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

🥳 And there’s more:

🧽 MR Clean turns your real room into a hand‑tracked mixed‑reality cleaning playground, coming to Quest 3/3S

🏀 For select local Vision Pro owners, six upcoming Lakers games will be reserved in Apple Immersive with multi‑angle,

🕶️ Demand for Meta Ray‑Ban Display AI glasses has been so intense that Meta has paused their early‑2026 launch in the UK, France, Italy, and Canada,

eXtend your gaming:

Welcome to XR Gamer Digest #90

Discounts and Tips

🔥 Meta’s Warm Welcome Sale is offering up to 50% off a wide range of Quest VR titles to kick off the new year with discounted games.

XR Games

🧽 MR Clean turns your real room into a hand‑tracked mixed‑reality cleaning playground, coming to Quest 3/3S with party modes, virtual object detailing, and planned collab challenges in early 2026 .

🗡️ An unofficial BetterVR mod is bringing fully stereo 6DOF PC VR with motion‑controlled weapons and interactions to the emulated Wii U version of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, albeit with some expected emulation jank and performance demands. .

🕵️ In Panoptic II, a single VR “seeker” will hunt up to four mobile non‑VR “hiders” across new maps, as the devs expand their asymmetric PC‑vs‑VR formula onto Quest 3 and phones with Patreon‑funded development and early test builds.

🤖 UNDERDOGS’ PSVR 2 version won’t receive the upcoming multiplayer mode, since the small, resource‑strained dev team found player numbers on Sony’s headset too low to justify the extra porting work.

🧛 In Dixotomia’s full Quest launch out of Early Access, players step into the role of a vampire fighting other vampires in a story‑driven sci‑fi shooter that mixes gunplay with supernatural powers.

🦕 UG’s free‑to‑play mix of social multiplayer, arm‑swing locomotion, and dinosaur pet‑raising has, in barely half a year, rocketed it to the Quest store’s most‑rated and top‑earning ranks with standout engagement metrics.

🎮 For 2025 on Steam, PC VR playtime was dominated by long‑standing staples -Skyrim VR, Beat Saber, Half‑Life: Alyx, Gorilla Tag, sims, and mods - while only one newly released title cracked the top‑50 most‑played list.

🥷 Catana: Red Flowers arrives on Quest as a hyper‑stylized, blood‑soaked samurai VR slasher where precision swordplay and flowing combat runs turn each level into a fast, violent action vignette.

🗡️ Legendary Tales, a dark fantasy co‑op action RPG, has finally landed on Quest with physics‑driven melee, spellcasting, and dungeon‑crawling loot hunts designed for groups of VR adventurers.

XR Entertainment

🏀 For select local Vision Pro owners, six upcoming Lakers games will be reserved in Apple Immersive with multi‑angle, courtside‑plus 3D views via Spectrum SportsNet and NBA app authentication, plus replays arriving within about 24 hours .

🖼️ By turning famous paintings into full‑scale, customizable VR galleries, ArtQuest VR reimagines how a museum can help visitors study brushwork, context, and curation—bugs, missing ambience, and all.

XR News

📈 A new ARtillery Intelligence forecast sees global VR revenues climbing from $12.2 billion in 2024 to about $18.9 billion in 2029, with Meta’s low‑margin Quest strategy still driving most of the market’s growth despite a soft 2025.

🖼️ Apple’s open‑source SHARP model now converts a single 2D photo into a real‑time, photorealistic 3D Gaussian scene in under a second, sharply reducing the data and time usually needed for XR asset creation.

👓 At CES 2026, PetaRay and Quanta debuted a commercial‑ready AR headset using LiFiD light‑field optics to deliver arbitrary focal depth, aiming to eliminate VAC and support long‑duration, enterprise‑grade use.

💔 Cloudhead Games, the studio behind Pistol Whip, has laid off roughly 70% of its staff - 40 people - leaving 16 employees to keep existing content and long‑gestating new VR projects alive in a tougher platform landscape.

🔬 Lumus introduced its next‑gen ZOE 70° FOV and Z‑30/ Z‑30 2.0 waveguides at CES 2026, signaling a split between wide‑FOV immersive optics and ultra‑thin, glanceable AR glass designs for everyday wear.

🎮 After its Meta Horizon OS headset plans were shelved, Asus pivoted to partner with XREAL on the ROG XREAL R1 gaming glasses, which offer 1080p per eye at a standout 240Hz via microOLEDs and an external dock for PCs and consoles.

📝 Meta is rolling out new Ray-Ban Display features - including an in-lens teleprompter, EMG-based finger-writing for WhatsApp/Messenger, expanded walking navigation, and early EMG integrations with Garmin cars and University of Utah accessibility projects.

🤝 Google has deepened its multi‑year partnership with XREAL, elevating the Aura compute‑puck glasses as a lead Android XR reference device with 70° FOV, 6DoF tracking, and Gemini integration to anchor Google’s consumer AR push.

🪖 Pimax’s thin‑and‑light Dream Air PC VR headset has finally begun shipping in small beta batches using a simple fabric “2D headstrap,” with more advanced 3D and hard strap options to follow as wider rollout ramps.

🕶️ Demand for Meta Ray‑Ban Display AI glasses has been so intense that Meta has paused their early‑2026 launch in the UK, France, Italy, and Canada, prioritizing long US waitlists and limiting purchases to in‑store appointments.

🕶️ Panasonic has stepped away from the MeganeX project, leaving Shiftall to fully own, develop, and support the thin‑and‑light PC VR headset line going forward.

🔭 Lumus’ new ZOE glass waveguide demonstrates a claimed world‑first 70° AR field of view, aiming to match Meta’s Orion prototype capabilities without exotic silicon carbide optics.

💬 Responding to Reality Labs layoffs and studio closures, Palmer Luckey argues that Meta is trimming internal game efforts rather than abandoning VR, since it still runs by far the largest XR team.

📉 Meta is axing Horizon Workrooms, business SKUs, and about 1,500 Reality Labs roles as it redirects investment from metaverse bets toward AI‑driven wearables and mobile experiences.

🏢 With Horizon Workrooms being shut down and its data deleted in February, Meta is retreating from its early VR office experiment and nudging Quest users toward third‑party productivity apps instead.

🦇 A planned Batman: Arkham Shadow follow‑up for Quest 3 has reportedly been cancelled mid‑development after Meta closed the studio behind the first game.

🧙‍♂️ An unannounced Harry Potter VR title intended as a Quest exclusive has been scrapped, caught in the same wave of Meta studio cuts and project cancellations.

👓 Even as it reins in metaverse spending, Meta is reportedly gearing up to at least double - if not triple - Ray‑Ban smart glasses production in 2026 to meet rising demand.

🚀 Google’s Android XR platform gains momentum as XREAL raises an additional 100 million dollars to scale its AR hardware and software ecosystem.

🪖 Distance Technologies is adapting its lightweight AR goggles for defense use, giving soldiers see‑through tactical overlays in a compact, field‑ready form factor.

🧠 Lynx’s newly revealed R2 mixed‑reality headset squeezes an unusually wide field of view into a very small shell, signaling a push toward more compact standalone MR devices.

Until next time, enjoy your other reality gaming!

Bobby Voicu