‘Cave Crave’ Brings Flooded Cave from Thai Rescue Mission in July Update

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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.

The update title is slated to arrive on all supported platforms next month, including Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR 2, with a non-VR version planned for Steam.

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Meta’s Brain AI Takes a Step Closer to Telepathy With Improved Thought-to-Text Decoding

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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.

Note: The findings was presented in a recent paper, which involved researchers from Meta and a host of universities and institutes, including Université PSL (incl. École Normale Supérieure), University of Lille, Paris Cité University, Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria, CEA (NeuroSpin), Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), and Hospital Foundation Adolphe de Rothschild.

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.

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Quest Peak Summer Sale Brings Big Savings to Top VR Titles

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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.

Game	Sale	MSRP	% Off
Alien: Rogue Incursion	$10	$40	75%
Arizona Sunshine II	$15	$30	50%
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad	$24	$30	20%
Breachers	$12	$20	40%
BRINK Traveler	$9	$15	40%
The Climb 2	$14	$30	53%
Clone Drone in the Hyperdome	$12	$20	40%
Cooking Clash	$10	$15	33%
Cosmonious High	$14	$20	30%
Creed: Rise to Glory – Championship Edition	$12	$30	60%
Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked	$24	$30	20%
Drums Rock	$10	$20	50%
Dungeons of Eternity	$15	$30	50%
Elements Divided	$10	$15	33%
Eleven Table Tennis	$18	$30	40%
FLY – A Google Earth Flight Sim	$7	$10	30%
Ghosts of Tabor	$17	$25	32%
Golden Gloves	$12	$20	40%
Human Fall Flat VR	$8	$13	38%
Kaiju Battle Simulator	$8	$12	33%
LES MILLS Bodycombat	$19	$30	37%
Maestro	$12	$25	52%
Metro Awakening	$15	$30	50%
Ocean Rift	$7	$10	30%
The Pirate: Republic of Nassau	$12	$20	40%
Prison Boss VR	$8	$20	60%
Real Fishing VR	$14	$20	30%
Shave & Stuff	$12	$15	20%
Slime Lab	$15	$20	25%
Strayed	$12	$15	20%
SUPERHOT VR	$20	$25	20%
Synth Riders	$13	$25	48%
Tactical Assault VR	$15	$20	25%
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City	$19	$25	24%
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow	$14	$20	30%
Titans Clinic	$15	$18	17%
Vacation Simulator	$14	$20	30%
Virtual Skate	$11	$20	45%
War of Wizards	$16	$20	20%
Wreckin’ Raccoon	$8	$12	33%

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Apple Vision Pro & Smart Glasses Exec Reportedly Leaves for OpenAI Hardware Team

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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.

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VR RPG ‘Township Tale’ is Shutting Down in July Following Second Game Cancellation

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Alta announced it’s sunsetting multiplayer RPG A Township Tale (2021) next month, making for a second bit of bad news this year since the studio pulled the plug on its follow-up game, Reave.

Alta co-founder and CTO Joel van de Vorstenbosch announced the news on the game’s Discord, noting the studio explored multiple avenues of keeping the game alive, which ultimately failed.

Now, the game is scheduled to go dark on July 20th, which also includes pulling it from the Quest Store and shutting down the game’s PC VR installer.

Here’s van de Vorstenbosch’s full statement:

Hi @everyone, It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing the closure of A Township Tale and its live services. The game will become unavailable to download, and its backend services will be taken down, on the 20th of July.

Like many others, we’ve been impacted by the state of the VR industry in ways we didn’t foresee. As many of you know, we discontinued our second game, REAVE, at the start of May.

We have explored various avenues to keep A Township Tale live, but unfortunately none are realistic in our situation. A Township Tale began in 2016, launched in pre-alpha in 2018, and launched on Quest in 2021. Across that journey, we had the privilege of building what we believe became one of the most special experiences in VR, with one of the best communities in VR. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been part of that.

To our players: thank you for playing, for your feedback, and for the fun times. To everyone who spent time in Discord: I’ve personally sent around 120k messages here, mostly from back when I was working on ATT, and it was a genuine pleasure spending that time with you all. To our moderators, server owners, and community leaders: thank you for helping maintain, organize, and support this community over the years. To our supporters: thank you for your ongoing support. I can confidently say A Township Tale would not have made it this long without you.

And to everyone who worked on ATT over the years: thank you for helping build something truly special. Unlike REAVE, A Township Tale’s community platforms will not be closing. Discord, Reddit, the wiki, and other community spaces will remain live, though they may shift further toward being community-managed if they have not already.

Our hope is to preserve some of the history around A Township Tale, and to ensure the community can maintain contact with each other. We know many friendships and relationships have been built here over the years. I encourage everyone to take advantage of the coming weeks to jump back into ATT and enjoy some final adventures.

I also encourage people to share other games they’re interested in, including in #other-games, so that the fun can continue elsewhere after the 20th of July.

A Township Tale is what you might call an MMO-like, as it offers up an open-world environment with a wide variety of roles so users can survive, craft, and build up an abandoned settlement together. It only supports up to 8 players on Quest and 40 on PC VR, however it was one of those games that easily tricked you into thinking it was much larger.

Initially launched in early access on PC VR headsets in 2018, the successful launch on Quest in 2021 allowed Alta to attract over $12 million in investment, which at the time was used to expand the studio and accelerate development of A Township Tale.

Then, in 2024, the studio announced it was working on ‘Project 2’, later revealed to be extraction-style multiplayer dungeon crawler Reave.

Although the studio progressed to the point of hosting months of open playtesting, Reave was ultimately cancelled in May 2026, with the studio citing “increasingly difficult market conditions.”

The Sydney, Australia-based studio hasn’t announced layoffs, and the size of the studio is not certain at this time. Following its $12 million funding raise in 2022, the studio said it was “more than two-dozen and growing,” having scaled up from its original three-person founding team.  

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Studio Behind Top-selling VR Extraction Shooter ‘Ghosts of Tabor’ Announces Layoffs

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Combat Waffle Studios, developer behind VR extraction shooter Ghosts of Tabor (2024), announced the studio is laying off a number of staff in effort to “align the company with the current state of the VR industry.”

Initially released in early access in 2023, Ghosts of Tabor generated over $30 million in revenue with the sale of over 10 million units leading up to release on PSVR 2 in 2025, making it one of VR’s big success stories.

Notably, in addition to selling well across SteamVR and Pico, the Escape From Tarkov-style shooter is consistently one of the top-selling Quest games of all time too.

In a LinkedIn post, Combat Waffle Studios CEO Scott Albright announced the studio is making staffing cuts as a direct result of current turmoil in the VR gaming industry.

Here’s Albright’s full statement below:

Today we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team.

As part of this, we are saying goodbye to a number of talented individuals who have contributed meaningfully to our work. We are grateful for their efforts and are committed to supporting them as they transition to new opportunities. Any studio would be fortunate to have them.

We came to this decision after having a project we were working on with a large platform partner get cancelled

These actions are part of a broader effort to align the company with the current state of the VR industry and ensure we are positioned for long term sustainability.

Our focus remains unchanged. Ghosts of Tabor continues to be our core product, and we will continue expanding that universe alongside our partners.

We remain confident in the future of VR and our role within it.

It’s uncertain how many the cuts have affected, or how many remain. In July 2025, Albright noted in a SQR Magazine interview that the studio’s staff totaled 50 employees, which was notably before the Nokomis, Florida-based studio moved from a 7,000 square foot space to a 23,349 square foot building. At the time, Albright said the move could accommodate “an extra 100 people.”

In 2025 alone, Combat Waffle also released Day Z-style multiplayer zombie shooter Silent North and multiplayer survival game Grim, neither of which have yet lived up to the meteoric success of Ghosts of Tabor.

This follows a growing list of studio shutdowns, layoffs, and project cancellations, the most significant of which was Meta’s rash of VR studios cancellations and broad pullback from funding VR games.

As a result, a number of in-progress VR games were cancelled, including an unannounced Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel from Meta’s Sanzaru Games, an unannounced Harry Potter VR game for Quest from Skydance Games, a major project from Moss developers Polyarc, and now, presumably, Combat Waffles next project “with large platform partner.”

Other notable shutdowns include social VR platform Rec Room, VR veteran and Alien: Rogue Incursion studio Survios, and Metro: Awakening satellite studio Vertigo Studios Amsterdam.

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‘Synth Riders’ Gets Surprise Linkin Park DLC Drop, Its Biggest Music Pack to Date

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Kluge Interactive today announced the launch of the Linkin Park Music Pack for Synth Riders, making it the VR rhythm game’s biggest paid DLC music pack to date.

The Linkin Park Music pack includes 13 of the band’s most iconic tracks which span the group’s entire career, from their breakout album Hybrid Theory (2000) to their most recent releases.

Check out the track list below:

1. In the End
2. Numb
3. Faint
4. One Step Closer
5. The Emptiness Machine (Radio Edit)
6. Bleed It Out (Radio Edit)
7. Breaking the Habit
8. Battle Symphony
9. Papercut
10. Castle of Glass
11. Heavy Is The Crown
12. Up From The Bottom
13. Over Each Other

“Linkin Park defined a generation of music fans, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring their music into Synth Riders,” said Kluge Interactive’s Sahin San. “Whether you grew up on Hybrid Theory or discovered them through their latest album, this pack is going to hit hard.”

Fun fact: the latest music pack is actually the game’s largest following the release of the Lady Gaga Music Pack in December 2025, which brought 11 of Lady Gaga’s most popular tracks to orb-smacking, note surfing game. Notably, since Synth Rider’s early access release in 2018 (full 1.0 release in 2019), DLC packs have typically hovered around 5-7 songs.

In the meantime, The Linkin Park Music Pack is available for purchase individually or as a full bundle, which you can grab starting today for Meta Quest, PSVR 2, and SteamVR headsets.

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Apple Raises Price of Vision Pro by $200 Amid RAM & Storage Shortage

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Apple is hiking the price of essentially all of its devices, which includes the already very pricy Vision Pro standalone mixed reality headset.

The News

As reported by 9to5Mac, a host of Apple devices have just gotten significant price increases. The company previously confirmed this would be the case in response to the ongoing RAM and storage crisis, although it wasn’t certain when, or by how much.

Now, the full updated list of Apple device prices is here, which has revealed that Apple has effectively bumped the latest M5 version of Vision Pro to $3,700.

Apple Vision Pro (M5) | courtesy Apple

Released in October 2025 for $3,500, the M5 Vision Pro is essentially a hardware refresh of the original launched in 2024, which included the company’s M2 chipset and the same $3,500 price tag.

Other devices to see similar price hikes include MacBook, iPad, iPad Air, Apple TV, HomePod, and even MacBook Neo, which the company launched for $600 in March, now bringing it $700. You can check out the full updated list over on 9to5Mac.

Speaking to Reuters, Apple reveals it held out for as long as possible before giving into price hikes:

“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement. “We ​have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising ⁠prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac.”

My Take

To the company’s credit, Apple isn’t the first to raises prices. In April, Meta announced it was hiking the price of Quest 3S and Quest 3, raising the price of them by $50 and $100 respectively.

Then, in May, Valve announced it was hiking the price of Steam Deck, which was sandwiched with the news that its was delaying both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, and rethinking its release and pricing strategy. To boot, Steam Machine is now available for pre-order for the princely sum of $1,050, which doesn’t particularly bode well for Steam Frame, its first standalone VR headset, which still doesn’t have a price or release date.

And although Apple isn’t the first to raises prices due to the current component crisis, it certainly won’t be the last. Any other holdouts in the market are likely soon to follow, if only because mighty Apple has justified it.

Apple isn’t actually the biggest drivers of these cost increases though, which are primarily due to the surging demand for AI data centers.

As it is, South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, and US company Micron Technology produce 93 percent of the world’s RAM. And although Apple has historically leveraged its power to outbid other companies to secure components at cheaper prices, it’s the big players in AI right now—Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Anthropic—that are hoovering up the lion’s share of the RAM and NAND.

I’m actively resisting the urge to call Apple a victim in all of this, because there is no greater victim than the end consumer, although it is odd to see the world’s third most-valuable company essentially shrug as its market cohorts blow up the AI bubble yet further—all while sporting a little over 4 trillion dollar market cap in the process.

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Amazon Prime Day Deal Reduces Quest 3S For First Time Since April Price Hike

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Amazon Prime Day is among us, which also means you can save a couple bucks on a brand new Meta Quest 3S.

Its only been a few months since Meta raised the price of Quest 3 and Quest 3S, essentially bumping prices across the board by $50 – 100.

Now, for Amazon’s June 23-26th Prime Day sale, you can actually get Quest 3S for the same or better than its previous MRSP depending on what you pick, which includes both 128GB and 256Gb storage options and various game bundles:

• Meta Quest 3S (128GB) Gorilla Tag bundle ($300)
• Meta Quest 3S (256GB) Gorilla Tag bundle ($380)
• Meta Quest 3S (256GB) Batman: Arkham Shadow bundle ($380)

Additionally, all of the choices above come with three free months of Horizon+, Quest’s subscription game service that lets you download and play a load of VR’s greatest games for as long as you’re a member.

As for the decidedly less cheap and cheerful Quest 3, Meta is still sitting on its regular pricing, although you can save $50 when buying a refurbished unit direct from Meta.

Notably, Meta’s permanent price increase in April brought Quest 3 (512GB) from $500 to $600, while Quest 3S now regularly starts at $350 (128GB) and $450 (256GB).

At the time, the company chalked up the increase due to increased costs of RAM, which have inflated by a wide margin starting late last year—an issue fans of Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame will likely encounter when the company finally releases pricing information for its first standalone VR headset, which will very likely follow Steam Machine’s eye-blistering $1,050 lead.

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Disney Song Pack Comes to ‘Trombone Champ’ VR in July, Including Toy Story & Little Mermaid Environments

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Flat2VR Studios announced during the VR Games Showcase today that Trombone: Champ Unflattened is getting a paid DLC pack next month that will bring six new Disney songs to VR’s silliest music game.

Coming at some point in July, Trombone Champ: Unflattened is getting a brand-new paid song pack featuring six beloved Disney classics, including:

• “A Whole New World” from Aladdin
• “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid
• “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story
• “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast
• “Circle of Life” from The Lion King
• “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid

The pack also includes two new themed performance environments, an iconic kid’s room inspired by Toy Story and an underwater escape inspired by The Little Mermaid.

Flat2VR Studios says we can expect the paid Disney DLC pack to arrive on all supported headsets in July, which includes Quest, PSVR 2, and SteamVR headsets.

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Omni One is the First VR Treadmill with Official Support for Meta Quest

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Virtuix has finally brought native Quest support to Omni One, making it Quest’s first officially supported VR treadmill.

As Virtuix’s consumer-focused VR treadmill, Omni One launched in 2024 with support for Pico 4 Ultra Enterprise, as well as PC VR headsets, which notably included Quest if connected to a capable PC via Link.

In February, the company announed it was taking part in the ‘Made for Meta’ program though, which promised to bring Omni One support to a number of Quest games in addition to giving the omni-directional VR treadmill a spot in Meta’s official Quest accessory store, putting it alongside devices like bHaptics TactSuit Pro, Logitech MX Link stylus, and Roto VR Explorer Chair.

Starting today, that’s where you’ll find it, as well as direct from Virtuix, priced at $2,595, now boasting native support for both Quest 2 and Quest 3.

“Omni One for Quest is a major milestone for VR gaming,” said Jan Goetgeluk, CEO of Virtuix. “Working with Meta to bring full-body movement to the Quest ecosystem creates an incredibly immersive and physically active gaming experience that takes VR to the next level. We’re excited to bring Omni One to millions of Quest users around the world.”

Granted, not all Quest games are supported on Omni One right now. Virtuix highlights a few that have been optimized, including VAIL, Forefront, The Boys: Trigger Warning, Star Trek: Infection, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, Men in Black: Most Wanted, Exoshock, and Zero Caliber 2.

Notably, Virtuix is bundling those last four games for free for a limited time with Omni One for Quest. The company says additional compatible games will be releasing over time; you can check out the evolving list here.

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Steam Machine Launches Next Week Starting at $1,050, Hints at What to Expect from Steam Frame’s Launch

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Valve today announced that Steam Machine is now available for pre-orders, starting at $1,050, and will officially launch on June 29th. While the announcement doesn’t include any direct details about Steam Frame availability, it offers clear hints about what to expect, including a randomized pre-order process.

The News

Courtesy Valve

Valve today announced availability of Steam Machine; the console-like gaming PC will begin shipping next week, on June 29th. Steam Machine is available for pre-order starting today:

• Steam Machine (512GB): $1,050
  • Steam Machine (512GB) + Steam Controller bundle: $1,130
• Steam Machine (2TB): $1,350
  • Steam Machine (2TB) + Steam Controller bundle: $1,430

At launch, Steam Machine is available in the US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australia. In Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Steam Machine will be available via KOMODO, a regional distributor.

In an effort to “improve the purchase experience and limit resellers,” Valve is using a randomized pre-order process. Basically, anyone that pre-orders between now and June 25th will be placed into a bucket, then Valve will generate a randomly ordered reservation queue from the bucket. Valve has an FAQ with more details here.

Valve also added some commentary about the pricing and availability of Steam Machine:

Since this has proven to be a weird time to launch hardware, we thought this would be a good opportunity to share more about how we got here.

Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.

Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.

Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch.

My Take

Courtesy Valve

We finally have firm launch details on Steam Machine. While Valve hasn’t said anything further about Steam Frame, it’s almost certain that its launch will follow the same blueprint, including a higher-than-anticipated price and randomized pre-order.

In Valve’s explanation above, the company said of the increasing cost of computer components: “the overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable.” While Steam Machine and Steam Frame are two very different products, they both rely on PC components like a processor, RAM, and storage. Steam Frame is thus not insulated from increases in component costs, and is almost certainly going to be more expensive than Valve originally hoped for.

The randomized pre-order process is an interesting development which feels more fair to me. Lots of people are excited to get their hands on new hardware, but favoring those who can be glued to their screen and put in a pre-order within minutes of availability—or worse, bots and resellers who have a profit motive to be first in line—doesn’t seem ideal. But I’m curious to hear what everyone else thinks; is this a good system? Drop a line in the comments below.

We still don’t know the actual release date of Steam Frame, but Valve will probably follow the same formula as above: meaning a very short period between pre-order and availability. And I don’t expect to be waiting too long for the Steam Frame launch announcement, considering we already saw stock flowing into US warehouses starting earlier this month.

The post Steam Machine Launches Next Week Starting at $1,050, Hints at What to Expect from Steam Frame’s Launch appeared first on Road to VR.

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EssilorLuxottica Partners with Applied Materials to Scale AR & Smart Glasses Optics

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EssilorLuxottica and Applied Materials have signed a long-term joint development agreement, which the companies say will accelerate the commercialization of next-gen optical systems for AR and AI-powered smart glasses.

EssilorLuxottica has been a close partner with Meta over the past five years, having released multiple generations of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in addition to its first pair of display glasses, Meta Ray-Ban Display.

Now the Franco-Italian eyewear brand announced it’s partnering with Applied Materials, the US-based semiconductor equipment giant, to scale optics for consumer AR and smart glasses of the near future.

Details of the partnership are still thin on the ground, however the companies are slated to collaborate on R&D at a dedicated lab located on Applied Materials’ Silicon Valley campus, which is said to focus on advanced optical technologies, including waveguides, adaptive lens systems, and materials innovations.

Ray-Ban Meta glasses | Courtesy EssilorLuxottica, Meta

“Designing, building and scaling next-generation smart glasses will require deep collaboration across the technology ecosystem,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “By bringing together Applied Materials’ leadership in photonics and materials engineering with EssilorLuxottica’s expertise in lenses and smart eyewear, we are accelerating the development and commercialization of advanced display smart glasses that can create entirely new user experiences.”

Note: In general, waveguides are important because they allow for a lightweight, glasses-like form factors and transparent lenses, which come in contrast to birdbath optics, which tend to allow for a larger field-of-view (FOV), higher image quality, and greater optical efficiency, but at the cost of being bulkier overall and less discrete.

On the flipside, today’s generation of waveguides tend to suffer from lower light efficiency, requiring brighter, more energy-hungry source displays. They also tend to have a lower FOV than birdbath optics (see: XREAL Aura) and a smaller eyebox.

While still unconfirmed, optics manufacturers SCHOTT and Lumus are widely thought to be the manufacturers behind Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses. It’s unclear at this time whether this means EssilorLuxottica is looking to develop its own AR hardware relationships separate from Meta, although the competitive landscape is rapidly changing.

In late 2024, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced they were extending their smart eyewear partnership to 2030, however since then Google announced it was partnering with a cadre of companies, including Samsung, as well as eyewear brands Gentle Monster, Warby Parker, and Kering.

And as the first wave of Android XR-clad smart glasses are expected to release sometime later this year, Apple is also reportedly working on its own smart glasses, as the company has allegedly accelerated its efforts amid a wider push for AI wearables.

More recently, Snap unveiled its first consumer pair of AR glasses, the sixth-gen Snap Specs, which are set to release sometime this fall for $2,200. The latest Snap Specs are said to feature a 51-degree FOV, although we’re still hoping to not only demo the company’s next big bet on AR, but also see the full specs sheet, which ought to include info on some outlying basics, such as resolution, brightness, and refresh rate.

To learn more about the difference between smart glasses and AR glasses, check out our handy primer.

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