MyOpinion

Whenever Apple releases a new product category, there seems to be this industry drive to find its weak points and jab at it until it dies. Apple Vision Pro may not be a blockbuster, but it is the entry point to Spatial Computing, which Apple still believes to be its future.

According to a report from MacRumors, Apple Vision Pro hardware as it stands in April 2026 may truly be dead. The story suggests that Apple has likely given up on the platform due to a lack of consumer interest after the M5 update.

The evidence presented is an anonymous tip about changes to the Apple Vision Pro team. Apparently, Apple has redistributed the team to other projects, including Siri. We believe what MacRumors has been told, and we know our friends over there do good work.

Speaking to Polygon, Valve revealed that it’s only releasing Steam Controller next month for a pretty important (and slightly obvious) reason: Steam Controller “doesn’t have RAM in it,” Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali told Polygon.

“We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch,” Cardinali maintains.

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is the best VR horror game in quite some time. Much like Batman Arkham Shadow, Half-Life: Alyx, and Metro Awakening before it, Altered Echoes stays faithful to its series while still shining in VR.

The gameplay is nothing groundbreaking, but the same can be said for the series as a whole. Altered Echoes keeps it simple and executes at a high level, getting nearly everything right with the exception of limited VR options. These ultimately do not detract from a top notch VR horror experience.

Schell Games head Jesse Schell joined the Good VR podcast and recapped his path in VR from working on Disney’s pioneering VR attraction Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride in the early 1990s to the studio’s recent explorations in generative AI.

Along the way, we discuss the seated I Expect You To Die trilogy, the physically active Until You Fall sword fighting game, and the ambitious effort to transition the mobile multiplayer game Among Us to fully immersive embodied virtual reality.

“The business of watching your back, the fact that in VR, you literally have to turn around to see…is someone behind me?” Schell said. “Like, ooh, that does feel kind of like a match. And so we were excited by the idea of it in conversations with Innersloth, this was something that was interesting to them. And so we ended up kind of being able to team up to get it done. They were very interested in having us be a part of that. And it definitely has been the most, in terms of number of players, the most successful VR experience that we’ve been a part of.”

Most recently, Schell transitioned development of Among Us back to original developer Innersloth. The title represents perhaps the only multiplayer title in gaming to transition across all those platforms and modes of play, essentially going full circle from a flat map on a flat screen to a 3D map on a 3D screen and then, finally, back to a 3D map on a flat screen. Schell says what “shocked us” was that, as the title moved from VR back to flat, they expected more players to enjoy the game in that final mode of play.

“As many players as we have in VR, I don’t know, we’ll probably have three times as many in flat? Of course we will,” he said they thought. “And the answer was no, that hasn’t been true. The VR part of it has been more successful for us than the flat version, which was a little surprising.”

Forefront, a 32-player Battlefield-style VR FPS, launches in full on April 23. Ahead of the release, Mike and I were invited to playtest the game's new weapons, gadgets, and attachments with 30 other content creators, journalists, and game devs all vying for dominance of the new map, Clearwater.

What followed was an hour of sprawling FPS warfare that hearkened back to the golden era of massive multiplayer Battlefield. We laughed, we cried, we bled, and lived to tell you about it.

Apple announced that CEO Tim Cook is stepping down, and John Ternus, a long-time Apple veteran, is set to take his place. As head of hardware engineering, Ternus oversaw the launch of Vision Pro in addition to a slew of core Apple products over the years, although the new CEO may have some reservations about the company’s premium XR headset moving forward.

Fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in mechanical engineering, the soon-to-be Apple CEO actually did a four-year stint at Virtual Research Systems, a now-defunct hardware company making some of the first commercially available VR headsets.

Virtual Research’s PC VR headsets were decidedly of a different era, although they helped spark the latest generation. Just three years prior to the release of Oculus Rift DK1, in 2010 Oculus founder Palmer Luckey even called an owner of a Virtual Research V8 a “lucky bastard”, noting the device’s 60-degree field-of-view was “pretty fantastic” more than a decade after the headset’s release.

Like last year, I’m one of the media partners of the event. For this reason, I asked if I could have a preview of the event by speaking with some relevant Chinese XR companies, and so I had the opportunity to have a mini interview with Pimax, INMO, FXG, and DPVR! They will explain to us not only what they do but also what the view of the current immersive market is from people who live in the Far East.

Sunny Chen [DPVR]: Chinese ecosystems excel in scenario agility, while Western ecosystems dominate in rule-defining power.

Strengths of the Chinese ecosystem: scenario-driven innovation and extreme efficiency. Backed by world-leading supply chain clusters, rapid hardware iteration, and exceptional cost-control capabilities, Chinese companies demonstrate extraordinary commercial agility. We excel at diving deep into specific vertical scenarios, validating business models quickly, and closing the loop from lab prototypes to large-scale commercial deployment. Simply put, we possess strong realization and transformation capabilities.

Strengths of the Western ecosystem: platform logic and ecosystem definition. Leading Western companies still hold profound technological sovereignty and first-mover advantages in underlying operating systems, developer ecosystem building, global content systems, and the ability to define consumer rules. They tend to start from underlying protocols to build a platform consensus on a global scale.

However, the endgame of the future XR competition will not be regional rivalry, but complementary strengths from a global perspective. Companies truly capable of riding out industry cycles must be inclusive and integrative: they need China-style speed of innovation, delivery efficiency, and scenario depth, as well as global platform thinking, brand heritage, and ecosystem synergy.

The future of XR will inevitably be one of deep integration. We are committed to seamlessly linking China’s hardware advantages with global application scenarios, creating value for users worldwide in a more open ecosystem.

The studio announced last month its ‘Sim 5’ update was coming in April, which is set to bring PSVR 2 support to the PS5 version of the game alongside a number of other improvements, although it wasn’t clear exactly when the update was planned to release.

Now, in the studio’s April 2026 Developer Stream, Asobo confirmed the game has now passed Sony certification, and is “down to three must-fix bugs or something” Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann says.

The studio isn’t ready to say just when it plans to launch the update, although Neumann says they’re “super close.”

Sock Puppet Superstar features hand-tracking and a custom voice synthesizer built in FMOD to transform players into sock puppet performers. Using hand tracking or traditional controllers, players control one or two sock puppet singers, raising and lowering them to control vocal pitch in an attempt to sing as accurately as possible. The result is a mix of rhythm gameplay and utter silliness that looks and sounds refreshingly hilarious.

meetings in VR can revisit the birthplace of the organization.

Two organizers of VR meetups for AA, Paul and Mike, estimate hundreds of people have been put on the path to recovery from their meetings in virtual reality as they find themselves protected by the total anonymity of a headset connected over the Internet.

The two co-founders of AA are known as Bill W and Dr. Bob and a home in Akron, Ohio is considered the birthplace of the organization back in the 1930s. Paul hopes to be able to visit that place physically soon to scan it with headsets and a 3D camera. Using a platform like Horizon Hyperscape, nearly 100 years later people may be able to revisit that place in VR.

“We want to create the ability to tour that home, which is so important to many people in AA, that will never be able to get there,” explained Paul during the Good VR podcast. “And we’ve got friends and people in Costa Rica and France and England and even other parts of the United States who are not going to travel to Akron but would really like to see, if you will, the birthplace of AA.”

Across a 39-minute conversation, Paul and Mike explain the organization and its principles as well as their journey through virtual reality as well as the fellowship they’ve been able to foster across various platforms, from Altspace to Horizon Worlds to new platforms they’re exploring today.

After months of waiting, Bigscreen has finally shown off the long-awaited Halo Mount for Beyond 2 and 2e, its thin and light PC VR headset which shipped in March 2025.

According to a company blog post, improvements over the old Halo Mount design include a new clip-on mechanism which requires no adhesives, as well as support for third-party accessories thanks to an M3 brass-threaded screw hole for mods.

It also features an improved flip-up mechanism, extra USB extension for better cable travel, and easier vertical adjustment for better forehead positioning, the company says.

Meta is increasing the price of Quest 3 by $100 and Quest 3S by $50, starting on Sunday.

Quest 3S (128GB): $300 → $350
Quest 3S (256GB): $400 → $450
Quest 3 (512GB): $500 → $600

Meta says the price hikes are coming because "the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly".

"The global surge in the price of critical components — specifically memory chips — is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR", the company said in a prepared statement.