When I first played STARVAULT during early access, I thought it was good. Polished, well made and full of potential, certainly, but not a game I expected to spend much time with. Well, fast forward about a year and I have somehow logged more than thirty hours into the Steam version in just two weeks. Considering MOBAs are usually my least favorite type of online shooter, that should tell you everything you need to know. Theia Games have crafted something genuinely special here and, much to my surprise, I have found myself completely hooked.

The sixth iteration of the VR Games Showcase just wrapped up, delivering massive new game announcements including the reveal of Breachers: Outbreak and DRIFTERS: Blackout Crew as well as new looks at Payday: Aces High, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades 2, and Korea. IL-2 Series!

Valve announced the Steam Frame alongside the Steam Machine last year, and though we still don't have firm release dates or final pricing information (likely delayed because of global memory shortages), Valve has been jumping through hoops on its way to release day. That includes FCC certification, which gives us official filings to pore over. These have revealed some intriguing information about the headset and its accessories.

Mentions of the Enthusiast Kit appear in the health and safety manual. It reads that the "controller triggers, face gasket attachment, and the Enthusiast accessory battery pack include magnets." It goes on, "The Frame Enthusiast kit also includes a hot-swappable lithium-ion battery pack," and warns users to "use only the battery pack that came with your Enthusiast kit, or an authorized replacement battery pack."

The standard Frame has its own battery, but it sounds like the Enthusiast Kit upgrade pack will include at least one additional battery that can be hot-swapped during use. It's not clear whether an additional internal battery will prevent hardware shutdown when the standard battery is removed, or whether the Enthusiast Kit will replace the standard battery with a swappable one.

While various companies providing this type of hardware are mainly focused on the enterprise sector (e.g. Senseglove), bHaptics focuses on both enterprise and gaming. Its accessories are usually quite affordable, and bHaptics works a lot with game developers to integrate its hardware with games available on stores like the Meta Quest Store or SteamVR. When I was working on the fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded, I worked with them, and I have to say it is one of the best companies I’ve ever collaborated with: they provided us with the hardware, plus all the facilities to have a smooth integration. We integrated everything in a few hours. If you are a game studio, I would really advise considering a collaboration with them.

When I was at their booth, I was able to go hands-on with the latest iteration of their Haptic vest and Haptic gloves. The main focus of the experience was the gloves, though, so I will focus my review on them.

I tried these new gloves by bHaptics for around 10 minutes (so consider this article a “first impressions” post and not a complete review). Wearing them was very easy, and the fact that the closing strap was magnetic and not with velcro made it incredibly easy to put them on and off. I can’t comment on the sensations of the gloves’ material on the skin, because I was wearing an internal hygiene glove. But overall, the fit was good, and the glove felt pretty lightweight. My only complaint on the comfort side is that you can constantly feel the little vibrational engines touching your fingertips. It is like always having a watch battery strapped to your finger. I don’t know if this sensation goes away with the constant use of the glove, but for sure, in my short demo, I kept having it.

bHaptics showed me a demo about repairing a spaceship (which also contained a cat I could pet, so it was definitely good). In the demo, there were buttons to touch, knobs to rotate, and elements to grab. After the demo, there was a playground where I could keep interacting with various objects to test the sensation given by the glove.

I have to say that compared to when I last tried bHaptics gloves a couple of years ago, the product made a big jump ahead. The purely “touch” sensations were now definitely good. Touching buttons, touching objects, touching the table… all felt much more immersive with bHaptics gloves than without. Compared to the past, it seems the haptic sensation is much more nuanced. In the demo, I could touch a sphere hanging from the ceiling and then a similar-but-heavier sphere, and I could clearly feel the difference in haptics. All buttons in the experience were incredibly nice to touch. I can’t say the haptic sensation was the same as in real life, but I can say in some cases it started to go towards the “believable” stage. The sensation the haptic motors can give on the fingertips is now not the one of “vibrating”, but the subtle sense of “touching”, and this is simply amazing. It has been one of the best haptic sensations I had on my fingertip in the last times.

VR Games Showcase is set to return next week, bringing another lineup of new trailers and updates from this season’s most anticipated VR games.

The Summer 2026 edition of the VR Games Showcase is slated to kick off live on YouTube on June 23rd at 11am PT (local time here).

This time around we’re getting another avalanche of VR gaming news, coming to Quest, PC VR and PSVR 2, which VR Games Showcase co-creator Jamie Feltham says will include Payday: Aces High Korea. IL-2 Series, Guardians Planetfall, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2, and The Lightkeepers.

Pay at least $18 for these 9 items

VTOL VR 98% Positive on Steam

Zero Caliber 2 Remastered 80% Positive on Steam

Metro Awakening 71% Positive on Steam

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow 77% Positive on Steam

Tactical Assault VR 85% Positive on Steam

Ancient Dungeon 95% Positive on Steam

Arizona Sunshine Remake 89% Positive on Steam

Among Us 3D: VR 75% Positive on Steam

Zero Caliber VR 81% Positive on Steam

At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I met with Alvin Wang Graylin for an in-depth discussion looking back at the last decade of attempts to create a mass market for consumer VR headsets.

He left HTC in 2025 after joining the organization in 2016, a few months before the launch of the PC-based Vive headset powered by Valve’s SteamVR technology. That means he had a front row seat to the effect of Meta’s competitive strategies, from funding VR developers to acquiring them to undercutting HTC’s consumer headsets on price.

“These are things that are just not healthy for the industry, and nobody was really making money,” Graylin said.

If the VR market suffers from a “chicken and egg” problem in that consumers won’t buy headsets because developers won’t make content and developers won’t make content because there are no consumers to buy them, then Graylin’s perspective suggests Meta’s aggressive approach over this decade made it practically impossible for anyone else to help grow the ecosystem that would allow chickens and eggs to flourish.

When Subside first arrived on PlayStation VR2 and SteamVR, it quickly established itself as one of the most convincing underwater experiences available in virtual reality. Rather than focusing on survival mechanics or typical game concepts, Subside's solo developer has instead created a diving simulator that simply captures the wonder, serenity, and occasional fear inherent in exploring the waterways of our world.

With the arrival of the Makoa Shelf expansion, which the developer describes as the game's largest environment yet, Subside is even better than ever. I've spent the past week exploring the game both alone and with my kids, and it's immediately become a favorite activity in our house. To put it succinctly, Subside and the Makoa Shelf expansion are breathtaking experiences and a must-buy for every VR player.

Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers up to 60% higher GPU performance, up to 30% increase in CPU performance, and up to 160% higher NPU performance1, giving developers greater flexibility to push immersive XR experiences further, including with richer visuals, faster responding interactions, and more complex mixed reality scenarios. These added gains support demanding use cases such as immersive content viewing, mixed reality applications, and real‑time spatial perception, while maintaining power efficiency designed for comfortable, extended wear.

The platform supports visuals up to 4.4K per eye at 90 frames per second, enabling sharper detail, smoother motion, and improved color fidelity. Enhancements to video see‑through (VST) reduce latency and improve image quality, helping digital content blend more naturally with the physical world. These advances are enabled by IP hardening, including the EVA block, which provides hardware acceleration for demanding computer vision workloads.

These performance and graphics improvements are paired with increased power efficiency, delivering up to 20% longer battery life1 at the same workload and up to 12 degrees Celsius cooler chipset under load. This enables lighter, cooler headsets and tethered glasses that can be worn comfortably for extended periods.

As always, this week-long festival features a mix of demos for upcoming games and games that have already released on other VR platforms, like Loop One Done, Fixer Undercover, and Peak Rhythm.

We received this list from Valve nearly two weeks ago, so it is subject to change. Some developers may have registered for the event and subsequently dropped out. We have already seen some participants developing hybrid titles release a demo that is not VR supported. We do our best to catch these ahead of time and exclude them from the list below.

Other developers may also release demos for their games despite not being a part of this event. Games can also be erroneously tagged as VR when they are not planned to have VR support. As always, we will update this list if we come across any changes.

For now, here's the full list of participants we are aware of:

• Amelia's Escape
• Axe Gang
• Biodetention
• Blind Touch VR
• Bodian's Bay Wash
• Bramblefort
• Construcubes
• Crawler
• Dart Racer
• Dead 4 Now: Rebirth of Survivors
• D.E.C.A.Y.
• Driving Test Simulator
• Edd Skeleton VR
• Exoshock
• Fixer Undercover
• Fruit Golf
• Fuel Cell
• Grab Your Friends
• Gunshot Survivors VR
• Hyperstacks
• King Archer VR
• Kosmass
• Loop One Done
• MechPit
• One Day To Live
• Outpath VR
• Paranatural
• Peak Rhythm
• Snooker Billiard
• Streets of Miami VR
• Tomboy Adventure 2
• Unmourned VR
• Voxel Playground
• Wade
• ZipRush: Surf the Void

I think we all need a way better solution for VR input to core legacy input devices. Floating keyboards are ass and we all know it. Using gestures is also bad and solves nothing.

Hardware needs to finger register better. Make grooves or lines on the capacitive controllers so that fingers don't get mixed up, and just have people type like normal. Let me play world of Warcraft in emulated flatscreen in vr. Have triggers of the controllers count as touchpads to work as both touch mouse clicks and micro adjustments for virtual mousing. Maybe even have dual actuation or multi level haptics on the trigger mechanism so that you can actually click the topmost or bottommost of the trigger.

I'm sick and tired of actual normal pc I/O besting VR and being something to fear while in VR, that's dumb. VR is supposed to be better in every way, not a trade-off. The answer to "can it do x?" Needs to be YES. VR isn't a console, it's an evolution of I/O. So until keyb+mouse doesn't need to be used, VR needs to get its shit together. And I don't know about you, but a pretty gd big part of language and using a computer requires letters, and numbers. Phones are 90% of the way there and good enough. VR is not, it just tries to avoid it by design, but it always inevitably needs it, because at the end of the day, at least for now, that's how stuff actually works.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. /rant

As spotted by XR analyst Brad Lynch, Valve has imported a large number “virtual reality devices” to its US-based warehouses, which can be none other than its long-awaited Steam Frame standalone VR headset.

As per the public records, Valve has imported some 32,000 kg (~35 US tons) of the VR devices in question, which was notably one week after the company imported 40,000 kg (~44 US tons) of “game consoles,” unmistakably its Steam Machine Linux-based PC.

According to video discovered in Pico’s public SDK, it appears the company’s next flagship headset has just been leaked.

What it reveals: a headset very much inspired by Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR, as it appears to include a separate battery unit and woven headstrap à la Vision Pro, and a body similar to Galaxy XR.

The creator of Virtual Desktop recalls the Tuscany demo as his first VR experience and Senza Peso as his favorite moment of presence in a headset.

Guy Godin’s recollections are from a different time in the VR industry. Enthusiasts launched their VR experiences by clicking around with their mouse on a PC outside VR instead of selecting from a menu inside. Watching videos of people doing that led him to start work on Virtual Desktop.

His work in VR has both been sought by Facebook and also competed with the work Meta built, leading to some tense and frustrating interactions over the years.

“There are some good engineers at Meta that care,” Godin says on the Good VR Podcast. “What sucks for them is that they’re not incentivized to ship quality software and fix bugs. I wish they were, because some of them are really good and they’ve done some incredible things.”

I spoke with Godin using Riverside for just over 45 minutes and cut the conversation to about 38 minutes recounting his path through VR.

VisionOS 27, available to developers starting today, adds new support for actively-tracked accessories like motion controllers, which Apple is calling ‘spatial accessories’. Prior updates to visionOS allowed for passively-tracked objects which were tracked by their appearance but did not actively communicate with the headset. On the other hand, visionOS 27 allows Vision Pro to track accessories based on known IR LED patterns and positional data streamed from an accessory’s on-board IMU via Bluetooth. Spatial accessories can also send input data from things like buttons and thumbsticks, as detailed in a newly released developer session from Apple.

Valve offered a sentence of new guidance for Steam Frame shipments after blowing out the original early 2026 guidance offered late last year.

The new page on Valve’s Steam begins with the following sentence:

“Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer.”

Summer begins June 21 and ends September 22 for Valve’s U.S.-based offices.

Supernatural was originally created by Within, the immersive technology company founded by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, before being acquired by Meta in 2023. The new company, called Supernatural Health, says it plans to launch a new Supernatural experience on Quest this fall. In its FAQ, the company describes the new version as retaining the “same coaches, same DNA, same mission” as the original service, while also making clear that the transition will not simply continue the existing Meta-owned platform unchanged.

The announcement comes five months after Meta halted development of the service. In January, the company said Supernatural would no longer receive “new content or feature updates” as part of a restructuring that also saw multiple VR studios shut down. At the time, UploadVR reported that subscribers could continue accessing the existing workout library, but the coaches who helped define the service would no longer appear in new content.

While the existing workout library remained available, Meta's decision left the platform's long-term future unclear. UploadVR later reported that Supernatural continued ranking near the top of the Meta Quest charts even after Meta paused content updates and laid off much of the team behind it. The same report noted that Supernatural’s subscription model, brand recognition, and strong engagement made it one of the few clear consumer success stories in VR fitness, even as users began exploring alternatives.

Since the launch of the original Vision Pro, the iPad version of Steam Link has been available on visionOS through the App Store. While this allowed for easily playing your flatscreen Steam library in the headset, it limited you to having a window with the 4:3 aspect ratio of an iPad, yet streaming the wider aspect ratio of your PC, leading to black bars on the top and bottom of the window – something entirely unnecessary in XR.

The iPad app also limited the window's resolution to that of an iPad, around 2732×1537 for 16:9 content.

With the visionOS app, released on the App Store a few weeks ago, the Steam Link window supports up to 4K streaming resolution, dynamically matches the aspect ratio of the PC you're streaming from, and lets you adjust the curvature of the window to your liking.

Valve announced that Steam Deck is getting a sizable price hike, bringing an increase of $240 to $300 to its handheld gaming PC–not exactly a vote of confidence for those of us waiting for Steam Frame, its upcoming standalone VR headset.

The company revealed the 512 GB OLED Steam Deck has increased from $549 to $789, while the 1 TB variant is going from $649 to a whopping $949, making for a 44% and 46% price increase respectively.

What’s more, the cheaper 256 GB LCD Steam Deck is no longer listed on Steam, which suggests the company may have retired it after months of being out of stock.

In a Steam news post, Valve explains what’s become an all too obvious occurrence in consumer electronics by this point: component prices are out of control.

“Steam Deck itself hasn’t changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole,” Valve says. “We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.”

There is a particular kind of grief that comes when a virtual world sunsets.

It is easy for some to frame these closures as the disappearance of a product, a platform, or a failed business model. But those of us who have spent time inside virtual worlds know better. When a world goes dark, we do not simply lose connectivity. We lose places. We lose rituals, relationships, events, art, architecture, memory, and the transcendent sense of belonging that only emerges when a community spends enough time together to turn a platform into a home.

If the immersive industry wants to mature, it must begin treating virtual worlds not as disposable experiments, but as cultural spaces with legacies, responsibilities, and communities worth protecting. Because when a virtual world sunsets, what we lose is not only a platform. We lose a piece of human history written in digital space.

And if we choose to preserve that history, honor those communities, and build better paths forward, their light can still guide the future of virtual worlds.