Meta is laying off more than 10% of its Reality Labs division, specifically targeting VR and "the metaverse", The New York Times reports.

Reality Labs, if you're unaware, is the division of Meta behind its Quest headsets, Horizon software, smart glasses, and sEMG wristband, as well as researching future technologies such as Codec Avatars and true AR glasses.

The New York Times estimates Reality Labs at roughly 15,000 staff, suggesting that more than 1500 could be losing their job.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has scheduled an all-hands meeting for tomorrow, both the NYT and Business Insider claim, describing it as the “most important” of the year.

Meta Confirms “Shifting Some” Funding “From Metaverse Toward AI Glasses”

Meta has officially confirmed “shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables”, following reports of an up to 30% budget cut for parts of Reality Labs.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The report comes just over a month after Meta officially confirmed "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables", a statement which itself followed early reports of the cuts from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider.

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

With the layoffs reportedly taking place this week, we'll bring you updates as we learn of Meta staff affected.

Meta CTO: 2025 Will Determine Whether AR/VR Bet Is Visionary Or “A Legendary Misadventure”

In a leaked memo, Meta’s CTO told staff that 2025 will determine whether its hardware & metaverse division is “the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure”.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Meta's funding shift from Horizon Worlds and VR to smart glasses is happening just over a year after a leaked memo from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told Reality Labs staff that 2025 will determine whether their projects are "the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure".

In the memo, Bosworth described 2025 as "the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs", and told staff they "need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR". Note that at the time, Meta was using MR to refer to VR too, a nomenclature that it ended earlier this year.

"And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance", Bosworth followed that sentence with.

Since then, Reality Labs saw its highest-ever quarterly revenue in Q4 2024 with the launch of Quest 3S, which was the top-selling console on Amazon US for Christmas. But this momentum did not carry through into 2025 at all.

The first two quarters of 2025 saw Quest sales decline year-over-year, revealing that while Quest 3S was a popular stocking stuffer, it simply is not a successful year-round product. While Q3 saw a rebound, Meta explained that this was due to retailers stocking up on Quest 3S for this year's holiday season.

Meanwhile, Meta has continued to push its Horizon Worlds "metaverse" platform with multi-million-dollar creator competitions, especially focused on smartphone-only worlds, as the company hopes to scale the platform from a social VR space to a cross-platform Roblox and Fortnite competitor. But this doesn't seem to have gained much traction.

Ray-Ban Meta Sales Have More Than Tripled This Year So Far

Sales of Ray-Ban Meta glasses so far this year have more than tripled compared to the same time last year, more than 200% growth.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

This relative stagnation in Meta's Quest and Horizon Worlds effort is contrasted with skyrocketing sales and significant public and investor interest in its smart glasses.

In multiple earnings calls last year, Meta's partner EssilorLuxottica said that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses were performing "exceptionally well", with sales having more than tripled compared to 2024. Both companies have claimed to be selling many models as fast as they can make them.

Meta has also claimed "unprecedented demand" for its higher-end Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, recently announcing a delay of its international expansion plans to catch up with US production.

Millions of people plan their weekends around a visit to virtual reality.

Solid total figures are hard to come by given the competitive nature of the immersive industry. A great many people are solo flying or driving in VR headsets, and spending time in single-player offline virtual worlds where they watch movies in virtual theaters, shoot at virtual gun ranges, bowl at virtual alleys, fish at virtual ponds, or play games in virtual apartments. In many cases, the designers of these digital spaces have zero interest in tracking the usage of the visitors to the spaces they've made.

Our systems for tracking and monetizing actions on the Internet and on Earth are alien to a generation learning to entertain themselves distributing spaces online to anyone who might wish to exit reality for half a day of headset sim and chill. For all intents and purposes, these people are pretty much just packing up in reality after the week is done with them and setting off for parts unknown in VR with the freedom of the weekend.

When it comes to going online and interacting with others, some of the most popular destinations in headset, like VRChat and Rec Room, also have flat-screen editions that make it difficult to cut out a singular figure on how many people are wearing a VR headset and being transported at any given moment. And in some of these places, where the servers need to scale constantly to accommodate fluid interactions delivered everywhere, there's a constant flow of people arriving and departing in and out of headsets.

On New Year's Eve, nearly 150,000 people spent the holiday in VRChat worlds, a majority of them in headset while setting a concurrent user record as the calendar changed from 2025 to 2026 across the United States. Then, last Saturday January 10, 2026 at 10 a.m. Pacific, Another Axiom's planet of apes received an off-world visitor and broke their own record too.

The alien's arrival in Gorilla Tag was preceded by a long build-up of lore that kicked off with the sighting of a green dot visible to everyone in the sky. According to Another Axiom, more than 110,000 people put on their headsets at the same time to witness the green comet collide with the planet, a moment executed as a once-in-a-lifetime live event hosted exclusively in virtual reality. More than 1 million unique users accessed Gorilla Tag in headset from Friday to Sunday, according to Another Axiom.

"Live Events are the modern version of Must See TV," wrote Jake Zim, Another Axiom Chief Marketing Officer.

Virtual worlds are becoming important and reliable destinations for the adults and teens up at midnight partying like it's 2050 in VRChat, and kids gathering a few weeks later to witness a comet in Gorilla Tag as well as countless more dipping in and out of other virtual worlds. As Meta shifts its hiring focus again and institutes another round of layoffs this week, I've put together this piece in hopes of shifting the broader narrative.

These narratives should probably acknowledge some things about VR.

VR Is Science & The Metaverse Is Fiction

VR was around as an idea with "presence" and its relationship to focus studied as a concept for years by researchers before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. To put a finer point on it, the metaverse is science fiction and virtual reality is studied in science.

Author Neal Stephenson wrote of the metaverse in Snow Crash while William Gibson wrote of the cyberdeck in Neuromancer and both are impactful works of science fiction today. Meanwhile, in actual real world VR headsets, researchers recently worked out the user interface that would let robots make actual deliveries to a person in headset without disturbing them from their virtual environment.

If VRChat and Gorilla Tag were cities, or public venues, then virtual reality in 2026 is already regularly accommodating roughly 100,000 people per place at one time. They're not all in the same exact room in each locale, but the people who go to these places (usually on the weekend) experience a sense of togetherness something like what other generations in a different century felt spotting Hale-Bopp in the sky together, or singing karaoke and counting down to midnight in a happy room with friends.

"Gorilla Tag itself, and I think the VR ecosystem, is reliant on a low cost headset that is parent-trusted and kid-friendly and sold in the toy aisle," Zim said over a voice call. "The health of the ecosystem is driven by the audience that is spending on the platform, and that audience is the younger audience, the Gorilla Tag audience."

Last weekend, Apple broadcast a whole live Lakers game from some of the first Apple Immersive VR cameras bringing Vision Pro owners closer than courtside seats. Later this week in Walkabout, a new mini golf theme park will release representing the creative output of a couple dozen artistic souls who complete the full loop of VR as an engine of creation. They build courses together in headsets more like chefs in the kitchen than architects making blueprints, even if their output is still architecture.

Former Oculus CTO and technical adviser to Meta John Carmack once sat with a triple monitor setup behind him and explained to VR's biggest believers what might be ahead for Meta's next few years trying to brute force the creation of a metaverse:

"Setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse...the metaverse is a honeypot trap for architecture astronauts," he warned. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided now is the time to build the metaverse....my worry is we could spend years and thousands of people possibly and wind up with things that didn't contribute all that much to the ways that people are actually using the devices and hardware today...we need to concentrate on actual products rather than technology, architecture, or initiatives."

Those interested in sharing anything relevant to VR usage can message 1-949-610-3857 or email ian@uploadvr.com.

March 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of Ubisoft’s The Division franchise, and while it failed to meet expectations in some ways, the series still found a dedicated audience who enjoyed the game’s mix of realistic aesthetics with RPG mechanics. For those who wished that The Division was a more hardcore shooter however, Ubisoft have announced a surprise update coming to The Division 2 in a few months – with the new Realism mode offering a more classic shooter experience.

Set to launch in March alongside the franchise’s 10th anniversary, The Division 2’s Realism mode will be available to all those who own the Warlords of New York Expansion. Unlike the traditional Division experience, this new realism mode removes all XP and levelling, instead focusing on horizontal progression.

Alongside this, the mode is said to reduce HUD elements including the removal of the map and hitmarkers. Additionally, all weapons and gear have been rebalanced, with player health also being reworked so that limb shots are far less effective when compared to headshots – an important feature given that ammo drops have now been reduced.

For many, this realism mode represents what fans wanted from The Division in the first place and so it is encouraging to see Ubisoft addressing this side of the audience. Unfortunately, the realism mode will be a limited-time affair, only going on for the duration of the franchise’s anniversary.

That said, assuming the mode is a success, hopefully Ubisoft are able to learn from this mode, and possibly implement it into the currently-in-development Division 3.

KitGuru says: What do you think of this new mode? Should The Division have always played like this? Is it too little too late? Let us know down below.

Ahead of Resident Evil Requiem’s much-anticipated launch on the 27th of February, Capcom has been slowly but surely teasing out new bits of information regarding the upcoming sequel – with the publisher confirming that they would be hosting a dedicated RE showcase in early 2026. With Resident Evil Requiem a little over one month away now, Capcom has confirmed that the showcase will go live this Thursday, the 15th of January.

Making the announcement via a brief teaser trailer, Capcom confirmed that they will be hosting a Resident Evil Showcase on Thursday the 15th of January at 2PM PT (10PM UK time).

While very little was offered in the way of details (aside from confirmation that the showcase will focus on the upcoming Requiem) the brief trailer did tease the fact that players will now be able to aim down sights with their weapons when playing in first person – a welcome change when compared to previous entries.

Regardless, Resident Evil Requiem looks set to be one of the best entries in the series yet, both in terms of game mechanics but also narrative and so it will be exciting to see what else Capcom is planning to show off during the showcase.

KitGuru says: Are you excited for Resident Evil Requiem? What do you think of the changes to first person shooting? Will it take away from some of the horror vibes? Let us know your thoughts down below.

AMD appears to be preparing to expand its professional desktop portfolio, bringing its 3D V-Cache technology to the enterprise market for the first time. A new shipping manifest has revealed the Ryzen 9 Pro 9965X3D, a 16-core CPU with a 170W TDP.

The leak, spotted initially by hardware sleuth @Olrak29_ (via VideoCardz), identifies the processor under the product ID 100-000001999. According to the manifest, the chip is a 16-core, 32-thread part with a 170W TDP. This power envelope is particularly notable, as it aligns the Pro model with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, rather than the more conservative, power-limited SKUs typically found in the series. The “9965” naming convention follows AMD's established pattern of using slightly higher model numbers for its professional-grade chips to distinguish them from their consumer counterparts while maintaining the same underlying Zen 5 architecture.

The database entry marks the processor as being in the Design Validation Testing (DVT) phase. This suggests the silicon is well past the initial Engineering Validation (EVT) stage and is currently undergoing stability and compatibility testing to meet reliability standards. While DVT is a late-stage development milestone, it precedes the final Production Process Validation (PVT), indicating that while a launch is likely, the final release window may still be several months away.

The primary appeal of a Pro X3D chip lies in the intersection of high-capacity L3 cache and business-critical security. While the manifest doesn't explicitly confirm the cache size, we assume it will feature 144 MB of L3, matching the consumer 9950X3D. For professional workloads, this massive cache could provide substantial performance uplifts in latency-sensitive applications. Moreover, the Pro designation confirms the inclusion of the AMD Pro Security stack, including Secure Processor, Shadow Stack, Microsoft Pluton Security, Memory Guard and Platform Secure Boot.

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KitGuru says: The existence of a Ryzen 9 Pro 9965X3D suggests that AMD has recognised a growing demand for X3D technology outside of the gaming sphere. For engineers and developers who require the extra cache for specialised software but also need the IT manageability and security of the Pro platform, this chip can offer the best-of-both-worlds.

Pocketpair is continuing to invest in the Palworld IP, officially announcing the Palworld Official Card Game at the “Bushiroad New Year Grand Presentation 2026”. Developed in partnership with Bushiroad, the studio behind Cardfight!! Vanguard and Weiß Schwarz, the game aims to translate the survival-crafting loop of the digital hit into a competitive tabletop format. Scheduled for a global launch on July 30th, the TCG marks a step toward establishing Palworld as a multimedia franchise, even as legal battles with Nintendo continue in the background.

The Palworld Official Card Game is designed as a head-to-head, two-player competitive experience. Unlike traditional creature battlers that focus solely on combat, this TCG incorporates the core pillars of the video game: base building and resource management. Players will deploy Pals not just to attack and defend, but to gather the resources necessary to expand their “fortress”. The ultimate goal is to leverage Pals' traits and technological upgrades to overrun the opponent's base. A teaser for this new card game has already been released and is available below via YouTube:

Bushiroad has confirmed that the launch will include starter decks and booster packs, with a full ruleset reveal expected at the Card Game Festival 2026 in Tokyo this May.

With nearly 200 Pals already in the digital game's roster, the TCG has plenty of content for future expansions, including the elemental variations and “Lucky” Pals familiar to veteran players.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: Partnering with Bushiroad ensures the Palworld TCG has a solid foundation, but the real test will be whether the base-building mechanics feel good in a card game.

The “AI tax” on PC hardware is spreading beyond silicon. After the cost increase for RAM and SSDs, the industry is now bracing for a significant price hike in other fundamental parts of a build: power supplies and cooling solutions. According to a warning issued by Guangzhou Xinhong Zhengdian Electronic Technology, a leading Chinese electronics firm, the surging cost of raw materials, specifically copper, silver, and tin, is forcing an immediate adjustment across the supply chain.

According to the letter shared by MyDrivers (via NotebookCheck), these increases are a direct side effect of the global AI infrastructure boom. While memory makers are busy reallocating wafer capacity to HBM, the construction of massive AI data centres has sent the price of industrial minerals to historic highs. Copper, the primary conductor in PSU transformers and cooler heatpipes, reportedly broke through the $13,000/tonne barrier in early January. Combined with surging silver and tin prices, manufacturers are no longer able to absorb the ballooning production costs.

As such, PSUs will see a 6% to 10% increase, while CPU coolers are slated for a 6% to 8% jump. Upstream suppliers reportedly stopped accepting orders at previous price points as of January 6th, meaning that any stock currently entering the channel is already being calculated at the new and higher rates.

Perhaps more concerning for the average consumer is the impending “promotional purge”. The notice from Guangzhou Xinhong Zhengdian states that all current promotional pricing and vendor discounts will terminate on February 1st. After this date, over 90% of products in these categories are expected to revert to a higher “standard” MSRP, with some products also subject to additional per-item surcharges. This creates a narrow window for builders to secure current inventory before the 2026 pricing baseline resets across the board.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: We've already seen the impact of the AI boom on the high-end GPU and memory markets, but seeing it trickle down into copper-heavy components like PSUs and air coolers is a grim sign for the 2026 DIY market.

Microsoft's strategy to bring its established first-party library to competing hardware appears to be working. While Forza Horizon 5 originally served as a flagship showcase for the Xbox Series X|S and Windows back in late 2021, its eventual arrival on the PlayStation 5 in April 2025 has proven that the appetite for high-quality arcade racers remains high across all ecosystems. 

According to data shared by Rhys Elliott (via Eurogamer), Forza Horizon 5 has officially surpassed five million copies sold on the PlayStation 5. This performance is particularly noteworthy given its age at the time of its port. Moving five million units of a late 2021 game certainly suggests that the Forza brand has resonated with the PlayStation audience.

Moreover, Elliott reports that the PlayStation 5 version has generated approximately $300 million (£223 million) in revenue to date. This figure reinforces the narrative that Microsoft's multi-platform pivot might be pretty lucrative. The port's success was foreshadowed as early as July last year, when Alinea Analytics noted that the game had become the top-selling new release on PlayStation 5 in 2025, and that sales momentum has clearly persisted into the current year.

This commercial success sets a strong precedent for the franchise's future. Playground Games is currently working on the next instalment in the series, which is scheduled to arrive on Windows and Xbox Series X|S in 2026. While a PlayStation 5 version of the upcoming sequel is confirmed to be in development, no specific release window has been announced yet. Given the significant revenue generated by the current port, it is highly probable that the gap between the Xbox and PlayStation release dates for the next title will be narrower than what we saw with this generation.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: Have you played Forza Horizon on the PS5? Do you think Xbox should consider launching Forza Horizon 6 for all platforms simultaneously?

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Welcome to 2026 where PSUs that provide over two kilowatts of power are no longer rare.  There are several models to choose from, including the Prime PX-2200 from Seasonic.  It sports a…

If you were looking for interesting technology at CES 2026, your best bet was to keep an eye on companies showing off new monitors.  The release of RGB-stripe OLED monitors from…

Detroit: Become Human is the latest game from French studio Quantic Dream. Released back in 2018 for PS4 (and PC one year later), the story-focused title saw a mixed reception, with many loving it and others not so much. Despite this, the game has gone on to be a big success for the studio. While fans continue to wait for the studio’s Star Wars Eclipse, Detroit: Become Human has quietly been selling millions more copies – with the title having now surpassed 15 million units sold.

Making the announcement via LinkedIn, the official Quantic Dream page wrote: “We are proud to announce that Detroit: Become Human has surpassed 15 million units sold worldwide;” confirming that the title is now “Quantic Dream’s best-selling game to date.”

For context, Detroit: Become Human reached 8 million copies sold back in January of 2023. This then rose to 9 million by December of the same year – with the game hitting the 10 million mark in October of 2024. Finally, the most recent figures put the game at 11 million copies sold as of February 2025 – meaning it sold a further 4 million copies in less than a year.

Given the game’s relatively mixed reception, it is interesting to see Detroit: Become Human continuing to sell this well so many years later. That said, considering the fact that we are still waiting for the next project from Quantic Dream to be released, it is fortunate for them that the now 7 year old title is continuing to find millions of new players.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of Detroit: Become Human? Are you surprised by its continued success? How many more years do you think we’ll have to wait for Star Wars Eclipse? Let us know down below.

Apple's open-source on-device AI model instantly turns images into scenes, and Vision Pro owners can try it out in the app Splat Studio.

Since visionOS 26, Apple's own Photos app has included a one-click feature to almost instantly turn any image into a 'Spatial Scene'. It's essentially a volumetric photo with a limited area of viewing freedom, which you can slightly lean around to "peak" into.

Meanwhile, over the past year or so multiple open-source and proprietary AI systems emerged that can go much further, turning a photo into a scene that you can freely explore, even walk around. For example, Marble lets you do this in your headset's web browser and explore the scene in WebXR.

Marble Turns An Image Into A WebXR Volumetric Scene In Minutes

Marble, an AI model from World Labs, can turn a single image into a volumetric scene that you can view in WebXR in a matter of minutes.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Marble is a computationally expensive server-side model, however, that takes minutes to produce its result. And that's what makes Apple's SHARP particularly interesting.

SHARP runs on typical consumer devices, with general CPU support as well as Nvidia CUDA and Apple Silicon Metal hardware acceleration, taking less than a second to complete on most hardware.

In a rare move from Apple, SHARP is free and open-source, with the code available on GitHub. You can easily download and run it on a Mac, for example.

As with almost all of the remarkable advancements in 3D reconstruction over the past few years, it generates a Gaussian splat, fitting millions of semitransparent colored blobs (Gaussians) in 3D space so that arbitrary viewpoints can be rendered realistically in real-time. You receive the result as a .ply file that can be rendered in any standard 3DGS viewer.

For Apple Vision Pro owners, Portugal-based developer Rob Matwiejczyk built a visionOS app that integrates Apple's SHARP model into an easy-to-use graphical interface and eliminates the need to use a Mac or PC.

Called Splat Studio, the app is available for free on the App Store, and runs entirely on-device. Just choose any image from your Photos library and it instantly gets turned into a 3D scene floating in front of you, which you can rotate, move, and scale with your hands.

I tested Splat Studio on the M5 Apple Vision Pro, using the same Steam Dev Days 2014 VR room I used to test Marble. For comparison, I also turned the same image into a Spatial Scene in the visionOS 26 Photos app. You can see footage of the Splat Studio result above, and of the Spatial Scene below.

The Splat Studio app turned the image into a scene in around 20 seconds, compared to the near-instant result of Apple's Photos app, but it's unclear how much of this is truly due to the SHARP model compared to any overhead the Splat Studio app may add.

As for the result, while the Apple Photos Spatial Scene lets you peer into the scene, the degree to which you can move in each direction is relatively limited. Meanwhile, the SHARP result in Splat Studio lets you freely move around the scene. The tradeoff, as with many generative AI results, is some detail loss, as well as hallucinated details the further you go from the original perspective of the image.