There's been a lull in the VR space. Since the release of the Meta Quest 3, along with the more affordable Quest 3S, there hasn't been much in the way of headsets to expand the scope of virtual reality. Well, Valve changed this with the announcement of the Steam Frame.

Kicking off a new era of hardware devices from Valve, along with the Steam Machine and new Steam Controller, the upcoming VR headset is gearing up to be the virtual reality device to grab for PC VR gaming. It's not like it has much competition, with the latest HTC Vive Focus Vision arriving back in 2024 and Meta pausing plans for third-party VR headsets from Asus and Lenovo.

In any case, that gives the Steam Frame plenty of time to shine. Not only is it a bonafide "PC," according to Valve, but it's also made for VR and non-VR gaming. It may not be the mixed-reality headset some were expecting (no full color passthrough cameras here), but with a huge backlog of VR and non-VR PC games via SteamOS it can delve into, the gaming giant's priorities have become clear.

This is a VR headset made for PC gaming, through and through, and Valve is delivering a host of unique features I can't wait to try out. If these tools give me the best experience while playing the mythical Half-Life 3 (if it ever comes out), then the Steam Frame will have achieved its goals.

Cloudhead Games, the veteran VR studio behind hit rhythm shooter Pistol Whip (2019), announced that it’s laying off 70% of staff, making for at least 37 affected employees.

Cloudhead CEO Denny Unger released the news via a Bluesky post, explaining the decision was based a “downturn of the gaming industry, VR’s still nascent challenges, including a lack of platform funding.”

Unger, who co-founded the studio in 2012 alongside Tracey Unger, characterizes the decision as a “difficult choice,” noting the studio’s mission still includes the core belief in the power of VR and its coming mainstream relevance.

Unger maintains that mainstream relevance isn’t here yet though; when devices that “do everything” eventually arrive, it will “take studios like ours to be there.”

“Our ongoing priority is to find ‘the reason’ to use VR and we will continue on that road until we can no longer,” Unger says. He further notes that a future update will include more about the challenges and potential opportunities in the VR games industry.

Bigscreen founder Darshan Shankar believes Beyond headsets could be among the top five systems in use on Steam in the next few years.

On that path, Shankar hopes to fully catch up to demand for Beyond 2 headsets in February so they "ship within 1-2 business days, including custom-fit and universal-fit orders." In April, Bigscreen marks 10 years of shared co-watching in VR on Steam with Shankar suggesting over email "perhaps we'll keep the 'beta' tag forever."

Shankar said Valve's announcement of Steam Frame coincided with "one of our biggest sales days" as "the Beyond 2 has become the obvious upgrade path for those who want ultra-lightweight high-resolution micro-OLED and still use their preferred SteamVR tracking…

Poor sales have reportedly forced Apple to cut production of the Vision Pro headset that it had hoped would herald a new era in “spatial computing”.

The tech company also reduced marketing for Vision Pro by more than 95% last year, according to the market intelligence group Sensor Tower in figures first reported by the Financial Times.

Apple continues to sell iPhones, iPads and laptops in the millions each quarter, but analysts say sales of Vision Pro headsets, which cost at least £3,199 ($3,499) each, have been sluggish.

Apple has not released sales figures for the device, but the market research group International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates it will have sold only 45,000 in the last quarter of last year.

VRChat broke its concurrently connected user record as the year flipped from 2025 to 2026 in various time zones, according to figures posted on social media by the head of community. As the New Year rolled across the United States from December 31 at 11:59 pm to January 1 at 12:00 am, from Eastern Time to Pacific Time, VRChat's servers supported nearly 150,000 staying online in various spaces together concurrently. VRChat's long-time head of community Tupper posted on Bluesky that Japan saw a surprisingly high peak figure over the holiday, with no specific number provided, as well as specific peak numbers across the four time zones dividing up the United States for concurrently connected users:

• Eastern: 147226
• Central: 148886
• Mountain: 141184
• Pacific: 127708

While VRChat doesn't always detail how many users access the service in headset versus traditional flat interfaces, the figures help ground the narrative around VR headset use. Tupper noted that "normal weekend" use of VRChat in recent times has seen around "120-125K CCU at peaks."-

Project's Github Page
(releases)

LibreOffice might be a great way to view and edit documents on any platform, but it has never crossed into the realm of virtual reality. That's now changing, as LibreOffice is officially available on Meta Quest VR headsets.

The Document Foundation, which manages the open-source LibreOffice office suite and related projects, has announced a LibreOffice Viewer app for Meta Horizon OS. It's a port of the existing Android app, which allows you to open documents in Open Document Format (ODT, ODS, ODP, ODG), Microsoft Office 2007-365 (DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX), and Microsoft Office 97-2003 (DOC, XLS, PPT) file types. Limited editing capabilities are also available.

So, why is it now on Meta Quest headsets? Well, Microsoft already has Word, PowerPoint, and Excel apps on the Quest platform, which was part of a push by Meta to turn Quest headsets into general productivity devices. It makes sense that LibreOffice would meet Microsoft on the same battlefield. Also, it's not much work to port an Android app to run as a two-dimensional window on Quest headsets, especially with apps like LibreOffice Viewer that are not dependent on Google Play APIs and services.

Another one:
https://youtu.be/VNIjZ36ugQg

Metaverse dating is opening a new way for people to connect through immersive virtual environments. Instead of just texting or swiping photos, users can actually spend time together in digital spaces that feel interactive and real.

This shift is not just about technology. It is about how humans socialize, express emotions, and form relationships in a digital world.

A group of researchers from the University of Bologna, the University of Messina and the CNR-ISTC (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies) has used virtual reality to allow a sample of young men to embody a female avatar subjected to verbal harassment.

The research group has published the results of their study in Scientific Reports.

"We used immersive virtual reality technologies to give participants a direct experience of catcalling in an everyday context," explains Chiara Lucifora, researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bologna and first author of the study. "The results show that undergoing this experience elicits strong feelings of anger and disgust, closely linked to moral disapproval."

The study involved 36 young men with an average age of 23, who were immersed in a virtual reality scenario in which they embodied a young woman. In the first scene, the female avatar was in her bedroom, standing in front of a mirror and getting ready to go to a party. In the second scene, she arrived at a subway station, where several male characters interacted with her.

Created by ‘Crementif’, the BetterVR mod for BotW promises to bring fully stereo-rendered, 6DOF VR support to the Cemu emulated version of the game, including full hand and arm support for things like wielding weapons, torches and Bokoblin arms.

Notably, the mod is designed for the Wii U version of BotW, which comes with the usual provisos of requiring a legal copy of the game—no game files are supplied in the mod. Additionally, because it’s using Cemu, the popular Wii U emulator for PC, the VR mod also boasts a large list of mod compatibility.

“While I put a lot of effort into this mod, not everything works. Expect some jank that’ll be resolved over time,” Crementif says. “AMD graphic cards might not be supported (at launch at least). During testing we could not get it to work on an AMD system due to a driver bug.”

Nearly a decade after consumer VR took its first real steps—driven by headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR—the medium has outgrown its novelty phase.

Those early platforms reshaped not just how players experienced games, but how studios thought about presence, interaction, and scale. Today’s VR games and experiences walk along that groundwork—and are also judged against it.

With expectations higher than ever, this year’s standout titles aren’t just impressive in isolation. They’re the ones that meaningfully build on what came before—and that’s what this year’s awards aim to recognize.

Without further ado, here’s Road to VR’s 2025 Game of the Year Awards:

Game of the Year

Ghost Town

Developer: Fireproof Games Available On: PC VR, Quest, PSVR 2 Release Date: April 24, 2025

Best Meta Quest 3S (128GB) Holiday Sale: Best Buy – $50 discount + $159 in bundled value Deal Includes:

• Quest 3S (128GB) (discounted by $50)
• Best Buy gift card ($75 value)
• Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners game ($30 value)
• 1 month subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ($30 value) [new subscribers only]
• 3 month subscription to Meta Horizon+ ($24 value) Gives you access to a catalog of great Quest games

VRChat: A Home from Home is a film created in VRChat, discussing the positives, communities, events and so much more within it.

Valve’s recently announced Steam Frame is promising a unique twist on VR headsets. On top of being a Quest 3-style standalone headset that can both stream games from a powerful PC and run less demanding games on its own internals, the latter won’t be limited to VR titles – by using SteamOS as its operating system, the Frame can locally run any Steam game in your library, provided it can perform on the hardware.

That’s all fine, especially in how it bypasses classic VR issues like the need for base stations or an expensive desktop. But the smartest thing in VR right now is not the Steam Frame. It isn’t even hardware. It’s a mod. Enter Praydog's UEVR, or Universal Unreal Engine VR: a mod that’s quietly turned hundreds (potentially thousands) of Unreal Engine games into playable, room-scale VR experiences since its release.

The Frame’s ability to locally run your Steam library – enabled by SteamOS, the same operating system as the Steam Deck – might be new, but ultimately it’s still about running flat games in a 2D theatre view, and that’s something that Valve’s own SteamVR platform has been doing for years. UEVR actually changes the games, not just the screen you’re using to display them.

A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company was rebranding the Quest operating system to ‘Horizon OS’ and announced it was working with select partners to launch third-party VR headsets powered by the operating system.

Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an “all-new performance gaming headset,” while Lenovo was purportedly working on “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.”

“We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market,” a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. “We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves.”

Los Angeles-based nonprofit Creative Acts is using virtual reality headsets to help prepare for life outside prison walls. Incarcerated men use VR headsets for exercises ranging from experiencing foreign countries to practicing real-world scenarios they’ll face when released, leading to a reported reduction in prison violence.

After reports from outlets like Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider suggested that Meta is "considering" a cut "as high as 30%" for its "metaverse" teams, Meta issued an official statement confirming "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables".

"Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there," the official statement read. "We aren't planning any broader changes than that."

Asymmetric VR games are a rare but wonderful treat, especially those which let you play with non-VR friends. The newly released VR Giants not only lets you play with a non-VR friend, but thanks to the ‘Friend Pass’ feature, your friend plays for free with only one copy of the game between the two of you.

VR Giants, an asymmetric co-op VR game first launched on Steam, is now available in Early Access on Quest. The game features two distinct roles: the VR player is Goliath and the non-VR player is David. The pair work together to tackle platforming challenges from two completely different perspectives.

For years, the metaverse has been discussed through the lenses of virtual reality, gaming, crypto-economics, and digital identity. Yet beneath all these layers lies a critical component that rarely makes headlines: the linguistic infrastructure required to make immersive worlds truly global. A metaverse that cannot be understood, accessed, or used by millions of non-English speakers cannot scale — technologically or economically.

While localisation is widely understood in traditional software and web environments, translating the metaverse is an entirely new challenge. The rules are different, the interactions are multidimensional, and the expectations for immersion leave no room for slow, inaccurate, or culturally blind communication.

Inside a makeshift tent in the heart of the besieged Gaza Strip, Israel’s genocidal war, which has destroyed neighbourhoods, schools and hospitals, decimated families and shattered lives for more than two years, no longer exists.

Virtual reality technology is taking Palestinian children struggling with physical and psychological wounds to a world away, where they can feel safe again.

“After I was injured in the head, I try to forget the pain,” Salah Abu Rukba, a Palestinian child taking part in the sessions, told Al Jazeera at the VR Tent in az-Zawayda, central Gaza.

Skyjet VR is a solution for location-based entertainment. The machine is made by a standing station with a cushion for your back and a safety belt that keeps your torso attached to the cushion even when the station is moving. On your two sides, there are two metal handles that you should hold during the whole experience. This has two advantages: one is, of course, safety, and the other is related to realism, because if you had a real jetpack, most probably your hands would be holding something similar, too.

Below your shoes, there is a metallic floor with some hydraulic mechanisms that let it rotate: when the floor rotates a bit, for instance, to simulate you going on a curved path with your jetpack, you rotate with it, for an added realism of the experience.

In front of you, two fans simulate airflow towards you while you are flying.

Google is starting to roll out new photorealistic avatars which they call “Likeness”. Similar to Apple’s Personas, Likeness avatars are generated by scanning a user’s face, then animated it with input from the sensors on a headset. The avatars can be used to represent the user in video call apps, but Google doesn’t yet have a way to have spatial meetings with other Likeness avatars.