This is the first newsletter of the Winter! And to celebrate it, I got sick as hell, and I have a fever. My brain is dizzy, so I don’t take any responsibility for what I’ll be writing in this newsletter. I hope everything will make sense, but if you see any reference to the Teletubbies, it means that my brain is fully gone. Still, enjoy this summary of the most interesting XR news of the past week!
Top news of the week
Meta cancels 3rd party headsets for HorizonOS
More than a year and a half ago, Meta announced that third-party manufacturers would start making headsets for the Quest operating system, which was rebranded as HorizonOS for the occasion. After a long silence on the matter, it seems the whole program has been “paused”, which means that it has been canceled.
In a statement to Road To VR, Meta confirmed that it has “paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market”. It also added that they are “committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves”. Long story short: no more ASUS and Lenovo headsets.
I honestly think this decision makes a lot of sense, and it probably should have been taken before. Before I got the news, I was discussing with a friend about these headsets, and my personal take was that they were at least postponed by another year, because releasing them now would make no sense. The VR market is stagnating, and if a new headset that is similar to the current ones is released, it has no chance of succeeding. So a Lenovo headset that feels like a Quest Pro would sell quite badly today, unless it becomes super expensive and is sold to high-budget enterprise markets, like the military. To make things even worse, these companies would just earn money from the hardware sales, because the software and the store would be completely controlled by Meta. So this partnership today would not work, because these companies would just lose a lot of money developing and selling a few units of these headsets. We’ve already seen the partnership with LG shattering for the new Quest Pro; it doesn’t come as a surprise that things did not work with ASUS and Lenovo, either.
To these reasons that concern the external manufacturers, I would add a few reasons that, instead, are more about Meta. First of all, even if Mark Zuckerberg sees his company as the open alternative to Apple, Meta Reality Labs has always operated more like a slightly-more-open Apple than like Google. Meta has always wanted tight control over the hardware and the software, cared about the style of its product, curated as much as it could, and so on. I personally don’t remember Google ever saying to Google Play developers, “now you all go free to play”, but this is what Meta is pushing for on its store now.
An Open Quest ecosystem seemed a bit of a stretch since the beginning, especially because the Quest Runtime has not been thought of like that since the beginning, so opening it up would require a massive undertaking. Google has a lot of experience in building a shared operating system between devices, instead, and even its previous foray into VR, Google Daydream, was already an open platform. So, as Road To VR states, too, Android XR is the platform with the highest chances of becoming the “Android of XR”. I think in the future we may have a very closed platform with Apple, an open platform with Android XR, and something in the middle with Meta.
Last but not least, we should remember that Meta is now performing huge budget cuts, and probably we’ll lay off many people in January. Resources (people, money) will be moved from VR/MR to smartglasses, and this means that serious cuts should happen in the XR division. This project of third-party headsets is for sure a victim of these cuts. Becoming an open platform would require a lot of money and people that the company does not have at this moment.
John Carmack said since day 1 that he didn’t like the idea of HorizonOS. Well, it seems he was right, like most of the time…
More info (Meta cancels 3rd-party headsets — Road To VR)
More info (Meta cancels 3rd-party headsets — Upload VR)
Other relevant news
Ready Player Me has been acquired by Netflix and will shut down its avatar service
While the news of the Horizon headsets did not impress me, I was rather shocked when I discovered that Ready Player Me was acquired by Netflix, and for this reason will shut down its services.
The acquisition makes sense for both companies. It is well known that Netflix wants to enter the gaming entertainment field, or at least hybridize movies and games, so it for sure needs an avateering system that is proven to work and is fully inclusive. Ready Player Me, on the other hand, had a great product, but its monetization strategy was not fully clear. It raised more than 70M during the metaverse hype, but no one understood how they could return that money back to the investors. So this exit brings benefits to both of them. And I’m happy that the founders are going to get some money from this acquisition, because they deserve it.
But I’m pretty pissed off because the service is going to shut down, and also pretty abruptly. The final day for RPM to be up and running is January 31st, 2026, meaning that all users having a Ready Player Me avatar, and especially all the platforms that integrated this service, have only one month to find a substitute. This is really bad, and it is going to create troubles to many companies (I know personally a few of them). Some other alternative avatar services like VRoid or Genie avatars exist, but they are not as widespread as RPM was.
Ready Player Me was the closest we ever came to a distributed identity service for the metaverse. Since most VR platforms (e.g. VRChat) integrated it, it was possible for a user to have the same avatar inside different applications. The fact that this is now going to disappear with the same speed as Thanos snapping its fingers shows us that an identity service for the metaverse can not rely on a single company. There should be a protocol/standard, plus it would also be ideal to have an open/distributed service for it. I wonder when something like this is going to be built… I would be happy to support any initiative in this sense.
Anyway, this is not the first and will not be the last time that something similar happens in XR. People in the space for more than 10 years will for sure remember Metaio: it was the gold standard to build mobile AR applications, then Apple acquired it, and it disappeared overnight…
(Thanks Georgy M for the tip)
Boz says that VR is not dead
During one of his AMA sessions on Instagram, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, answered the question of VR is dead for Meta this way:
Every now and then there’s just a narrative that people cannot help writing, and I’ll give you the way to know.
First of all, the answer is no: VR is not dead.We’re also investing a lot in glasses and AI, and that’s the trick.
The way to know if there’s a convenient narrative is if it appears zero-sum. Meta is a big company. We can invest in many things. We can invest in VR, glasses, and AI — and by the way, we have been for years.
Every year we go through a budget process, and in that budget process, we ask every team, “Hey, can you do the same work more effectively?” We’ve got better tools, we’ve got AI, we’ve got things. You’re trying to right-size it. How big is the market? How fast is it growing? Is that what we expected? If it’s slower than we expected, let’s make sure our burn rate is lower.If it’s faster than expected, let’s double down and make sure we take advantage and don’t cede it to other people. You’re being smart about it, but it’s normal stuff.
(Thanks Upload VR, for the transcription)
Long story short: Meta is cutting budget from VR/MR, but is still committed to it. But the priorities are smartglasses+AI now.
News worth a mention
PortalVR lets you play VR games without VR
Greg Fodor, who you may remember for his work at AltspaceVR and Mozilla Hubs, has just released an interesting piece of software called PortalVR. PortalVR lets you play your SteamVR games on a flat screen, using your Quest controllers as the controllers and an Oculus Quest as the “tracking station”. There are ongoing debates inside the community about this product: some people think it is an abomination, because VR should be lived in an immersive way, and a VR game is good only inside VR. Other people see its value in some use cases, like developers having to test a VR application, or letting children play Beat Saber without forcing them to wear a headset.
Personally, I think that an option more is always better than an option less, so I’m personally happy that this has been put on the market. And I think it’s also an interesting technical achievement. I would still play the most games I can in VR, but for instance, as a developer, I find it annoying as hell to put and remove the headset thousands time a day when I’m debugging an application, so this may come handy to me…
More info (Video of PortalVR)
More info (Some people comparing it to Wii)
More info (Official website)
Quest updates hand tracking and hand interactions
The new Quest runtime brings with it an update on the hand tracking algorithm, which is now more accurate than ever on fast hand motions. Hand tracking is now really usable in fitness and rhythm apps. At the same time, Meta’s Interaction SDK for Unity got a major update, too, introducing a lot of new hand-based interactions, like new modalities for hand-based locomotion, throwing, climbing, and much more! It is not a mystery that Meta is working on a sort of Vision Pro clone, so it’s doubling down its efforts on hand tracking.
More info (Improvements to Meta Hand Tracking — Road To VR)
More info (Improvements to Meta Hand Tracking — Upload VR)
More info (Meta Interaction SDK)
Quest gets Disney+ app
The Disney+ video streaming service is finally available on Quest, but with a few caveats. First of all, for now, it is US-only, with a general rollout coming in early 2026. Then, you can only stream 2D content and not also 3D content like on the Vision Pro. The news has been received very well by the community, which is glad it can watch quality content on its headset.
The Quest 3S deal from Best Buy is back
Quest 3S is on sale for $250 again, and from Best Buy it comes with a $50 gift card, 1 month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. It seems a great offer to me, so if you are on a budget and you want to play VR games, take the offer and buy it!
Discover The Meta Horizon Store’s 2025 Holiday Sale!
Meta has just started its 2025 Holiday Sale on the Horizon Store, with many discounts on “blockbuster” titles, like Asgard’s Wrath 2, Behemoth, Metro Awakening, and even Reach, even if it is a recent title. I suggest you have a look at this, because it seems like a cool initiative…
Some news about content
- Trip the Light is a VR dancing game that recently entered early access on Quest. The price is €4
- Mixed reality tactical roguelite Banners & Bastions is now out of Early Access
- BattleCrafter VR is all about restoring the weapons and armor of old, letting you get a closer look at everything from ancient swords to modern rifles, and learn about them. It costs $20, but it is currently discounted
- Co-op platformer VR Giants is now available on Quest 3 and 3S, and you can invite a friend to join you at no extra charge
- Game Night is a new co-located mixed reality party title. Currently, it allowsyou to play a mini game where you have to push your opponents out of a platform
- Espire: MR Missions gets a standalone release in early access, separating the Espire VR game from the MR one. Existing Espire 2 owners get it for free
- Population One is stopping to sell the game for PCVR users because PCVR cheaters are ruining the game for others. It is, in my opinion, a bit of an extreme solution. Someone speculates that it may be a trick to prevent people on Steam Frame from playing this Meta title, but I’m not sure if I believe in this theory
More info (Trip The Light)
More info (Banners & Bastions)
More info (Battlecrafter VR)
More info (VR Giants)
More info (Game Night)
More info (Espire MR Missions)
More info (Population One)
Some reviews about content
- Pocket Lands delivers a promising new sandbox for building digital worlds. It needs more blocks and more features, but it is a good start
- Glassbreakers is smart, competitive, and highly addictive, and stands as one of the best strategy experiences available in VR. But it’s not always easy to find other players to play it with
- Ninja Warrior VR is a fun, but a bit difficult, recreation of the TV show, about which it preserves the spirit
- Street Gods looked promising from the trailer, but it is actually pretty disappointing
- Titanic: Echoes From The Past is a charming location-based experience that lets you live what it was like having a trip on the Titanic
More info (Pocket Lands)
More info (Glassbreakers)
More info (Ninja Warrior VR)
More info (Street Gods)
More info (Titanic: Echoes From The Past)
The TeleTubbies
The Teletubbies are in a way cute, but also creepy. And I just discovered that 12 years ago someone made a sort of VR Slenderman game, but with the Teletubbies in place of Slenderman. What the hell…
More info
Other news
I reviewed the RayNeo X3 Pro smartglasses, and found them quite impressive
Rob Cole reviewed the Pimax Crystal Super, and wrote a super review about it
Niantic Spatial and Vantor Partner to Deliver Unified Air-to-Ground Positioning in GPS-Denied Areas
Valve released on GitHub some OpenXR Utilities for Unity
News from partners (and friends)
I attended A Christmas Carol VR!
Every year, Agile Lens (the company of the amazing Alex Coulombe) organizes for Christmas a live theater event about Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”. It is always free, a gift of some VR performative art to the community. This year, I’ve finally managed to attend it, and I’ve found it very interesting. Be sure to register next year, when it is going to happen again!
Learn more
Discover FM DUO camera!
Meet the FM DUO, a VR camera that is capable of filming up to 12K @30fps, and 8K @60fps. With built-in RTMP live streaming and 5G connectivity, the FM·DUO will immerse your viewers in real time! The FM·DUO features 2 full-frame CMOS sensors, with 6000 x 6000 pixels each. This allows for high-resolution zooming capabilities. Not only can you narrow in on one subject, but you can also focus on singular details of the subject’s facial expressions, clothing textures, and a multitude of other small details, enabling a much more immersive experience of VR video.
Visit Product Website
Some XR fun
AI slop, AI slop everywhere
Funny link
Finally a good system to counteract the Apple Vision Pro being front-heavy…
Funny link
Donate for good
Like last week, also this week in this final paragraph I won’t ask you to donate to my blog, but to the poor people who are facing the consequences of the war. Please donate to the Red Cross to handle the current humanitarian situation in Ukraine. I will leave you the link to do that below.
Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:
- Alex Gonzalez VR
- DeoVR
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
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- Richard Penny
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Meta)
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