I would like to say that this has been an exciting week for XR, but it wouldn’t be true: actually, probably also because of the vacations for the 1st of May, it has been one of the most boring weeks of the year in our field. But I’m excited anyway since I’m going to have a couple of interesting trips waiting for me… You will discover it all in tomorrow’s article! But now let’s see the (few) pieces of cool XR news that I’ve selected for you!
Top news of the week
Meta Reality Labs did not have a great quarter
In its latest earnings call, Meta shared that in the first quarter of 2025, the revenues of Reality Labs were 6% lower than in Q1 2024. 6% is not a lot, but it’s important to state that they would have been much lower if not for Meta Ray-Ban Glasses. As usual, the losses have been huge: just in that quarter, Meta spent $4.6 billion, resulting in a loss of $4.2 billion.
Quest sales dropped a lot, someone says even 30% less than last year, and this shows that, notwithstanding the claims from Meta, Quest 3S is not selling as well as Quest 2. It had a great launch quarter, but the momentum seems to have stopped with the Winter Holidays. Meta said that the series 3 of Quest is having much more engagement than the previous one, but the sales (and hence, the revenues) numbers remain disappointing. The Horizon Store seems to confirm this trend: Ghost Town, one of the most appreciated XR games of 2025, has sold just a few thousand copies: only 6500 people have unlocked the very first achievement, meaning that even if you release a great game, its economic success on the Quest platform is not guaranteed, especially if you just target Quest 3.
What has saved the day for Reality Labs has been the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Zuckerberg told investors that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had “tripled in sales in the last year”. Meta CFO Susa Li said that the glasses have four times as many monthly active users compared to Q1 2024. These results are impressive, and I’m sure they will make Meta double down on the investment of its resources on smartglasses, and slightly less on VR.
Zuckerberg has listed Meta’s ‘five major opportunities’ for the upcoming future, and VR/MR has not made it to this list. AI did (of course), and smartglasses fit very well with this technology. You can draw your conclusions…
More info (Meta’s earnings call for Q1 2025)
More info (Meta’s five major opportunities for the future)
More info (Quest sales may be down -30%)
More info (Ghost Town’s estimated sold copies)
Other relevant news
You can now publish applications using camera access on the Horizon Store
After a short trial period lasting a few weeks, Meta has promoted camera access from being an experimental feature to a standard one, and so you can now publish applications employing it on the Horizon Store.
This is a great day: finally, it will be possible to publish on the Quest Store apps that merge the real and the virtual using AI. Every week I see crazy interesting things that developers are making with camera access: this week, for instance, ImmerGallery showed how it used the data from the cameras to transform the Quest 3 into a 3D camera. And the fact that now these experiences are not just relegated to be tech demos but can become commercial products is amazing.
Of course, the privacy concerns remain. But remember that the user has to explicitly give consent to the app to have camera access. And Meta’s policies prohibit certain uses of data, including to “perform, facilitate, or provide tools for surveillance,” and “uniquely identifying a device or user, except as permitted [in the policy].” Let’s hope this will be enough.
More info (Quest apps with camera access can now be published on the store — Road To VR)
More info (Quest apps with camera access can now be published on the store — Upload VR)
More info (Immergallery on Quest 3)
News worth a mention
Discover what data mining reveals about the future of Quest
Since many articles about future features of the Quest that Upload was publishing were just journalists reporting what Luna was leaking, Upload took the smart decision to make directly Luna write an article about the upcoming features of the Quest that we can expect from their work on datamining. It’s a shorter path this way lol.
Luna’s article is pretty interesting and says that Meta will soon overhaul the UI and the windows management of the Quest (I hope for the better), plus offer people to share the content of a window with other users, let you authenticate to your device using eye tracking (probably on Quest 4) and touchtype for VR on every surface.
Pimax to share interesting news at Pimax Connect
Pimax is going to share some interesting updates about its headsets. It will hold an online event, which you can watch through YouTube, and that has a very original name, Pimax Connect, which is very different from the names of other events of VR companies, like Meta Connect or Pico Connect.
Pimax Connect on May 11 is going to share updates on the very small Pimax Dream Air, which is good, because we are all very curious to know its price and launch date. What worries me about this event is that Pimax also teased “new announcements”. I think the world is not ready for other 73 VR headsets announced by Pimax….
Anyway, I’m very excited to hear what Pimax has to say.
MeganeX 8K Superlight had a troubled start
The MeganeX 8K Superlight has finally been launched, but its launch has not been as exciting as Shiftall would have hoped for. From the opinions of people on Reddit, it seems the headset is hard to fit perfectly to the head of the users, the lenses have a small sweet spot, and especially, the software is a mess. If it works, it’s a delight thanks to its crispness, but if it does not work, it is a nuisance… also because the headset can not be refunded.
(Thanks Rob Cole for the tip)
The doubts around Infinite Reality
Some weeks ago, I reported to you about the startup Infinite Reality getting the absurd amount of $3B from a single investor, even if it has no hit product we know about. From that moment, the company started acquiring other companies, but it is still not clear what exactly its vision is.
The investor was not disclosed, but Forbes did an investigation (reshared by David Gene Oh) and found that the secret investor is Sterling Select, a venture firm affiliated with Sterling Equities. Anyway, the investment of Sterling in Infinite Reality is not reported on its website, notwithstanding its huge size. The situation is always more confusing…
Live meshing on Quest 3
Last week, I reported to you that a developer had been able to obtain live 3D mesh reconstruction of the environment around the user on the Meta Quest 3. This week, an article on Upload explained that the developer is Julian Triveri (the guy who created the hack to read passthrough cameras on Quest) and that he’s not using camera access, as I erroneously believed, but the Depth APIs of the headset. The process is resource hungry (it drains the battery fast), but it is very cool nonetheless.
How to block Horizon Worlds
Meta is keeping annoying us with Horizon Worlds, and recently, it also made it impossible to uninstall it from the headset. So the community found another solution to get rid of it: blocking it. Using a very simple process, shared by a VR guy on Reddit, you can prevent Horizon Worlds from starting and be sure not to open it, even by chance. I wonder if Meta will now also block this method…
EA pauses its work on Rally Games
Codemasters is “pausing development” on future World Rally Championship games, ending updates for EA Sports WRC. This is terrible news in general (Codemasters have been working on rally games for 40 years), and is even worse for us VR people because it was offering the best rally games with VR support. Unluckily, the crisis of gaming and the layoffs in EA have caused this sad outcome.
Some news about content
- Psytec Games released an interview with Upload VR, where it explained why it launched Titan Isles and not Windlands 3
- Remnant Protocol is a VR space sim with a strategy layer funded by Meta, and it’s coming to Quest and Steam in Q4. HOTAS is going to be supported
- Legends BMX, a freestyle mixed reality cycling game, is launching on Quest on May 8
- VR civilization builder Surviving Mars: Pioneer is making its Quest and Steam Early Access debut also on May 8
More info (Psytec Games)
More info (Remnant Protocol)
More info (Legends BMX)
More info (Surviving Mars: Pioneer)
Some reviews about content
- Elsewhere Electric seems an interesting asynchronous game that allows a person with a VR headset and one on a mobile phone to interact together. It’s been defined as a “spooky roguelike”.
- I, Robot, a reimagining of the 1984 arcade game of the same name, is a puzzle game with well-tuned difficulties that may especially appeal to people who are fans of arcades and retrogaming
- Immerrock proposes a good concept, that is teaching you how to play a guitar through mixed reality, but mixed reality, because of its lag and distortion, is still not ready for this type of product
More info (Elsewhere Electric)
More info (I, Robot)
More info (Immerrock)
Other news
Apple is adding support for Apple Vision Pro to the opensource Godot game engine
Homerise lets you control your smart home from the Apple Vision Pro
Lowe’s now lets its customers design their kitchen with the Apple Vision Pro
Motorola phones are now usable in VR from your Quest
Meta shared an interesting interview with one of the audio designers of the new Star Wars MR experience
News from partners (and friends)
Under the pillow: Kitten Mormitten is now on Quest Store!
My friend Georgy Molodtsov has finally published on the Meta Quest Store the first part of Under the Pillow: Kitten Mormitten, for just €2. It is a cute short storytelling experience that talks about two little kids and their stuffed plush toy. One of the kids is called Georgy, so you can imagine that there is some autobiographic component in it.
I have helped Georgy in fixing some issues with his Quest version, so I really hope this experience goes well for him!
Learn more
Open Brush announced multiplayer support
Open Brush, the open-source version of Google Tilt Brush, now offers what was one of the most requested features: Multiplayer collaborative painting. It means you can finally meet with other people in VR and start creating together!
Learn more (OpenBrush official website)
Learn more (OpenBrush social channels)
Phygtl Is Hiring!
Who We Are
A Silicon Valley-Based Startup on a mission to transform digital engagement from the ground-up by merging the physical and the digital world. A Creator Platform for next-gen to ‘Socialize.’ With former leaders from Amazon, Riot, Ubisoft, Samsung, and a strong Advisory Board from Nike, Lego, Coca-Cola, and Mastercard, led by a serial-entrepreneur with 2 exits, UC Berkeley Faculty, 2x Author, we are handpicking brilliant minds and devoted souls like you to join the team
Who Are We Looking For
Unity Developers (both Junior and Senior levels)
Join our Unity team and be at the forefront of innovation in the global mobile-AR industry. If you’re passionate about fine-tuning Unity components and creating groundbreaking AR experiences, we want you to be a part of our team, shaping the future of engagement.
Contact me and I’ll forward your CV to the team!
Some XR fun
This Quest 3 is a bit sus…
Funny link
This is not spam, trust me, it is… ehm… another thing…
Funny link
Well… he just said it
Funny link
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.
Let me take a moment before to thank anyway all my Patreon donors for the support they give to me:
- Alex Gonzalez VR
- DeoVR
- GenVR
- Eduardo Siman
- Jonn Fredericks
- Jean-Marc Duyckaerts
- Reynaldo T Zabala
- Richard Penny
- Terry xR. Schussler
- Ilias Kapouranis
- Paolo Leoncini
- Immersive.international
- Nikk Mitchell and the great FXG team
- Jake Rubin
- Alexis Huille
- Raghu Bathina
- Chris Koomen
- Cognitive3D
- Wisear (Yacine Achiakh)
- Masterpiece X
- Dimo Pepelyashev
- Carol Dalrymple
- Keith Bradner
- Jennifer Granger
- Jason Moore
- Steve Biggs
- Julio Cesar Bolivar
- Jan Schroeder
- Kai Curtis
- Francesco Strada
- Sikaar Keita
- Ramin Assadollahi
- Juan Sotelo
- Andrew Sheldon
- Chris Madsen
- Horacio Torrendell
- Andrew Deutsch
- Fabien Benetou
- Tatiana Kartashova
- Marco “BeyondTheCastle” Arena
- Eloi Gerard
- Adam Boyd
- Jeremy Dalton
- Joel Ward
- Alex P
- Lynn Eades
- Donald P
- Casie Lane
- Catherine Henry
- Qcreator
- Ristband (Anne McKinnon & Roman Rappak)
- Stephen Robnett
- KaihatsuJai
- Christopher Boyd
- Anonymous Supporter
- Giuseppe Pippi
- Mark Frederiksen
- Sb
- Boule Petanque
- Pieter Siekerman
- Enrico Poli
- Vooiage Technologies
- Caroline
- Liam James O’Malley
- Hillary Charnas
- Wil Stevens
- Francesco Salizzoni
- Alan Smithson
- Steve R
- Brentwahn
- Michael Gaebler
- Tiago Silva
- Matt Cool
- Mark G
- Simplex
- Gregory F Gorsuch
- Paul Shay
- Matias Nassi
And now here you are the link to donate:
Support The Red Cross in Ukraine
(Header image by Meta)
Disclaimer: this blog contains advertisement and affiliate links to sustain itself. If you click on an affiliate link, I’ll be very happy because I’ll earn a small commission on your purchase. You can find my boring full disclosure here.
Related
