Walker Industries is a company made up of VR makers. In the Kickstarter video, the head of the company says that he had the dream of building a headset since when he was like 13 years old and was watching Sword Art Online. 9 years later, he’s trying to make his dream reality, by building himself together with a bunch of other talented nerds a fully opensource headset packed with features: the Vector Gear.

This only took about 5-6 hours to make. All the land data, bathymetry, buoys, etc. are all accurate. The boat is a replica of a real schooner and you have full sail control (or autopilot). The physics of the sails is modeled. Seagulls, even a shark out there somewhere.

In today's email from Bigscreen, with the recent news of Valve selling its last remaining stock of Valve Index headset and accessories, they reached out to HTC to ask if 2.0 lighthouses will be discontinued. They responded saying there is no future plan to retire base stations.

New Humble Bundle featuring a bunch of games from Flat2VR, a studio that ports flatscreen games to VR), though not all of these games are ports.

£20 gets you:

• Roboquest VR
• I AM YOUR BEAST VR
• VRacer Hoverbike
• WRATH
• Surviving Mars: Pioneer
• Genotype
• Out of Sight VR
• RAGER
• Audio Trip

Next Fest is a chance for players to go hands-on with anticipated upcoming games while developers get a boost in visibility, potential wishlists, and invaluable feedback to help shape their projects as they approach a release date.

Some of the participating games released demos prior to the start of Next Fest, like Rustmourne, The Rifted Skies, Drifters: Blackout Crew, and RAID VR. Co-op heist shooter Payday: Aces High will have a demo available with two playable heists after its closed playtest in August.

Please note that this list was provided two weeks ago by Valve and is subject to change. Developers can drop out of Next Fest if their demo is not ready or release a demo on short notice.

Valve confirmed with PC Gamer (via Skarred Ghost) that it’s working on a new headstrap with hot-swappable batteries and Balanced Mode Radiator (BMR) drivers which are said to match the off-ear speakers seen in Valve Index.

Index, which was just discontinued, has long been the audio bar for VR headsets since its release in 2019.

Get your tickets here for the cope train. Next stop: the future!

We’ll cut to the chase: Valve is working on a mid-gen refresh of the Steam Frame, codenamed “Plano”, that is mainly characterized by a pair of new displays. The panel they’re using has a resolution of 3552×3840 per eye and appears to be OLED. It supports up to 90 Hz, although Valve has been experimenting with getting 120 Hz working.

This information comes from the Steam Frame kernel source code that was recently made public by Valve, which has been kindly mirrored to GitHub by the good folks at evlaV. Among this repository are many branches, including some specifically for the upcoming Plano device. From this, we can figure out that Plano began development on the “deckard-oled” branch on December 17, 2025, ended on February 9, 2026, and then resumed on another branch called “deckard-plano” from March 3, 2026 to October 2, 2026, just a few weeks ago!

Valve Index is no longer being produced, which means this could be your last chance to get new stock of the company’s landmark PC VR headset.

Everything is now 20 percent off on the Valve Index page, including:

Valve Index Headset was $499.00, now $399.20
Valve Index Replacement Left Controller was $149.00, now $119.20
Valve Index Replacement Tether was $129.00, now $103.20

If you’re in the US, you’ll notice that Valve is only now selling left replacement controllers. If you’re in the UK or EU, you should still be able to buy both left and right.

Notably, the biggest missing piece is the required SteamVR 2.0 base stations, which give Valve Index six degrees of freedom (6DOF) by emitting lasers. You can find those direct from HTC, priced at $229 for a single unit.

I've been using a Reverb G2 for the past few years, until it decided to not power up last week (R.I.P.). Now from these years playing VR I had fun, found a few good gems here and there, mostly playing co-op games with a buddy of mine.

A reccurent grief we've had is that the VR games offering was poor, like the store-front when opening SteamVR would showcase the same games for the past 3 years... With the release of the Steam Frame, I'm of course tempted to jump on ship (or at least the 1-year queue behind it), but I also wonder whether that somehow boosted general interest in PCVR? Are new games ported from Meta's OS name I can't recall arriving on the Steam VR store, giving it the fresh breeze it needed?

Getting a Steam Frame for the holidays could be a bit dicey, as Valve says the order queue has now stretched into 2027.

Valve says in a news update that customers hoping to get their hands on Steam Frame, the recently launched standalone VR headset, can now view their expected order window by going directly to the Steam Frame product page while logged in to your Steam account.

Order emails are being sent out either by December or in 2027, Valve says, with those in the 2027 camp due to receive further information on their expected order timing by January.

As for customers who haven’t made it out of the interminable waiting list, Valve says that info will be sent out if spots open up; places on the waiting list are sequential, so the later you join, the further you are down the list.

cross-posted from: https://swg-empire.de/post/9037525

I was complaining that my disabled ass couldn't play VR with my new Frame while lying in bed. I feared that I would have to wait for Valve to implement it in SteamVR. But my New Waifu was faster and made it a plugin that works perfectly.

Thought I'd share the link for the dozen other lazy/disabled/gooning Frame users.

Pico and TikTok owner ByteDance first mentioned the existence of its next headset during a presentation in November 2025, revealing some key specifications. The company then publicly teased the device back in March, calling it 'Project Swan'.

Pico said the headset will have micro-OLED panels with 4000 pixels per inch (PPI), a dual-chip architecture with a self-developed coprocessor for computer vision and image processing, and a new main processor that will have twice the CPU and GPU performance of the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 in today's Pico 4 Ultra and Meta Quest 3 headsets. It also detailed many of the visionOS-like features of Pico OS 6 and the RealityKit-like Pico Spatial Engine.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/72973623

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/72788461

Render of the controller:

cross-posted from: https://swg-empire.de/post/8997094

Éloi Strèe on YouTube has a whole bunch of quick and dirty little videos with more or less obscure tips and tricks for the Steam Frame.

In the linked video he shows how to install the APK of Wolvic, a WebXR browser. This video is about installation from Windows. He also has one for Steam Deck/Machine/Linux.

His videos are short and unedited but straight to the point.

There's a new Humble Beyond Reality VR Bundle with an interesting set of sci-fi games to grab.

Bundle pricing: $5 / £4.53 for 2 games, $10 / £9.07 for 5 games, or $15 / £13.60 for all 7. All are Steam keys and must be activated before April 28th, 2027. Here's all the games included:

Blair Witch VR - Mixed (69%)
Z.O.N.A Project X VR - Mostly Positive (76%)
Z.O.N.A: Origin - Very Positive (83%)
Layers of Fear VR - Mostly Positive (71%)
A Rogue Escape - Mostly Positive (72%)
Star Trek: Infection - Mixed (65%)
Homeworld: Vast Reaches - 9 user reviews (no overall rating yet)

Getting the immediate question out of the way, yes, the Titanfall 2 VR mod is as great as advertised. Rather than a barely-performant, deeply flawed, subpar "early version" mod that wouldn't qualify for early access status if it were an actual game, like many of the vibe coded VR mods that popped up over the summer (yes, I played several of them), the TF2 mod feels like a finished product out of the gate.

We will have another article soon from a writer who had never played Titanfall 2 prior to the mod that gets into what makes it great. Having previously played the game myself, I cannot offer that perspective.

Much like Steam Frame, Crystal Pro’s major focus is on wireless PC VR streaming, which Pimax says is built around its own Native Foveated Streaming tech.

PC VR streaming can be done via the included Wi-Fi 6E adapter, although the headset also supports an optional 60G AirLink kit, which uses a two-antenna, 2×2 multi-input multi-output (MIMO) design on the 60GHz band.

Indeed, I am now that guy. More to follow, I'm sure.