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

🥳 But there’s more:

🏎️ Simcade VR racer Downtown Club hits full release on Quest and Pico with update v1.4.0.

🎬 A multisensory Blade Runner XR experience that will tour several North American cities starting in 2027.

⌨️ Google unveiled Rambler, a Gemini-powered Gboard dictation feature with multilingual code-switching.

eXtend your gaming:

Welcome to XR Gamer Digest #103

We’ve all noticed how AI is getting used more and more in game development and not only. So, to keep up with it, we added an AI section to this newsletter. It helps keep us up to date with what happens in the space and I hope it will be something useful for you, as well.

XR Games

🏎️ Leaving Early Access on June 11, simcade VR racer Downtown Club hits full release on Quest and Pico with update v1.4.0, adding voice chat, in-game rain, slipstream mechanics, and AI improvements.

✈️ Sky Legends: An Aeropostal Epic has gone gold at developer Super AC, with the early-1900s aviation narrative adventure set to take flight on Quest 3 on May 18 and a PC VR version still in the works.

🐒 Following heavy community demand, the Quest horror hit Scary Baboon is getting its "Fight Back" update from ENVER, which finally arms players with weapons so they can swing back at the lab's monsters instead of just fleeing.

XR Entertainment

🎬 Behaviour Interactive and PHI Studio, in partnership with rights-holder Alcon Entertainment, are co-producing a multisensory Blade Runner XR experience that will tour several North American cities starting in 2027.

XR News

🛠️ Originally unveiled at last year's Connect, Meta's open-source Immersive Web SDK has been updated with an "agentic workflow" that lets AI assistants like Claude Code and Copilot generate, test, and validate WebXR scenes - rebuilding the Project Flowerbed demo in just 15 hours.

🍎 According to analyst Mark Gurman, the Vision Pro 2 remains years away and won't arrive before 2028, as Apple has reportedly diverted resources toward AI pendants, camera-equipped AirPods, and smart glasses prototypes.

🤖 Following news of roughly 1,500 Reality Labs layoffs (about 10% of the unit), Meta has quietly acquired humanoid-robot startup Assured Robot Intelligence on May 1 and is redirecting talent toward consumer wearables and AI rather than ambitious metaverse projects.

👜 Luxury parent company Kering, partnering with Google for AI and platform support, plans to launch Gucci-branded smart glasses in 2027 in a move that could reshape AR's pricing, distribution, and status appeal.

📅 Meta Connect 2026 will be held September 23–24 at the Menlo Park campus, with Mark Zuckerberg teasing what looks like a new pair of smart glasses while industry watchers wait to see whether a next-gen Quest headset finally gets announced.

🕶️ At a London Galaxy Unpacked reportedly set for July 22, Samsung is expected to debut its first smart glasses - an Android XR–powered, audio-only "edge device" styled in collaboration with Gentle Monster and positioned to take on Ray-Ban Meta.

AI News

🎮 Origin Lab has closed an $8M seed round led by Lightspeed Ventures to build a marketplace where video-game companies can license their digital assets to world-model labs like Yann LeCun's AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs as physical-world training data.

⌨️ At Android Show: I/O Edition 2026, Google unveiled Rambler, a Gemini-powered Gboard dictation feature with multilingual code-switching that rolls out first on Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones and squeezes startups like Wispr Flow at the OS level.

📞 After being chosen by Amazon Ring over more than 40 rival AI voice vendors to handle 100% of its inbound calls, Vapi raised a $50M Series B led by Peak XV Partners at around a $500M valuation, with over a billion calls now processed on its platform.

Until next time, enjoy your other reality gaming!

Bobby Voicu