XR Gamer Digest
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Courts Ban Meta Smart Glasses

Courts Ban Meta Smart Glasses

D.E.C.A.Y. to SteamVR Early Access, Beat Saber is cheaper, Threads on Meta Quest

August 13, 2026

XR = eXtended Reality (everything VR, AR, MR)

📣 If you only read one thing today 📣

🎮 Valve has rewritten the rules for its Steam Frame Verified badge, dropping the frame-rate floor from 90 fps to 72 fps while requiring native VR titles to hold 1,728 × 1,728 per eye during normal play.

📢 Certification is the quality contract between Valve, developers, and buyers on a platform that hasn't shipped yet — trading a strict smoothness bar for a guaranteed sharpness bar tells the whole ecosystem that Valve wants a broad verified catalog on day one rather than a short, purist one.

🎮 It means far more games - including ports and mods that could never sustain 90 fps - will carry the badge when Steam Frame launches, and every one of them now comes with a resolution guarantee that the old rule never provided.

🥳 But there’s more:

🎯 Steam Frame Verified status has been granted to the fan-made Half-Life 2: VR Mod.

💪 Existing accounts won't carry over when Supernatural returns this fall as the independent Supernatural Health.

💰 XGIMI's camera-free MemoMind One has crossed $1 million on Kickstarter with three weeks still to run.

eXtend your gaming:

Welcome to XR Gamer Digest #113

XR Games

🎯 Steam Frame Verified status has been granted to the fan-made Half-Life 2: VR Mod, whose team added eye-tracked foveated rendering, smoothed controller poses, a crossbow sniper scope, and low-end CPU gains along the way.

⛳ What began as an April Fools' joke is now real: Mighty Coconut confirmed Walkabout Dungeon Golfer at its Presents showcase as a crossplay VR-and-flatscreen roguelike putter-crawler targeting summer 2027.

☢️ On August 21, solo studio AGaming+ brings D.E.C.A.Y. to SteamVR Early Access - a post-nuclear survival shooter about maintaining radiation shields from a bunker, with roughly a year of Early Access planned.

🗡️ Crementif's BetterVR mod for Breath of the Wild is closing in on 1.0 with multiplayer and a stereo-rendering overhaul still to come, while a Mario Kart 8 VR conversion has been teased as the next target.

XR Entertainment

⚾ Four live Friday Night Baseball games will be streamed to Vision Pro in Apple's 180-degree Immersive Video format between August 28 and September 18, with full replays available afterward in the Apple TV app.

💪 Existing accounts won't carry over when Supernatural returns this fall as the independent Supernatural Health, and the monthly price climbs back to $20 while music licensing talks keep part of the 3,000-workout catalog uncertain.

🎵 Eight years after launch, Beat Saber has been cut to $19.99 on the Meta Horizon Store, where it still ships with over 60 free tracks and a 300-plus catalog of licensed songs.

XR News

👓 At 63 grams and $300, Viture Pro 2 arrives as the company's slimmest tethered AR glasses yet, pairing 1,600-nit micro-OLED panels and a 50-degree FOV with a new $100 pocketable Mobile Dock Mini for Switch 2.

🎬 Quest owners can now retroactively capture highlights: XR Replay, from the Quest Games Optimizer developer, continuously buffers thirty seconds to ten minutes of gameplay in the background for $3.99.

💰 XGIMI's camera-free MemoMind One has crossed $1 million on Kickstarter with three weeks still to run, suggesting real appetite for $400 display glasses that deliberately leave the lens out.

🎮 The bar for a Steam Frame Verified badge was quietly lowered by Valve from 90 fps to 72 fps, though native VR titles must now also sustain 1,728 × 1,728 per eye during normal play.

💬 Threads has landed on Meta Quest as a free native VR app, complete with hand-tracking navigation, voice dictation, and Horizon Gallery attachments, a month after debuting on Ray-Ban Display glasses.

⚖️ Following New York's lead, His Majesty's Courts & Tribunals Service will confiscate Meta smart glasses at the door of every criminal, civil, and family court in England and Wales, returning them on exit.

🥽 Priced at $549, or $799 with eye tracking, DPVR's enterprise-focused P1 Max opens to sample and test orders in November, offering Snapdragon XR2 compute, a 3664 × 1920 display, and dual-vent cooling.

AI Games

📉 Because capital keeps flowing toward AI, live services, and mobile, S&P analyst Neil Barbour warns that traditional PC and console studios face tougher funding odds, with Q2's 23 games M&A deals totalling just $1.15 billion.

🧠 Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight model released by Meta under Apache 2.0, runs agentic tasks locally on a single consumer GPU and marks the line Zuckerberg is drawing between AI people can own and the closed Muse Spark he won't release.

🦺 Nearly $2 million has been distributed by Meta across 30 US organizations through its AI Glasses Impact Grants, chosen from around 500 applicants working on accessibility, jobsite safety, agriculture, and workforce training.

Until next time, enjoy your other reality gaming!

Bobby Voicu