The XR Week Peek (2026.08.31): VR was featured in GTA VI trailer, Quest 3 got a framerate boost, and more!
It’s the last day of August. The last day of what is usually considered a vacation month, before we start the busy period of XR product launches in September and October! So enjoy this last newsletter with more relaxed vibes, because I guess that from next week I’ll have a lot of work to do 🙂
(Btw, talking about hard work… I’ve written a very detailed review of XREAL Aura, which has been widely appreciated… do you mind giving it a look?)
Top news of the week
VR was depicted in the latest gameplay video of GTA VI
GTA VI, the most awaited game of the moment (besides Half Life 3, which will probably never happen), is coming soon. And Rockstar Games a few days ago released an extended look at it with a long gameplay video. And VR was part of it… kind of.
At a specific instant of the video, you can see a guy enjoying VR at home while wearing a black VR headset that resembles a Quest 1. From his movements, we can infer that he’s into one specific type of VR content. You know, those videos that I’ve never watched but “a friend of mine did”. Let’s say “super hot” content, but not the SUPERHOT game. I guess you understood what I mean at this point. And if not, well, probably it’s because you’re still watching The Teletubbies on TV.
We got all excited by the fact that Rockstar Games put VR in a part of the game, and that it even included this segment with a VR headset in its teaser video. It’s for sure good news, because it means that VR is “mainstream enough” that the game studio decided to insert it into its game. But on the other side, if we got so excited for one second in a video trailer when we can see a VR headset and a guy who makes obscene moves… it means we are really desperate at this moment.
Anyway, the trailer of GTA VI is definitely cool, and I suggest you have a look at it. I really can’t wait for it to be released on PC… also because this means that someone will make a VR mod for it.
More info (VR depicted in GTA trailer)
More info (GTA VI extended gameplay look)
Other relevant news
Quest 3 just got a framerate boost
In a totally unexpected move, Meta has announced an increase in the Quest 3’s frame rate. With just a software update, the headset can now run at a maximum of 207Hz! This will increase the smoothness of the immersive applications. And even more… if you enable developer mode and tweak some settings, you can even arrive at 240Hz. This is crazy: no headset I know about ever reached this crazy refresh rate.
It’s good news that Meta is enabling next-gen smoothness on a headset many people already have. Anyway, before you start dreaming of playing your favorite game at 240Hz, remember that most VR apps on the store already struggle to run at 90Hz. An app that renders at 207Hz must have very little graphics: most of the games most probably will never reach these crazy framerates. But still, some of them could optimize to have a higher framerate than now.
The first app to use this feature has been Virtual Desktop, which has immediately launched a 144Hz mode in beta. This makes a lot of sense: since the rendering in VD is mostly done by the companion PC, it can more easily afford to run at an increased framerate.
I can’t wait to try this feature myself! And if you want to do it, too, remember that to work, this feature requires specifically the Quest 3, HorizonOS v2.7 or later, and an app that supports extended frame rates.
More info (Quest 3 now supports high frame rates — Reddit)
More info (Quest 3 now supports high frame rates — Meta SDK docs)
More info (VR Desktop introduces 144Hz mode)
Meta released a new update to fix Ray-Ban Meta tampering
A few weeks ago, Meta released an update to prevent people from tampering with the privacy LED of its smartglasses. According to the company, after this update, the glasses should have been able to detect if the LED had been disabled or covered and disable the camera if any tampering was detected. But as I reported last week, this update was not very effective, and malicious people were still able to disable the LED and use the glasses to secretly record other people.
For this reason, Meta has released a new update this week to fix the issue. And even better, a spokesperson for the company clearly stated that it will keep releasing updates until the problem is solved. Meta understood it is a cat-chasing-the-mouse issue, so it will constantly work to improve the safety features of its glasses, counteracting whatever hack people will find to disable the LED. This is definitely great news.
Besides that, Meta also started to put up some billboards in selected cities to educate people about the privacy LED of the glasses. These billboards basically teach the general consumers that if the LED is off, they are not being recorded. Because, let’s be honest: a privacy LED is useless if people do not know what it means.
I’m not fully sure this will solve the bad reputation that the smartglasses are gaining, but at least it seems we are making some steps forward.
News worth a mention
Everything we know about Meta’s upcoming headset
The usual Luna has written a very interesting post with everything we know about Meta’s upcoming headset, codenamed Phoenix. It is definitely a great read.
Schell Games just had layoffs
Schell Games, one of the best VR games studios out there, just had its first round of layoffs in its 20+ years of existence. The company had to fire 10% of its staff because of the current “Winter” of VR and Meta’s disinvestment from VR content. It will now focus more on a bigger number of small projects instead of a small number of big projects: this will allow the company to be leaner and see what works before committing to it.
More info (Layoffs at Schell Games — Upload VR)
More info (Layoffs at Schell Games — Road To VR)
The status of LBVR
Kevin Williams, one of the biggest authorities in Location-Based Virtual Reality (LBVR), has written a very interesting article about the out-of-home immersive market. In it, you can discover that LBVR is not in the same Winter as at-home consumer VR, but that if you want to enter the field, you have to follow some specific strategies.
Volumetric videos may become user-friendly
The coolest thing I’ve seen this week is a research project that aims at making volumetric videos very easy to shoot.
The project is called 4DAnyone, and it is able to create a 4DGS, which is a volumetric video made with Gaussian Splats, by just starting from a monocular video, like the ones you shoot with your phone. Usually, shooting volumetric videos requires a huge rig with many cameras, and it is an expensive process. The goal of this project is to let you use just your phone.
4DAnyone works by trying to infer the pose of the person pictured in the video at every frame, and then use the skeletal pose together with the visuals that are seen in the video to try to reconstruct what could be the video of the person if he/she were shot from many other points of view. Once many points of view have been simulated, the process of creating a 4DGS volumetric video is the same as it is now with the huge rig of cameras.
The demo videos shown in the article are impressive. It is still a research project, though, and I strongly believe that the videos reconstructed this way can’t match today’s stunning quality of the 4DGS created by companies like Gracia. But it is very promising research, and in a few years we could all have volumetric videos coming out of our phones…
Mark Zuckerberg tried to lay off a big percentage of its staff
According to Reuters, Mark Zuckerberg tried to carry out a special operation inside Meta, dubbed Project OT (short for Organization Transformation), whose purpose was to use AI to the maximum to substitute workers. The plan was to use AI to reduce the costs of the company by laying off a big chunk of the staff at Meta: some teams should have even been reduced by more than 60%. This abomination luckily failed for two reasons: the first is that the plan leaked and the employees started to revolt (like refusing to use their work to train AI); the second is that AI proved not to be ready to fully substitute a human employee.
Personally, I think this is a monstrosity. Meta, like all companies hardly working on AI (like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc…) keeps writing nice articles on how AI will guarantee us all a future of abundance, while in reality it just tries to use AI to substitute people. This proves what I’ve always thought: all these AI companies just write on the web a lot of bullshit.
(Thanks Rob for the tip)
Industrial training on a social VR platform?
One of the most surprising videos I’ve seen this week was about an industrial machine fully replicated inside Resonite. Resonite, if you don’t know it, is a sort of VRChat, but more open, more healthy, and more furry. I was not expecting to see industrial training happening in 2026 on a social VR platform, but here we are…
An interesting use of VR mods
These weeks, we have been flooded with VR mods of flat games. One of the content creators who is enjoying writing and playing mods the most is GingasVR. And in one of their latest video, they showed something very cool: in Fallout VR, using a specific mod, the user can connect the experience to like a fan and a heater. When the user gets closer to a fire in the game, the heater turns on, and when there is something windy, the fan also turns on. It is a very hacky way to increase the sense of immersion, and I love it.
(Thanks Alex for the tip)
Some news about content
- You can now wishlist the new Supernatural fitness app on Quest
- Snoop Dogg is the new main character of Hitman World Of Assassination Elusive Target. And yes, it will be about weed…
More info (Supernatural)
More info (Hitman World Of Assassination Elusive Target)
Some reviews about content
- Isle Of Food is a sort of Overcooked game where you have to cook for your customers. But in this case, you also have to retrieve the ingredients. The game is interesting, but also currently haunted by various bugs
- Vertigo Rush tries to mix Mario Kart with Gorilla Tag. The idea is cool, but the execution for now is still problematic, and it is also weird that it has limited multiplayer options.
More info (Isle Of Food)
More info (Vertigo Rush)
Other news
Mark Gurman details how Apple is shaping under the new CEO John Ternus (who bets on AI and not on Vision Pro)
ARM submits a patent about reducing motion sickness through ultrasound waves
Google is working on a new live translation feature for Android XR glasses
Meta is working to spin off Horizon Worlds from the Horizon app into its own mobile app
News from partners (and friends)
A categorization of Spatial Intelligence
We always hear people talking about spatial intelligence. But what does it mean? And what different types of spatial intelligence exist? This article helps in understanding all of this.
Learn more
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Some XR fun
I made a stupid tweet and it got more popular than I expected
Funny link
Happy anniversary, Valve
Funny link / 1
Funny link / 2
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.
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(Header image by Rockstar Games)
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