Letting people teleport into your home via Horizon Hyperscape feels like magic, though the scans are lower quality than the old cloud-streamed solo system.

If you missed it, last week Meta started rolling out an overhaul of its Horizon Hyperscape technology, letting you share new captures as unlisted Horizon Worlds and invite people to visit them as Meta Avatars.

These Hyperscape worlds are also rendered on-device on Quest 3 and Quest 3S, in contrast to the cloud-streamed approach previously used for Hyperscape. Up to 8 people can be in a single instance, and the system also includes support for mobile users via the Meta Horizon app.

Horizon Hyperscape Now Lets You Invite Friends To Visit As Meta Avatars

You can now turn new Horizon Hyperscape captures into unlisted Horizon Worlds, letting you invite friends to join you in them as Meta Avatars.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

After receiving the update on his Quest 3, UploadVR's Kyle Riesenbeck rescanned the downstairs living, dining, and kitchen area of his home. A few hours later, it was ready, and so he invited me over to visit.

Appearing as a Meta Avatar, Kyle gave me a guided tour of this huge section of his home, pointing out the details the capture kept, as well as the ones it doesn't quite resolve.

Compared to the previous cloud-rendered solo Hyperscape system, there's a clear drop in quality. For starters, the rendering resolution is lower, with visible pixelation and aliasing for anything relatively far away. As well as this, the Gaussian splat density appears to be lower, blurring some of the finer details captured by the previous implementation of Hyperscape. And despite these regressions, the performance was not solid, with the frame rate dropping when a large enough section of the scan was in my field of view.

Still, these complaints aside, I still had a feeling of being in Kyle's home, and could still see relatively minute details like the place names on the badges and pins he and his wife had pinned to a board after their travels. Further, it's amazing that this experience is even possible at all on an affordable mobile chipset from 2023, and we're due an XR2 Gen 3 next year that should make the experience a lot sharper and smoother.

If you own a Quest 3 or Quest 3S, or have the Meta Horizon app on your phone, and want to visit Kyle's home too, here's the link: Kyle's Home on Meta Horizon Worlds. Let us know what you think of it!

After visiting Kyle's home, I also scanned the living room and kitchen area of the apartment I live in, and found the resemblance to be remarkable. In fact, visiting it in VR while in my office induced such a strong feeling of presence that I tried to walk through my virtual kitchen, and thus bumped straight into my office wall. As someone who has been using positionally-tracked VR for well over a decade, I thought the days of mistaking the virtual for real like this were far behind me. But I was wrong. And it's a testament to just how realistic Hyperscape scans can feel, especially for places you're familiar with in reality, even in this lower quality on-device version.

Meta says it's still "rolling out" the Hyperscape sharing and social update, and keep in mind that any scans you make before your headset gets it won't be able to be shared or visited. Once you do get the update though, be sure to give it a try, as the ability to scan, share, and co-inhabit realistic reconstructions of real-world spaces with headsets that go on sale for as little as $200 is a truly remarkable technological achievement.

Quest's Horizon OS v83 brings System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) and Temporal Dimming as experimental features, as well as improved scene understanding.

A test version of v83 started rolling out to the Horizon OS Public Test Channel (PTC) last month, testing these features and the evolved 'Navigator' system UI, which remains experimental. Now, a month later, a stable build of v83 is rolling out to all supported Quest headsets.

Quest v83 PTC Has The Evolved Horizon OS UI Meta Teased At Connect

Horizon OS v83 PTC includes the evolved Quest system UI that Meta teased at Connect, as well as scene understanding for slanted ceilings and inner walls.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Meta's rollouts happen gradually, so it may take a few days or even weeks for your headset to get the v83 update. Further, Meta rolls out some features separately from the main update itself, so even having the v83 update doesn't guarantee having everything listed here yet.

Read on for a rundown of the key changes Horizon OS v83 brings compared to v81, the previous stable release:

System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW)

Just before displaying every frame, all major XR operating systems rotationally reproject (warp/skew) it to match the tiny change in orientation of your head since the frame started rendering.

This is done to eliminate the latency you'd otherwise perceive as you pan your head. And when the running app fails to complete rendering a new frame in time for the next display refresh, the previous frame gets rotationally reprojected further instead of just repeating it. This avoids rotational judder, which is sickening in VR.

With Horizon OS v83, Meta has added an experimental setting called System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW). When enabled, it applies to all apps at all times, extending the system-level reprojection to be positional, not just rotational.

VR Timewarp, Spacewarp, Reprojection, And Motion Smoothing Explained

TimeWarp, Spacewarp, Reprojection, Motion Smoothing. Asynchronous, Interleaved. You may have heard these terms or seen them in the settings of your VR headset, but what do they do, and what’s the difference? Timewarp The idea of Timewarp has been around in VR research for decades, but the specific feature

UploadVRDavid Heaney

According to Meta, SysPTW "uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames".

"This feature automatically activates when needed and works across all apps, with no impact on regular performance", Meta claims.

Application SpaceWarp (AppSW), the SDK feature developers can enable for their apps to run at half framerate by generating every other frame synthetically, has already had Positional TimeWarp built-in since launching 4 years ago, so AppSW games won't see any changes here.

For apps that don't use AppSW, enabling SysPTW should both reduce positional latency and significantly dampen the positional judder you normally experience when a game drops a frame.

Temporal Dimming

Back in v69, Meta added an experimental option called Content Adaptive Brightness Control (CABC) for Quest 3 headsets, which dynamically dims the backlight of the LCD displays in darker scenes to achieve deeper blacks that are closer to true black than the murky grey typically delivered by LCD.

Now, in v83, Meta has added a second but distinct experimental option called Temporal Dimming for Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

"This feature gradually dims your display brightness during each session, helping reduce eye strain, extend device battery life, and improve display performance—all without noticeable impact on your experience", Meta explains.

Meanwhile, the description of the setting in Horizon OS reads "Dynamically adjusts screen brightness to further reduce power consumption during idle periods, with minimum impact on user experience".

While CABC is very noticeable, with the screen brightness visibly adjusting, from briefly testing Temporal Dimming, it seems to be a far more subtle effect, with brightness seemingly changing over a greater time period.

We'll keep an eye on whether Meta moves Temporal Dimming out of Experimental in future releases, something it hasn't yet done for CABC. Meta may even make it the default eventually, with the aim of getting the most out of its plain LCD displays.

Improved Scene Understanding

Quest 3 and Quest 3S create a 3D mesh of your room during mixed reality Space Setup. Since launch, Meta's system has been able to infer the positions of your main walls, floor, and ceiling from this 3D mesh, and since v64 it has also generated labeled bounding boxes for doors, windows, beds, tables, sofas, storage (cabinets, shelves, etc.), and screens (TVs and monitors).

Quest developers can access these bounding boxes using Meta's Scene API and use them to automatically place virtual content. For example, they could place a tabletop gameboard on the largest table in the room, replace your windows with portals, or depict your TV in a fully VR game so you don't punch it.

Now, with Horizon OS v83, Meta says Space Setup will also incorporate "more complex architectural elements like multi-height floors, slanted ceilings, and inner walls".

Apple Vision Pro added support for slanted surfaces in visionOS 2 last year.

Smartphone App Login For The Web

A significant drawback of Meta's Horizon OS compared to Apple's visionOS and Google's Android XR is that its default web browser isn't available on traditional device platforms. On Samsung Galaxy XR you'll have access to all your Chrome passwords and bookmarks, and on Apple Vision Pro you'll get the same for Safari – but the Horizon OS browser is only available on Quest.

The Horizon OS browser does have LastPass, and Meta is gradually rolling out Bitwarden, NordPass, Proton Pass, and Dashlane to it too, but switching to a supported password manager is a big ask for your VR headset.

Quest’s Web Browser Seems To Be Getting Ad Blocking & VPN Extensions

Quest’s web browser seems to be getting a range of new extensions, including an ad blocker, four new password managers, and multiple VPN options.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Now, with Horizon OS v83, Meta says you can log into "certain websites" via your phone by sending a link to the Meta Horizon smartphone app.

Currently supported websites include "Roblox and Tiktok", Meta says, without disclosing exactly how other web developers can implement this, or whether it's based on a web standard.

Meta now has a trade-in program for its displayless smart glasses in the US.

The company's online store offers credit for trading in either Gen 1 Ray-Ban Meta glasses or recent models of AirPods, Beats, or Galaxy Buds wireless earbuds.

Here's the full list of eligible devices to trade in:

• Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1)
• Apple AirPods Pro 2
• Apple AirPods 4
• Apple AirPods 3
• Beats Powerbeats Pro 2
• Beats Studio Buds +
• Beats Fit Pro
• Samsung Galaxy Buds3
• Samsung Galaxy Buds3 Pro
• Samsung Galaxy Buds3 FE

You can trade one of these devices in when buying any of Meta's smart glasses except for Meta Ray-Ban Display. That means the program applies to the two Ray-Ban Meta generations, Oakley Meta HSTN, and Oakley Meta Vanguard.

Traded-in devices must be "in working condition and include the charging case to properly charge the device", Meta's policy states. After an inspection to verify this, you'll be issued the credit to the payment method you used to buy the glasses.

How much credit you'll get depends on which device you trade in, with Ray-Ban Meta fetching up to $113 depending on the exact variant, while wireless earbuds will get you up to $70.

As Ray-Ban Meta Sales Skyrocket, Quest Sales Are Down Again

Meta Reality Labs revenue rebounded in Q2, up 5% compared to 2024. But this was driven by the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, while Quest headset sales were again down.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The Gen 1 Ray-Ban Meta Glasses are currently on sale at $239 in the company's Black Friday sale. But according to Meta's terms, the trade-in program "cannot be combined with other offers, discounts, bundles, or coupons", so it looks like you can't combine the sale and the trade-in.

Pico's 2026 headset will have 4K micro-OLED displays and a dedicated R1-style passthrough chip, a ByteDance executive reportedly said.

The Chinese news outlet STAR Market Daily reports that during the 2025 ByteDance Scholarship Award Ceremony, ByteDance Vice President of Technology, Yang Zhenyuan, described key details of Pico's next-generation headset.

We first heard that ByteDance's Pico was working on a high-end headset two years ago, when The Information reported that Pico 5 had been canceled in favor of a short-term Pico 4 refresh and a longer-term Apple Vision Pro competitor.

That short-term headset arrived last year as Pico 4 Ultra, while the Vision Pro competitor seems to be what Zhenyuan described.

Pico 5 Has Reportedly Been Canceled

Pico 5 has reportedly been canceled as ByteDance shifts its focus to a further out high-end headset to compete with Apple Vision Pro.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

According to STAR Market Daily, Zhenyuan said that the headset will feature "custom" micro-OLED panels with 4000 pixels per inch (PPI). That would match the pixel density of the 4K micro-OLED panels in Samsung Galaxy XR, Play For Dream MR, and Shiftall MeganeX.

Zhenyuan also reportedly said that the new Pico headset will have a self-developed dedicated chip for passthrough, handling real-time processing of the color cameras and delivering frames in less than 12 milliseconds.

The only headsets we've seen yet with a dedicated secondary chip for passthrough are Apple's Vision Pro series, which feature the company's R1 chip for this. And matching Pico's figure, Apple claims R1 delivers 12 milliseconds of photon-to-photon latency.

The news, if accurate, could suggest that Pico is looking to deliver best-in-class passthrough quality, exceeding competitors like Samsung that only use the ISP of the Qualcomm XR2 Gen 2 series chipset.

ByteDance Reportedly Working On Ultralight Pico Headset

ByteDance is working on a lightweight Pico headset with a tethered puck similar to Meta’s ultralight headset, The Information reports.

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

We should note that earlier this year, The Information reported that Pico is working on an ultralight headset resembling a pair of goggles, with a tethered compute puck, similar to Meta's next headset.

That report also noted that ByteDance was working on an R1 chip equivalent, but it's unclear whether the 2026 headset Zhenyuan described is the same as the ultralight headset, or whether Pico plans a range of high-end options with different form factors.

We'll keep a close eye on Pico in 2026 for any signs of a new headset announcement. But keep in mind that Pico 4 and Pico 4 Ultra aren't sold in North America, as ByteDance doesn't want to risk any unwanted political scrutiny in the face of a TikTok ban taking effect, so there's a good chance its next headset won't be either.

Godot now supports Vulkan foveated rendering on Android, Application SpaceWarp, DirectX 12, and OpenXR render models, and can build a universal OpenXR APK.

If you're unaware, Godot is a free and open-source alternative to Unity and Unreal Engine. It's technically controlled by the non-profit Godot Foundation, but all development takes place in the open.

Since last year, Meta has been funding a group of Godot veterans to improve the engine's support for OpenXR and Quest feature extensions, as well as to build high-quality samples and documentation.

Uniquely, Godot is also available standalone on Quest 3 and Quest Pro. To be clear, that means the editor itself runs as a 2D Android app within Horizon OS, including the ability to build APKs on-device.

Godot 4.5, released in September, brought a number of important new XR features and improvements:

• You can now use DirectX 12 and OpenXR together on Windows for improved performance.
• Foveated rendering now works in Vulkan on Android. Previously it only worked in Vulkan on desktop, and was thus limited to OpenGL on Android.
• Application SpaceWarp is now supported on Meta Quest and Pico headsets.
• The OpenXR render models extension is now supported, letting the app dynamically load in 3D models of the active tracked controllers from the system. This avoids each application needing to bundle its own 3D models for every possible tracked controller it wants to support, and enables support for future unreleased controllers.

Crucially, Godot 4.5 also delivers support for building a universal OpenXR APK that can, in theory, run on any Android-based standalone headset that supports OpenXR. This rectifies the problem of having to maintain multiple device-specific builds for each headset, the antithesis of the "core promise" of OpenXR.

OpenXR Spatial Entities Extensions Standardize Surfaces, Markers, Anchors & Persistence

The new OpenXR Spatial Entities Extensions standardize surface detection, marker tracking, spatial anchors, and persistence.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Godot 4.6 is now in public testing, and it's set to bring even more XR features and improvements, including an upgrade to OpenXR 1.1.

The engine will also add support for the OpenXR spatial entities extensions, released earlier this year. The spatial entities extensions standardize how developers leverage the environment tracking capabilities of headsets and glasses to build experiences that interact with the user's physical environment, a class of capabilities that until now have been handled by vendor-specific extensions or SDKs.

This includes persistent spatial anchors, plane tracking, and marker tracking.

OpenXR 1.1 Brings Foveated Rendering & More Into The Spec

OpenXR 1.1 brings a foveated rendering extension & more into the core specification. Full details here.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Godot says it also plans to improve its frame synthesis support, providing runtimes with depth buffers and motion vectors to improve the quality of output of features like Application SpaceWarp.

The Meta Horizon Store's Black Friday sale, now on, offers 40% off hundreds of Quest games via the discount code BFCM25.

There are far too many eligible titles for us to reasonably list, but you can see the full selection here.

Eligible games range from blockbusters like Assassin’s Creed Nexus, Reach, Asgard's Wrath 2, Metro Awakening, Alien: Rogue Incursion, Resident Evil 4, and Arizona Sunshine 2 to indie gems like Ghost Town, Superhot VR, Dungeons of Eternity, Walkabout Mini Golf, Real VR Fishing, and GOLF+.

We could go on all day here, but the TL;DR is that you can get 40% off almost every major title on Quest for the next week. A notable exception is Deadpool VR, which isn't eligible since it only came out last week. You'll still need to fork out $50 for it.

To apply the 40% discount for the eligible titles, just enter the code BFCM25 at checkout.

You can use it as many times as you want, up until 11:59 pm PT on December 2, a week from now.

Quest 3S Is $250 At Best Buy And Comes With $110 Of Black Friday Perks

Quest 3S is on sale for $250 at Best Buy, and comes with a $50 gift card, 1 month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Sale Bundles

Separately, Meta is also offering 11 sale bundles, letting you get multiple games and/or DLC together for a lower price than buying them individually:

• Vader Immortal Series
• Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge + Last Call DLC
• Squad Up: Pavlov Shack + Tactical Assault VR
• Freddy’s Bundle: Arizona Sunshine Remake + Arizona Sunshine 2
• Sandbox Chaos: Plastic Battlegrounds + Newton's Playground: Physics Sandbox
• Supersized Battles: UNDERDOGS + Kaiju Battle Simulator
• Walkabout Fan Favorites: Walkabout Mini Golf + Around the World in 80 Days + Atlantis + Raptor Cliff's + Venice
• Ghosts of Tabor Black Friday PAYDAY Bundle: Ghosts of Tabor
  + PAYDAY DLC
• Xtreme Riders: Virtual Skate + MotoX
• Real VR Fishing Japan DLC bundle: Real VR Fishing + Japan DLC Part 1 + Japan DLC Part 2
• Black Friday Pass: NightClub Simulator VR + Nightclub Simulator Multiplayer

If you already own one of the games in a bundle, the price is lowered to reflect that.

Meta's WorldGen AI system generates trimesh 3D worlds from text prompts, though the company doesn't think it's ready for Horizon Worlds yet.

Meta first teased that its Horizon Worlds creation tools would get the ability to AI-generate entire 3D worlds back in May, when announcing the related AssetGen 2.0 model. Then, in June, the company revealed that this feature would be called Environment Generation, teased example generations, and said it would launch "very soon".

Horizon Worlds Creators Can Now AI-Generate Islands, Add AI NPCs “Very Soon”

Meta’s Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor now lets creators AI-generate island environments, and will let them add conversational AI NPCs “very soon”.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Environment Generation launched in August, but it was (and remains) only capable of generating a very specific kind of island, a very limited scope compared to the goal of generic world creation.

At Connect 2025 in September, Meta teased an overhaul of its Horizon Worlds creation tools, called Horizon Studio, which hasn't yet launched. The tease depicted an AI Assistant capable of generating just about anything a creator wants, including entire worlds, specific assets, custom NPCs, and specific gameplay mechanics, in a matter of seconds or minutes. But it's unclear whether what Meta was showing was notional or representative of real technology it was waiting to deploy.

Meta Horizon Studio Will AI-Generate Just About Anything For Horizon Worlds

Meta Horizon Studio, the new name for Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor, is getting an upgraded AI Assistant that can generate or change just about anything.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

That brings us to WorldGen, the new AI system Meta published a paper for.

Meta describes it as "a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt", leveraging a chain of 2D and 3D techniques, rather than being a single model.

"WorldGen is built on a combination of procedural reasoning, diffusion-based 3D generation, and object-aware scene decomposition. The result is geometrically consistent, visually rich, and render-efficient 3D worlds for gaming, simulation, and immersive social environments."

To be clear, this is not producing a Gaussian splat like World Labs' Marble, nor an interactive video stream like Google DeepMind's Genie 3.

Meta's WorldGen creates a layout of traditional trimesh 3D assets, making it fully compatible with traditional game engines and rendering pipelines. And it also includes a navmesh for collision detection and NPC traversal.

Here's the underlying sequence WorldGen goes through after you input a prompt, according to Meta:

(1) Planning
1. Procedural blockout generation
2. Navmesh extraction
3. Reference image generation

(2) Reconstruction
1. Image-to-3D base model
2. Navmesh-based scene generation
3. Initial scene texture generation

(3) Decomposition
1. Part extraction with accelerated AutoPartGen for scenes
2. Data curation for scene decomposition

(4) Refinement
1. Image enhancement
2. Mesh refinement model
3. Texturing model

So why isn't WorldGen rolling out in Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor, or at least being announced as a launch feature for Horizon Studio?

Meta says it's not satisfied with the fact that WorldGen currently only produces 50×50 meter spaces, and that it takes a long time to do so. The company says it's working to address both limitations.

It seems like a greatly upgraded future version of WorldGen will be necessary to deliver on the promise of Horizon Studio that Meta teased at Connect, and given the rate of advancement in AI, it's very possible that the company will be able to achieve exactly that sometime in 2026.

AI can bring real-world objects into VR as 3D assets in seconds, with Meta's new SAM 3D Objects model setting a new standard for quality.

It has been possible for years now to generate a 3D model of a real-world object by capturing dozens of images of it from surrounding angles, leveraging traditional photogrammetry techniques. Epic's RealityScan, for example, takes around 15–45 minutes of cloud processing, while Apple offers an on-device Object Capture API for iPhone Pro models that takes around 5 minutes.

But over the past year or so, advanced AI models have emerged that can produce 3D assets from a single image in a matter of seconds. And while they don't offer the same quality of photogrammetry, the quality has steadily improved with each new model release, mirroring the overall rapid advancement of AI.

For an example of how this applies to VR, Takahiro “Poly” Horikawa published a Quest app on SideQuest that uses hand tracking to let you frame a specific real-world object and take a photo of it, leveraging Meta's passthrough camera API. This image is then provided to Stability AI's Stable Fast 3D API, based on the TripoSR model, and the result is spawned as a virtual object beside the image capture spot.

TripoSR is now almost two years old, though. And a few days ago, Meta launched SAM 3D Objects, the new state-of-the-art model for generating 3D assets from a single image.

You can test out SAM 3D Objects for free in your web browser on the Meta AI Demos page. Just provide it with an image and you'll be able to select which object you want to convert to a 3D model. Seconds later, you'll see a 3D view where you can pan around the object with your mouse or finger.

Meta's site isn't designed for mobile screens, so you'll probably want to use a PC, laptop, tablet, or VR headset. Also note that the model is only designed for inanimate objects, not people or animals.

SAM 3D Objects is open source, available on GitHub and Hugging Face. That means developers should be able to host it on a cloud computing platform that offers GPUs, and use it to provide the experience of that EchoTheReality demo but with higher quality output – essentially pulling an object from reality into VR.

Social VR platforms, for example, could let you conduct show-and-tell for objects in your real room in a matter of seconds. Or decorate your home space with items you crafted in the real world. Meta has no announced plan to add this to Horizon Worlds, but it would seem like a natural future step, complementing the Hyperscape worlds it just launched.

Horizon Hyperscape Now Lets You Invite Friends To Visit As Meta Avatars

You can now turn new Horizon Hyperscape captures into unlisted Horizon Worlds, letting you invite friends to join you in them as Meta Avatars.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

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.

World Labs was founded last year by Fei-Fei Li, one of the pioneers of modern AI. She's best known for creating the ImageNet dataset that helped enable the rapid advancement of computer vision in the 2010s, having the insight that the lack of high-quality labeled data was a critical bottleneck.

As with almost all of the remarkable advancements in 3D reconstruction over the past few years, Marble generates Gaussian splats, fitting millions of semitransparent colored blobs (Gaussians) in 3D space so that arbitrary viewpoints can be rendered realistically in real-time. But Marble's variety of supported input types and the speed of its output are unprecedented.

While other splat generation systems like Meta's Horizon Hyperscape and Varjo Teleport require hundreds of input frames and hours of processing, in its simplest mode Marble can generate a splat from a single input image or text prompt in a matter of minutes.

For more advanced outputs, if you pay for the $20/month subscription Marble can take multiple images as input, or a short video, or even a 3D structure, using a tool World Labs calls Chisel.

Chisel lets you lay out a scene with crude 3D shapes, as you would in a game editor, and then use a text prompt to turn it into a detailed volumetric scene.

With the subscription, Marble outputs support interactive editing, expanding, and the ability to combine multiple worlds together. And you can export as a high-quality traditional 3D mesh, though this takes multiple hours of conversion time.

Because of the unique capability set of Marble, World Labs describes it as a "first-in-class generative multimodal world model".

On the Marble web app you can generate your own scenes for free, and view the output in VR via WebXR using the web browser of your headset.

Trying out Marble on Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, by turning a single image of the Steam Dev Days 2014 VR room into a volumetric scene, I found the quality to be noticeably inferior to Meta's Hyperscape worlds and Varjo Teleport, more akin to (but notably better than) Niantic Scaniverse. While the details directly brought in from your input image are relatively detailed, the further away you move from this, the more typical Gaussian splat visual artifacts you'll see.

And of course, the elephant in the room here is that details beyond the image frame are hallucinated, so will be very different from what was actually there behind the camera, unless you provide multiple input images.

Still, the limitations aside, the ability to generate volumetric scenes in minutes from a single image or sentence is remarkable, and that you can then edit them with a combination of an editor UI and natural language is even more so.

Further, the ability to then export these scenes as traditional 3D worlds, with geometric steerability via Chisel, seems like it could have huge potential for VR developers to build environments for their interactive apps and games.

You can try out Marble at marble.worldlabs.ai. Note that if you don't pay, any scenes you create will be publicly listed. You'll need the $20/month subscription to create a private scene, alongside unlocking the more advanced creation, editing, and export features.

An Apple Immersive Video documentary about Real Madrid is coming next year, "with a level of access that fans have never experienced before".

If you're an American reading this who doesn't know much about what you call "soccer", here's some context: Real Madrid is one of the most successful football clubs of all time, and has signed some of the best players of all time, including both Ronaldos, Zinedine Zidane, and David Beckham. In the year 2000, FIFA even officially declared Real Madrid "Club of the Century".

Today, Real Madrid and Apple confirmed work on an Apple Immersive Video documentary about the club, captured during last month's Champions League match against Juventus.

Apple says the documentary was filmed using over 30 Blackmagic immersive cameras, and "brings viewers inside the world’s most decorated club, capturing moments from practice to the pitch with a level of access that fans have never experienced before."

In an interview with GQ Spain, Real Madrid's president Florentino Pérez described the documentary as just the beginning of a long-term plan to connect the club's "billion" strong global fanbase to the stadium using technology. He references the "Infinite Bernabéu", an idea he has floated in previous interviews, a goal of one day letting fans all over the world virtually attend Real Madrid home matches using VR.

Apple Vision Pro Is Getting Live Apple Immersive LA Lakers NBA Games

Select LA Lakers NBA games will be streamed in Apple Immersive to Apple Vision Pro owners next year, the first-ever live content for the format.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

That strongly suggests that the next step of Real Madrid's plan is to stream live games in Apple Immersive.

The first known live Apple Immersive Video offering will be select LA Lakers NBA games, set to be streamed next year via Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive Live, a special variant of the immersive camera creators are using for prerecorded Apple Immersive Video content.

The announcement came almost nine years after NextVR started streaming weekly NBA games to the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR headset in 180-degree. In 2020 Apple acquired NextVR, and leveraged its expertise and IP to develop Apple Immersive Video.

You can now turn new Horizon Hyperscape captures into unlisted Horizon Worlds, letting you invite friends to join you in them as Meta Avatars.

Launched at Connect 2025, Meta's Horizon Hyperscape Capture app for Quest 3 and Quest 3S lets you use your headset to scan a real-world environment, such as a room, to create a photorealistic VR replica.

The Hyperscape scanning process requires between 5 and 10 minutes of walking around the scene while wearing the headset, and it's followed by between 1 and 8 hours of processing on Meta's servers, depending on the complexity of the capture.

Hands-On: Meta Horizon Hyperscape Captures Photorealistic VR Scenes On Quest 3

Meta Horizon Hyperscape, rolling out now in the US, lets you capture a real-world scene with your Quest 3 or Quest 3S and visit it in VR with photorealistic graphics.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

At launch, Hyperscape was a solo experience, and you couldn't share your captures with others. It was also cloud rendered, requiring a very strong and stable internet connection at all times.

Now, just over two months later, Meta is "rolling out" an overhaul of the technology.

Instead of creating cloud-rendered captures only accessible within the app, Hyperscape now creates a special kind of Horizon Worlds destination, a Hyperscape world. While the initial processing is still done on Meta's servers, Hyperscape worlds are rendered on-device in VR, via the Horizon Engine that also powers Quest's new Immersive Home and Horizon Central.

Once a new Hyperscape world finishes processing, you'll see Invite and Share buttons, with the latter generating a URL that you can send to friends.

People with the link can join the Hyperscape world in VR from a Quest 3 or Quest 3S, or in flatscreen on a smartphone in the Meta Horizon app, and you can reset access to the link at any time, according to Meta.

For example, here are links to Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen, Chance the Rapper’s live room, Happy Kelli's Crocs room, and UFC Apex as joinable Hyperscape worlds.

Hyperscape worlds currently support up to 8 people per instance, and Meta says it "hopes" to increase that number in future.

As with all Horizon Worlds, for people joining on smartphones the experience will continue to be cloud-rendered. The on-device rendering is for VR only.

Note that Hyperscapes scanned before the new update cannot be shared, and are only accessible solo in the Horizon Hyperscape Preview app.

UploadVR plans to test the new social Hyperscape experience as soon as we can, and we'll bring you footage and impressions once we do.

The Thrill of the Fight 2 is now out of Early Access with a launch update that adds a singleplayer campaign.

The original The Thrill of the Fight arrived on Steam for the original HTC Vive all the way back in 2016, and is still considered to be one of the best VR games of all time, as well as one of the first to get you breaking a sweat. It was ported to Quest soon after the original Oculus Quest launched, and last saw a major update in 2023.

Compared to the original, the biggest addition in The Thrill of the Fight 2 is multiplayer, which was the only mode available when it entered Early Access on Quest headsets back in November.

The Thrill of the Fight 2 also adds a visible and customizable player body model, as well as a thumbstick locomotion option in addition to the default room-scale movement. It's also a little more game-like, with visible scoring, a departure from the simulation feel of the original.

While the multiplayer-only Early Access release was $10, the full game with a singleplayer campaign too is now $20 for new buyers (existing buyers get the update for free).

You can find Thrill of the Fight 2 on the Meta Horizon Store, with support for Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, and Quest 3S.

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There's no timeline yet for a PC VR release, though there is a flatscreen PC viewer app launching on Steam soon for spectating fights between Quest players.

TCL is showing off a compact 2.5K RGB OLED panel for XR headsets that could be the perfect midpoint between cheap LCD and expensive micro-OLED.

Today, almost every affordable headset uses LCD panels, while premium options use micro-OLED, technically known as OLED-on-silicon (OLEDoS).

LCD is cheap, but has poor contrast, forming a relatively washed-out image that compresses the darkest details into a gray haze in place of deep blacks. Meanwhile micro-OLED offers vibrant colors with rich contrast, and can achieve extremely high resolution without increasing the bulk of headsets, but is incredibly difficult to manufacture and thus very expensive.

Some headsets like Meta Quest Pro, the Pimax Crystal series, and Somnium VR1 use advanced LCD panels with an array of mini backlights to improve contrast compared to regular LCD, and a quantum dot layer to enhance colors, but the result is still a far cry from the self-emissive nature of OLED, where every pixel provides its own light. Further, the extra layers increase thickness, weight, heat, and power draw.

Of course, there is another display technology for headsets between LCD and micro-OLED, one that also offers many of the latter's benefits: regular OLED, also known as OLED on glass.

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OLED on glass is what's used in your smartphone, your smartwatch, and perhaps your TV too, if you paid a lot for it. For VR, it was seen as the only game in town between 2014 and 2016, used in the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.

HTC continued to use OLED in Vive Pro, as did Oculus for the original Quest. But LCD soon offered higher density at lower cost, a killer combination for a market looking to scale up while increasing resolution, and so investment in new custom OLED panels to keep up with the density demands of VR mostly dried up within just a few years.

The only regular OLED VR headset still on the market today is PlayStation VR2. And one key reason that it's the only headset from a major company with new fresnel lenses is that, when it released, there was simply no OLED with high enough density to be compact enough to be suitable for pancake lenses (among other issues, which we'll get to later in the article).

That brings us to TCL's new OLED panel, which its China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) division is showing at the Display Tech-Ecosystem Conference (DTC 2025) this week in China.

The company says it's the highest density RGB OLED-on-glass display in the world, and has the 120Hz refresh rate ideal for VR.

It's almost twice as dense as the OLED in PlayStation VR2, while using a full RGB subpixel arrangement, letting it offer 73% more pixels and 160% more subpixels despite being just over half the size.

Its size makes it ideal for use with pancake lenses, its RGB subpixels mean it shouldn't need a softening diffusion layer, and its resolution is notably higher than the LCDs in Meta Quest 3 and Valve's Steam Frame.

Putting it all together, this means TCL's new OLED panel could power clear and sharp headsets with rich colors, deep contrast, and true blacks, but without the sky-high prices you get with micro-OLED. And this could be key to delivering compelling products that sit somewhere between Meta Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR in the market.

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This isn't the first time we've heard about the idea of high-density regular OLED as a way to deliver some of the advantages of micro-OLED but in far more affordable headsets.

Over a year ago, South Korean news outlet The Elec reported that Japan's JDI was pitching Apple a 1500 PPI regular OLED for the rumored "Vision Air" headset, and that Samsung was working on a similar display too.

That's notable because it's almost exactly the same density as TCL's new OLED, and may suggest that TCL too is (or was) pitching the panel to Apple.

For now, TCL isn't saying whether it has any customers for the new OLED panel, but does confirm that it's designed for "XR devices".

There are, however, a few major unanswered questions.

The first is whether the panel is bright enough to overcome the inefficiency of pancake lenses, and the fact that they work best with polarized light, which OLED doesn't provide. There are workarounds for this, if the panel layers and lenses are specifically designed to work together. And the brightness of OLED panels has significantly improved in recent years, with the latest iPhones and Apple Watches for example reaching 3000 nits.

The other question is whether the new panel exhibits the same non-uniform fixed-pattern noise we've seen in many regular OLED headsets like PlayStation VR2, the mura, an issue not present in any micro-OLED we've viewed to date. Overcoming this may be the key to reviving regular OLED as a great option for midrange headsets, so we're incredibly curious to find out whether TCL has done so.

Marvel's Deadpool VR, the latest Quest 3 and Quest 3S exclusive blockbuster, is out now for $50.

Developed by Meta-owned Twisted Pixel Games in collaboration with Marvel Games, Deadpool VR has a cel-shaded graphics style, and unlike in the movies, Deadpool in VR is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris, not Ryan Reynolds.

The arcade-style action game sees you, as Deadpool, kidnapped by the supervillain Mojo (voiced by John Leguizamo) and forced to hunt down talent for his galaxy-wide reality TV show. The talent you'll kidnap are iconic villains from across the Marvel universe, including Mephisto, Lady Deathstrike, Omega Red, and Ultimo.

In UploadVR's review of Deadpool VR, Pete Austin described the visuals as paying off "beautifully", with the best implementation of cel-shading that he's seen yet in VR. He also found Neil Patrick Harris' performance to be "easily on par" with Ryan Reynolds in the films, and the "gloriously over-the-top" soundtrack to feel like it was straight out of one too.

However, his feelings on the combat system were more mixed. While it impressed in the early phases of the game, he criticized the fact that it's "disappointingly weightless", with weapons clipping through each other, hands clipping through the environment, and two-handed weapons feeling like they’re made of paper.

"Deadpool VR is a paradox. It captures the antihero's essence perfectly but wraps it around mechanics that just never feel like they completely deliver - great presentation carrying combat that never quite lives up to its potential."

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You should go read Pete's full review, and if it leaves you wanting to, you can buy Deadpool VR on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest 3 and Quest 3S, priced at $50.