The XR Week Peek (2026.06.14): Apple announces updates to VisionOS, Pico Project Swan was leaked, and more!
I’m here in Long Beach, California, and I can’t wait for AWE to start tomorrow! It’s going to be a great event, with the Snap Specs announcement, the public demos of XREAL Aura glasses, and a lot more! I will report to you as much as I can… stay tuned on my blog and my social media accounts! But now let’s get back talking about the XR news of the week…
Top news of the week
Apple announces Siri AI and new features for Vision Pro
This week started with WWDC, the annual event for developers by Apple. It has been the last WWDC for Tim Cook, but most probably not the last WWDC for the Vision product line at Apple.
The main theme of the keynote was AI, which is not surprising considering that it is the main theme of all the keynotes of tech companies nowadays. Apple has implemented modified Gemini models and finally evolved Siri into what it should have been since the beginning: Siri AI, a conversational assistant that can help you with many tasks. Apple then proceeded to demo Siri AI, showing things that we’ve already seen ChatGPT and Claude do at least one year ago, but since it is Apple, we should all pretend not to have seen anything like that before.
The good thing for us XR people is that the Vision Pro had a little part in the keynote. Every time the family of Apple devices was shown, the Vision Pro was there. And during the keynote, an update was also announced for it about panorama pictures becoming environments for the Vision Pro. Siri AI also landed on the Vision Pro as an orb you can look at and ask questions. Siri AI on Vision Pro can analyze both virtual elements and the world around you.
In the sessions after the main keynote, Apple unveiled many other updates for VisionOS and its related ecosystems, like improvements to RealityKit and RealityComposer, the integration with Godot, new updated Google Maps with Gaussian Splats, the ability to preview 3D elements, and especially the possibility of creating accessories that are tracked by the Vision Pro. In this, VisionOS becomes a bit like SteamVR, and allows people to create elements with embedded IR LEDs that are tracked by the headset. This thing is very interesting for the B2B sector, and this confirms the enterprise orientation of Apple’s headset. I’m pretty sure at a certain point someone will start a Kickstarter for a “Vive Tracker” for the Vision Pro (mark my words on this).
The presence of the Vision Pro during the keynote confirmed that the platform is not dead. And also when I met some Apple employees at a meetup in Cupertino, they confirmed to me that the Vision Pro is very well alive, especially for enterprise use. The Vision Pro is used by various companies, and Apple can’t just abandon it because companies demand continuity when they start using a device. Anyway, the fact that the platform is not dead doesn’t mean we’ll see a new Vision Pro soon, and doesn’t even mean that we are sure there will actually be a new Vision Pro. Maybe Apple will release another headset of another kind in the Vision line.
The fact that the situation is not very well defined is also confirmed by the video where Justin Ryan interviews Steve Sinclair, who handles the PR for the Vision Pro. When asked about whether the Vision Pro is on ice, he gave a very political answer that didn’t confirm or deny anything. Notice that when PR wants to communicate something, it says that straightly, so the fact he never said “Yes, there will be a new Vision Pro at a certain point” means that every possibility is still open.
More info (Official page of VisionOS on Apple website)
More info (What’s new on VisionOS)
More info (Tracked accessories now available on VisionOS)
More info (Siri AI on Vision Pro)
More info (Apple accepting requests for raw camera feed retrieval)
More info (New Maps with Gaussian Splatting)
More info (Apple not giving a clear answer on the future of the Vision Pro)
Other relevant news
We had a first look at the Pico Project Swan headset
The usual Luna has leaked a video showcasing how the upcoming Pico headset, codenamed Project Swan, will be. The video, which was an official tutorial of the headset, has been taken down for a copyright infringement request, but you can still see a frame of it above here.
From the images, the headset looks like a foster child of a Galaxy XR and an Apple Vision Pro. And all the hints point to the fact that this will be a Vision Pro competitor.
I wonder if we will know more about it at AWE…
Qualcomm to announce its next chipset soon
Qualcomm has teased that it is going to announce its next chipset “soon”.
The company has just teased a render of a headset with a new chip inside and the sentence “Imagine #XR that’s smarter and more immersive than anything you’ve experienced before. Something new is coming”. That’s all we know. We have no official info, but we can still come to some conclusions.
Regarding the timing, I would bet that “soon” is AWE. Qualcomm always has a big booth at AWE, and this year won’t be an exception. So it seems natural that it is going to announce its new chipset at this important event.
And regarding the first headset mounting it, everyone is betting on Pico Project Swan. Pico already mentioned that this headset will have “more than 2× CPU and GPU performance vs XR2 Gen 2”, so it must definitely run a new-generation chipset. And since until now it has always used Qualcomm chips, it seems natural that Qualcomm is also going to power Project Swan.
I can’t wait to hear more. We need more powerful headsets, and I’m happy that Qualcomm is going forward in making them possible.
Valve Steam Frame may come in around one week
The launch of Steam Frame and Steam Machine is getting closer and closer.
According to the usual Brad Lynch, Valve imported circa 32,000 kg of “virtual reality devices” to its warehouse, and these are most probably Steam Frame headsets. It is clear that it is filling the warehouses before the actual launch, which is very close.
And the X page reporting the Steam Hardware Updates has got the info that content creators are allowed to post videos about the Steam Frame after June 23, meaning that the launch will likely be on that day.
So it seems that it is going to happen: in the end, both timing estimates of Valve were true, it is probably going to happen when it’s still the first part of the year, and Summer has begun. Of course, take this with a grain of salt, because these are all rumors, but it seems to me that all the cues are converging for that time frame.
Now that the timing is set, there is only one big unknown that is super important to understand if the Steam Frame will succeed or not: what’s the price going to be?
More info (Valve importing tons of VR headsets)
More info (Steam Frame likely coming around June 23rd / 1)
More info (Steam Frame likely coming around June 23rd / 2)
Snap glasses to be announced at AWE
Snap is going to announce its Specs glasses at AWE on June 16. Now it’s 100% sure: Snap is teasing short videos about the new glasses on social media, with the attached June 16 date and the AWE logo. They couldn’t be more explicit than this, actually…
I’ll be at AWE and report to you about them. I’m pretty excited about this product, which aims to be “the first consumer AR glasses on the market”. The rumored price is very high, but let’s see what the truth will be in a couple of days.
More info (Snap teaser video / 1)
More info (Snap teaser video / 2)
Read the news announced at the Upload VR Summer Showcase
Upload VR had its usual Summer Showcase, where a lot of pieces of news about upcoming games or updates to current games were announced. It has been the usual feast for VR gaming. To be honest, no major news was featured in it, but there were still a lot of announcements about cool games. You can find below the link containing all the games featured in this event, plus a personal selection of the news I liked the most.
More info (All the news from the Upload Summer Showcase)
More info (New trailer from Guardians Planetfall, which is VR’s answer to Helldivers 2)
More info (Pedal Rebel, a game you can play on your stationary bike, launches on October, 5)
More info (BrushHammer, a game that lets you paint figures in VR, is coming this August)
More info (Disembodies, a puzzle game that lets you control some hands with your hands, is coming on October 15)
News worth a mention
Meta removed facial recognition from its app
Last week, Wired reported that Meta secretly installed a facial recognition feature inside its Meta AI app. This let us imagine the feature was going to launch very soon. The news created some turmoil in the community, which already envisioned all the privacy issues related to a feature that was scanning and registering all the faces that the glasses were seeing through their cameras.
This week, Meta removed the feature. The company denied that it happened because of the Wired article, but I’m 99.99999% sure that this was the exact cause. I’m pretty happy about it, because the reaction the community had was a message for everyone wanting to implement face recognition on glasses that it is something that should be done with a huge emphasis on privacy.
Your weekly dose of bad VR news
In this pretty shitty moment for XR, every week we have some sad news to hear. This week, I’m reporting three to you:
- The studio behind The Walking Dead: Saints And Sinners, one of the best VR games ever released, is not working on VR projects anymore
- Vertigo Games announced the flatscreen version of Arizona Sunshine. It is a clear signal that the studio is going towards the flatscreen market now
- Mighty Eyes canceled Wanderer 2 and stopped any development on the current Wanderer: Fragments Of Fate
More info (TWD: Saints And Sinners)
More info (Arizona Sunshine)
More info (Wanderer 2)
Your Quest can now track objects
An open-source project integrating Quest with Vuforia (a popular AR library) has now integrated Vuforia’s Model Tracking on top of the Quest passthrough. Long story short, it means that using this library, you can now track objects with your Quest. The demo video is pretty cool and shows a gamepad tracked with the Quest. Of course, this is not fast enough to be used as an input method, but it can be interesting for some mixed reality applications.
(Thanks Ivan for the tip)
A couple of cool projects
I want to share with you two interesting projects I found through social media:
- A Quest app that transforms your Quest into old-school red-blue VR glasses
- A Quest app that reimagines the Snake game in 3D around a cube
More info (Quest as stereo glasses)
More info (Snake 3D)
Open-source Vector Gear headset now connects with Steam VR
I’m keeping reporting about Vector Gear, the open-source mid-range PCVR headset that is being developed by Walker Industries. The update of the week is that the current version of the headset can now connect with SteamVR and show SteamVR Home. That sounds like a major step forward…
Some news about content
- Into the Dead: Crimson Heights is a new horror game that, on Quest 3 headsets, constructs its VR levels based on the scanned walls and furniture of your physical room
- There is a new VR mod for Cyberpunk 2077: it is open, and supports motion controls! But it is still in very early stages…
More info (Into the Dead: Crimson Heights)
More info (Cyberpunk 2077)
Some reviews about content
- Amplium is an app providing a curated mix of high-quality immersive videos on the Apple Vision Pro. It’s interesting if you want to enjoy media on your Apple headset
- Dendur Decoded, a new immersive experience from The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, explains how the Temple Of Dendur arrived in New York. It’s a good showcase for educational content in VR
- Outblast is a fun and challenging throwback to the arcade stick-shooters of old, with the added dimension of being fully immersed in the high-tech battlefield thanks to virtual reality
More info (Amplium)
More info (Dendur Decoded)
More info (Outblast)
Other news
Meta plans to demo again Quest headsets in Best Buy stores, this time together with Ray-Ban glasses
Some predictions about Meta Connect 2026
Someone filed a fake data breach related to VRChat
A collection of some interesting apps made for the Meta Ray-Ban Display
Sponsored Area
Play this amazing mini-golf game
Pocket Putt: Mini Golf is a very cute mini-golf mixed-reality game that you play with hand tracking. This is not about realism, but it’s all about simplicity and fun. Try it now on the Meta Quest Store!
Get it on Meta Store
Some XR fun
The new hype cycle
Funny link
Apple’s AI (slop) moment is here
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:
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And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Apple)
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