/UK-based XR display manufacturer Kopin, signed a multi-year supply agreement with US-based XR display manufacturer eMagin, and announced a strategic partnership with ALEREON, the US-based creator of ultra-wide-band wireless technology.

This follows news last month that Varjo is pulling support for its older XR headsets starting next year, and putting its main focus on its XR-4 Series headsets, effectively marking a return to enterprise-first offerings following the release of its first and only consumer-focused headset, Varjo Aero.

Released in late 2023, the XR-4 Series includes the standard XR‑4 ($5,990), XR‑4 Focal Edition ($9,990), and its military-compliant XR‑4 Secure Edition, which comes in three variants (~$18,00 – $32,000).

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