MyOpinion

Play For Dream MR, the high-end Android standalone headset, is getting Guy Godin's app Virtual Desktop next week.

Originally founded in China as YVR in 2020, the headset company renamed itself to Play For Dream and reincorporated in Singapore alongside launching its third headset, called Play For Dream MR, which it started shipping this year.

Play For Dream MR is a high-end standalone headset running the company's own fork of Android, with the kind of specs you might have expected from a Meta Quest Pro 2. Priced at $2000, it features Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, 4K micro-OLED displays, eye tracking with automatic IPD adjustment, and comes with tracked controllers. It has a 1-hour battery, built into the back of the strap, and thus Play For Dream recommends pairing it with an external battery pack.

Bootstrap Island is a survival game inspired by Robinson Crusoe. It was developed from the ground up for PC VR.

You are the sole survivor of a 17th-century shipwreck. In order to survive on the mysterious tropical island, you must adapt to your surroundings, fend off wild animals, explore the island, and develop your skills.

Bootstrap Island entered Early Access in early 2024. Since then, three major updates have been released, introducing an inventory and system for building shelters and managing scarce resources, a boss fight against the Jungle Overlord, and a dynamic weather system.

Now, indie studio Maru VR has unveiled the official roadmap for Bootstrap Island (see trailer below). It lays out the studio’s vision for the game from its initial state to the planned end of Early Access in the first quarter of 2026.

At SID Display Week 2025, Samsung is showcasing two new micro-OLED panels that can deliver brighter 4K per-eye headsets with richer colors and no motion blur.

Micro-OLED displays are fabricated directly onto silicon wafers, a distinctly different manufacturing process to regular OLED, and offer much higher pixel density than any other production-ready display technology. Micro-OLED displays thus enable high resolution headsets with relatively slim designs - and of course OLED's signature infinite contrast with rich colors and true blacks.

Currently 2.5K micro-OLED displays from Chinese supplier SeeYA Technology are used in the Bigscreen Beyond series, while 4K micro-OLED displays from Sony are used in Apple Vision Pro, and BOE's 4K micro-OLED displays are used in Play For Dream MR and Shiftall MeganeX superlight. More headsets using a new Sony 4K micro-OLED are set to launch later this year, from Samsung, Sony, and Pimax.

VRChat credits buy avatars made by a new group of creators skilled in the art of virtual reality fashion. The new system allows users to try on sellers' avatars in a private space before buying. "The Marketplace is an in-client store that allows users to buy and sell avatars," a VRChat representative explained over email. "Not only does this give creators another platform to monetize on VRChat, but it also makes finding an avatar far, far easier than before."

Assetto Corsa EVO launched earlier this year in early access, serving up a PC VR mode that wasn’t exactly a hit due to some pretty questionable overall optimization. Now, developer KUNOS Simulazioni have released the game’s 0.2 update, which also includes some much needed VR performance tweaks.

The 0.2 just dropped for Assetto Corsa EVO, which includes a heap of new content, including seven new cars: Maserati GT2, Lotus Exige V6 Cup, Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA, Alfa Romeo 75 Turbo Evoluzione, Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6, Mazda MX-5, and Honda NSX-R. There are also two new tracks: Circuit of the Americas (COTA) and Donington Park.

Overall, the game now boasts both single player ‘Open Mode’ as a way to access all game cars without limitations, and a single player ‘Career Mode’, offering game economy and progression mechanics.

There’s nothing quite like The Midnight Walk. The Swedish studio Moonhood has pulled off something rare in today’s gaming landscape: every object in the game was first hand-sculpted from clay, then scanned in 3D, and finally animated with a stop-motion effect. This gives the entire world a tactile, one-of-a-kind look where you can almost see every fingerprint and every tiny imperfection in the clay.

The catch? In VR, the game’s resolution is so low that most of these lovingly crafted details are lost in a haze.

The Midnight Walk is available for both PC and PlayStation 5, with VR modes on both platforms. I tested the console version with PSVR 2, the PC VR version using both PSVR 2 with the PC adapter, and Meta Quest 3 via Link cable. The low-res, dull look is present across the board, but it’s especially noticeable on the PS5 with PSVR 2.

Rebellion is gearing up for the release of Zombie Army VR, dropping a fresh feature trailer that spotlights both close-quarters and long-range combat against the undead. The trailer gives a first look at meticulously recreated World War II-era weapons, now brought to life in virtual reality. One notable twist: you can wield different weapons in each hand, adding a new layer of chaos to the action. As the series’ first VR spin-off, Zombie Army VR launches May 22 on PlayStation VR2, Meta Quest, and PC VR via Steam. If you’re looking to blast your way through hordes of zombies with a friend — or just want to see those X-Ray kills from a new perspective — it might be worth keeping an eye on this one.

This release includes a variety of bug fixes and quality of life improvements for SteamVR.

We continue to focus on OpenXR as our preferred API for new games and applications. SteamVR’s official OpenXR subforum is here and we’d love to hear your feedback, as well as suggestions for new features.

SteamVR:

• Quick recenter now available system-wide via system button long press.
• Improved automatic throttling behavior.
• Reduces controller and physics jitter from throttling and prediction changes in response to performance variations.

OpenXR:

• Better handling of non-pipelined applications.
• Reduces controller jitter for Unity OpenXR apps.

Linux:

• Fixed empty black window when starting SteamVR on Linux.
• Added window icons to SteamVR windows on Linux.

Developer Options

• Removed remaining legacy 32-bit executables, including: vrmonitor, vrstartup, restarthelper, overlay_viewer.
• Fix UI launching of overlay_viewer.
• overlay_viewer gets better pan / zoom / resize support, and other misc improvements.
• performance improvements to IVRChaperone ()->GetBoundsColor().
• Added lens calibration model, DISTORT_POLY3_TANGENT_SCALED.

Cutting it down to half the size would mean bringing it down around 310 grams; certainly not be easy but also not entirely unrealistic, especially if they stick to an off-board battery. After all, Bigscreen Beyond is around 180 grams. It might not be a standalone headset, but it shows how compact the housing, optics, and displays can be.

And half the cost would mean a price tag of roughly $1,750. Still not cheap compared to most headsets out there, but significantly more attainable, especially if Apple can market it as also being the best TV most people will have in their home.

This might seem obvious. Making any tech product smaller and cheaper is a good thing.

But my point here is that Vision Pro is disproportionately held back by its size and cost. It has way more to be gained by halving its size and cost than Quest, for instance, because Quest’s core UX is still very clunky.

Impact Reality, previously known for its VR-related marketing services and its subsidiary Flat2VR Studios, which specializes in VR conversions of flat games, has announced the creation of a full-fledged publishing arm for original VR games.

Impact Reality emphasizes that Impact Inked will not be about direct ports or adaptations of flat games. Instead, all games will be built from the ground up for VR. Some will introduce entirely new IPs, while others will expand existing universes in unexpected and immersive ways.

Puzzling Places (2021) has been a long-time favorite immersive puzzle game, bringing a heap of its real-world scanned 3D jigsaw puzzles to players in both virtual and mixed reality. Now developer Realities.io is preparing to release it on PC, which will include both VR and flatscreen modes.

Like in the versions available on Quest, PSVR 2 and Vision Pro, the app’s 3D-scanned puzzles come in multiple difficulty levels, including 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400-piece puzzles, with some of the largest puzzles going up to 1,000 pieces. The benefit with the PC release though is you can continue puzzling across flatscreen, like a Steam Deck, and in VR mode with a capable VR-ready PC.

Android XR has been squarely out of the limelight since Google announced it back in December alongside Samsung’s ‘Project Moohan’ mixed reality headset. There aren’t any firm release dates for either, although both are expected to launch publicly sometime later this year.

While the company has confirmed a number of Android XR features, including the much-awaited support for passthrough camera access, and has also released developer access to its Android XR SDK, we’re still waiting to see how it will stack up against more mature XR ecosystems, like Meta’s Horizon OS and Apple’s visionOS.

Android XR is moving towards public launch later this year, and Google is prepping a new XR toolchain before it does, which will bundle Jetpack SceneCore and ARCore into its XR-specific version of Jetpack. Jetpack XR, which is now in developer preview, lets mobile or large screen Android app devs create spatialized layouts with the help of 3D models and immersive environments. Notably, the inclusion of ARCore with Jetpack XR suggests Google is consolidating its spatial computing tools, giving devs a unified way to build both AR and VR experiences.