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

🥳 But there’s more:

🏃 DreamVR has revealed The Rifted Skies, a high-speed parkour roguelite whose flowing movement doubles as its combat system.

🧟 YUNGBLUD's grief-driven single Zombie is now slashable in Beat Saber.

⭐ Snap is negotiating a roughly $100 million stock deal to enlist Robert Downey Jr. as ambassador (reportedly!).

eXtend your gaming:

Welcome to XR Gamer Digest #108

XR Games

🌊 A community VR mod for Subnautica 2 now folds in full 6DOF motion controls, letting PC VR divers swim, scan, and build with tracked hands rather than a gamepad.

🏃 DreamVR has revealed The Rifted Skies, a high-speed parkour roguelite whose flowing movement doubles as its combat system, arriving on Quest and SteamVR this fall in early access.

🧟 Unveiled at the VR Games Showcase, Breachers: Outbreak pivots Triangle Factory's PvP shooter into a four-player co-op zombie extraction game headed to Quest, Pico, SteamVR, and flatscreen PC later this year.

🏚️ Free-to-play, co-op extraction horror Inwigo dropped onto Meta Quest, sending teams into procedurally shuffled haunted mansions where all loot vanishes if nobody escapes.

🚀 A stylized sci-fi extraction shooter, Drifters: Blackout Crew was announced by Sweet Surrender studio Salmi Games for Quest and SteamVR, stranding four-player crews in deep space to raid guarded facilities via jetpack.

🎮 Recapping its June showcase, Meta detailed 28 Quest games and updates — headlined by the franchise's first VR entry, PAYDAY: Aces High, alongside H3VR2, Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux, and more.

🌆 Because official support never came, the community has built cyberpunk-vr-port, an open-source Cyberpunk 2077 mod adding OpenXR, motion-controlled hands with full-arm IK, and separate weapon tracking for true VR aiming..

XR Entertainment

 🏃 Virtuix has brought native Quest 2 and Quest 3 support to its $2,595 Omni One, crowning it the first omnidirectional VR treadmill officially backed by Meta's "Made for Meta" accessory program.

🎸 Landing as a surprise drop, the Linkin Park Music Pack for Synth Riders bundles 13 career-spanning tracks — from Hybrid Theory to recent releases — making it the rhythm game's largest paid DLC yet across Quest, PSVR2, and SteamVR.

🧟 YUNGBLUD's grief-driven single Zombie is now slashable in Beat Saber as the game's newest Shock Drop, playable on Quest.

📡 Built as a 3U rack-mounted powerhouse for live Apple Immersive Video, SpatialGen's Zeus ingests, encodes, and distributes ProRes streams at up to 16K and 100 Gb/s, quietly underpinning immersive Vision Pro broadcasts like Spectrum's Lakers games.

🖼️ Because no VR version of Google Arts & Culture ever materialized, professor Eric Mosinger taught himself Unity and built ArtQuest VR — a Quest museum whose latest DLC adds over 1,400 optimized 3D sculptures and artifacts sourced from the Louvre, the Met, and the British Museum.

XR News

🔧 Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon Reality Elite, a new XR chipset delivering up to 60% more GPU power, 20% longer battery life, and cooler thermals to enable slimmer next-gen AR and VR headsets like the Xreal Aura.

🕶️ Weighing just 93 grams, Unseen Reality's URXR One debuted at AWE 2026 as spatial-computing glasses with dual Micro-OLED displays, a 90-degree FOV, 6DoF tracking, and hand-gesture control aimed at all-day wear.

⭐ Reportedly, Snap is negotiating a roughly $100 million stock deal to enlist Robert Downey Jr. as ambassador for its $2,195 Specs AR glasses, betting his Tony Stark image can make the divisive eyewear look desirable.

📉 Combat Waffle Studios, the developer behind hit extraction shooter Ghosts of Tabor, has laid off staff after a platform partner cancelled a project, becoming the latest casualty of the wider VR-industry pullback.

💸 Squeezed by the ongoing RAM and storage crisis, the M5 Vision Pro has been bumped up $200 to $3,700, part of an across-the-board Apple price hike also hitting MacBook, iPad, and Apple TV.

💬 After years of fan requests, an official Discord app landed free on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and up, bringing full servers, DMs, and voice calls plus a month of free Nitro for newcomers.

👓 A leaked Galaxy Glasses Manager app has surfaced, revealing Samsung's upcoming Android XR eyewear — complete with charging case, pairing flow, One UI XR branding, and Gemini-powered features — possibly bound for the July 22 Unpacked.

AI News

🎧 By hiring Paul Meade, the Apple VP who spent seven years leading Vision Pro hardware and its smart-glasses effort, OpenAI has stripped Apple of its most seasoned AR engineering chief just as its wearables ambitions ramp up.

🕶️ Dropping the Ray-Ban label for the first time, Meta launched its own $299 Meta Glasses lineup - matching Gen 2 internals with 8-hour battery and the new Muse Spark AI - to undercut rivals and pull AI eyewear toward the mainstream.

🧠 Meta has unveiled Brain2Qwerty v2, a non-invasive brain-to-text system that now decodes full sentences at 61% word accuracy, aiming to restore communication for people with speech-impairing conditions without surgical implants.

💰 Backlash erupted after Meta capped Conversation Focus — an on-device hearing-assist feature needing no servers — at three free hours monthly, with a $20 Meta One Premium subscription lifting the ceiling only to 15.

🤖 At an internal town hall, Mark Zuckerberg conceded that AI agent development hasn't accelerated as expected and that the recent 8,000-person layoffs weren't as "clean" as intended, though he expects payoffs within three to six months.

Until next time, enjoy your other reality gaming!

Bobby Voicu