A new era appears to be kicking off in immersive hardware as long-time VR developers reel from a Christmas season without new consumer hardware drawing in audiences.

UploadVR spoke with a number of developers finding themselves in varying degrees of distress over the overall direction of investment in VR and the overwhelming cost of reaching people in headsets about their wares.

Several spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of their business relationships with platform companies being affected by their comments. If you have comments you'd like to share with UploadVR, you can email ian@uploadvr.com or message 1-949-610-3857. I will assume comments are fine to associate with your name unless you include the words "on background" in your message to request I take steps to anonymize your statements.

“We are definitely seeing a shift in the market and a need to diversify in terms of platforms,” wrote Tommy Palm, the head of Resolution Games. “We’ve been preparing for this for some time as we’ve aimed to make our games available to players across as many platforms as possible for the last few years. While it’s no easy task to launch a game like Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked across Quest, PlayStation and Steam - with the goal of more platforms to come - the game did exceed our sales goals over the holidays, and being cross platform helped with that.”

Creature led by Doug North-Cook released several projects in 2025 with partners of the label launching new games and downloadable content at a regular pace. Maestro continues dropping hugely appealing DLC content and our reviewer found Deadly Delivery from Creature-associated Flat Head Studio to be "hilarious horror best played with friends".

"The state of the industry leaves no room for error," North-Cook wrote. "With no new headset this holiday sales were up over the holidays but not where they would be in a new device era. I fully expect most studios will have a difficult time finding a positive path forward this year as industry trends, lack of investment, and declining per-developer revenue hit everyone hard."

"Creature isn’t slowing down at all though. We have several large titles in development across multiple partner studios - some of our most ambitious yet. We also had a positive holiday with our catalog overall doing pretty well and Deadly Delivery ranking as one of the top selling titles leading into the holidays."

Cloudhead Games laid off 40 people after teasing for years work on a major title following their standout release Pistol Whip. The studio confirmed in the comments on our initial article about the layoffs that both versions of the game – one for Intel machines and one for ARM systems – will be packaged for sale on the forthcoming Steam Frame. At 16 people now, founder Denny Unger's first week of 2026 involved resetting Cloudhead's strategy and "reverse recruiting" for dozens of now-former colleagues looking for new remote positions.

Some VR game developers have been buoyed by revenue from the subscription programs offered by Sony and Meta that their games are downloadable through. Some developers, however, see these subscriptions becoming a larger percentage of a smaller income pie overall. With no new VR hardware from Meta in 2025 and confirmation that their third-party Horizon OS headset program has been shelved, developers growing overly dependent on subscription revenue likely face difficult decisions about how to maintain independence or continue VR development.

Forking Inputs

Do VR developers build games for controller-free hand tracking or for a new set of controllers from Valve that differ from Meta Quest in the number of buttons they have?

Do they build volumes that float in space alongside other volumes and windows, or do they construct fully immersive virtual worlds?

Can VR developers expect the targeting of eye tracking in all future headsets to help them build more responsive software?

In early 2025, we met virtually with Ryan Payton of Meta-owned studio Camouflaj to cover their work on the Batman: Arkham Shadow Game of the Year edition.

"We're as hungry as ever," Payton told us during the broadcast. "I think a Wolverine VR game would be incredible. I want that."

A Meta Neural Band worn on each wrist could conceivably make that dream come true. When combined with the idea that computer vision could help more accurately detect precision microgestures, we're glimpsing an era with Meta's Display glasses that could see users do much more than just navigating menus in headsets or glasses privately with simple thumb swipes.

In the dreams we seem to share with the director of one of the best VR games produced by Meta, we want something wholly more robust from our experience in headset. Wolverine's adamantium claws can seem to slide out from underneath the skin of our wrists and then we can use our new tools to climb up brick walls in wide field of view virtual reality. This can be done without controllers in hand as wristbands vibrate haptic effects for us instead. If this is the way, it would require Meta figuring out how to transition its ecosystem from selling two inexpensive controllers in the box with each headset to bundling up a pair of Neural Bands instead.

Without third-party Horizon OS headsets to differentiate the experience inside Meta's ecosystem near term, and as executives court partners like UFC and James Cameron long term, VR game developers are left wondering what space Meta is making for them in their future endeavors.

50-degree field of view AR glasses with a wristband on your dominant hand to interact with menus or handwrite will certainly be interesting to some people for tasks out in the physical world. However, that's so very far from the presence-inducing VR of the sort we would want in a Wolverine game. We can only have dual-wielding indestructible claws via a pair of bands on both wrists with wide field of view virtual reality doing the work of transporting us into a world of superheroes.

Platform Focus

Consider the next two years facing two of the best games made for VR – Batman: Arkham Shadow and Half-Life: Alyx. Near term, pirates are likely to try to run Batman: Arkham Shadow on the Frame headset before Meta chooses to put it for sale on the Steam store.

Meanwhile, Valve is working to get Half-Life: Alyx running performant in the standalone Steam Frame. If that should happen, will there be the same demand to get that experience running directly on a Meta standalone?

I'm illustrating that some of the biggest-budget exclusive software products made for VR headsets – games owned 100% by the platform – find their virtual worlds diametrically opposed in the pressure ahead for their distribution.

Alyx faces developer-led optimization to bring an experience that sings with a high-powered PC down to run performant on a low-powered standalone headset. Batman faces the demand of PC buyers hungry for more high-quality content than the market can produce, and a publisher with some motivations against selling software via a competitor's storefront.

Nintendo releases the revamped Virtual Boy next month and we'll be curious if Sony can pull together a coherent strategy after the PlayStation VR2. Meanwhile, Apple chips away at major software updates for visionOS and we'll have a review of Steam Frame once we receive the completed headset from Valve.

For now, multiple long-time VR development studios still find themselves committed to the medium and working on new software, but they are also recalibrating their expectations for a smaller market near-term and difficult decisions ahead about focus and differentiation.

My final moments at Valve headquarters for the reveal of Steam Frame last year were spent snapping the photos you see sprinkled throughout this article.

Right before that, overwhelmed by my desire to spend more time in Valve's upcoming headset, I uttered my final question to their engineers.

Can you explain to "an idiot who doesn't understand how the Internet works what the difference is between Flatpaks and APKs?"

"It's pretty much the same thing," a Valve representative answered. "Flatpak is for the Linux desktop. APK is for Android, but it's similar. It's a package that contains everything you need to run, that's gonna run in a sandbox that you can uninstall later. So it's an application package."

I quickly recapped for the Valve VR team my formative experience with Windows circa 1995 or 1996. I was granted access to a Windows PC my dad brought home from work and shown a games folder full of a bunch of fun and simple 2D games to play. I also was shown how to get into DOS, and what command to type to launch games like Doom. Soon I was looking up cheat codes online and I quickly filled up the storage inside the PC with more games to play. One day, to make more space, I simply dragged the game files to the recycle bin and hit empty.

I can't remember the exact sequence of events that followed but I remember a lot of crying accompanying intense fear of my father's return from work at 5 p.m. The actions of a 10-year-old adding and deleting games left our family PC, meant just for business and school, bootable only in safe mode.

"We have those two tiers on Steam Deck. People that want to go set the OS to read/write mode and change system files, they can do that. But for folks that are just distributing apps that are prepackaged between themselves – the flatpak distribution format, which is similar to the sandbox we run games in, is pretty safe. Like it guarantees that if you remove it, your system is in the same state [as] before you installed it. So it really aims to provide an initial way to engage with a device that is more like an appliance..."

Thirty years have passed since my first direct interactions with the Internet and personal computers. As a father now in the 2020s, I found myself over Christmas break explaining to my teenager the difference between a Mac and a Steam Deck, and why some games they love run on one system and not the other. Our conversation revealed a spectrum of openness in computing with different amounts of power for physics and graphics. Some developers haven't been paid to do the work to put a particular game on a specific system and make it run really well there.

I got that part across just fine. What I had trouble conveying is why openness and offline computing matter. I want an appliance that's both hard to break and easy to use, and I want a playground for everyone at least as big as the one I had to explore in 1995.

I believe Valve is trying to make that happen in SteamOS with Linux.

Openness & Offline Computing Make Playgrounds For Discovery

A kid's first computer is often an Internet-connected device like iPhone, iPad, Android, or a school-issued Chromebook, with all of them requiring an online account to operate. Caregivers prepare those accounts for the children and, over the last few years, platform companies providing online services have worked steadily to enable more stuff for kids and teens to do on these managed accounts.

After a very short time with the Steam Frame on my head I kicked off my shoes, reclined comfortably on a couch, and started searching the open Web using a browser in the Linux desktop with my voice. I have no idea what account was logged into the headset and it didn't matter – I was doing whatever I wanted inside SteamOS and Linux.

I didn't have time to try it at their offices, but the moment Valve sends out review units I'm going to click play on a great number of games in Steam loaded up on a 2 terabyte microSD card to see how they run.

As I create a mental picture of how much space I have to play inside Steam Frame in standalone, and before I connect the headset to another PC for what Valve itself describes as a streaming-first device, I'm going to open the Linux desktop and see what mischief I can manage. I'm looking to install apps like VLC for watching videos and Discord for chatting with friends, RetroArch for playing classic games, and Spotify for streaming music. That's a lot I expect to find right out of the box in Flathub, described as the "Linux App Store".

The key takeaway here is that I expect to install more stuff to the Steam Frame headset using Linux directly on day one than I did in four days with Android XR. And I expect to be able to install a lot more to the headset overall than I have been able to in years of ownership of Vision Pro or Quest. Am I going to install my own operating system? Probably not. But am I going to personally screw up my installation of Linux so bad the system is going to need to restore me to factory settings? After this many years messing with computers, that's probably my goal and I'm going to enjoy doing it.

Decades after my incident in 1990s Windows, as I was explaining what Mac and Steam Deck can do for a teenager, I found myself overwhelming them. My effort to make personal computing seem less daunting than it was for my forefathers was not going well. I told my eldest that if they break a Steam Deck by installing too many games and modding the system with software, I would be impressed.

Back in 2019, Facebook set up a call with me to discuss their "console-like curation strategy" for the Quest ecosystem, and today leadership at Meta has abandoned that strategy entirely for a policy of openness, as a great many developers struggle for sales inside of an ecosystem flush now with low quality projects. Meta seems to have meant for Horizon Worlds to be the floor of the Quest ecosystem, but requiring a Meta account and giving developers a cut of subscriptions is not providing stable footing to keep developers afloat, nor must-have reasons to put on a headset.

Now consider the game Valve is playing in comparison to that and the space their engineers are making for experimentation. Valve funded faceless developers worldwide to work on a series of key open source projects for the last decade forming the basis of SteamOS all trying to make it easier to play games with computers.

"A lot of what you're experiencing here when you wear that and play a game is gonna be powered by a ton of the open source work we've been doing for the last decade or so, just ranging from SteamOS itself, which has elements dating all the way from the first version of SteamOS in 2013," a Valve representative explained. "The way we're running desktop games in this, the way we're doing things like the graphics driver, it's all open source. Proton is all open source. That's been hundreds of people for a decade working on that stuff. And of course, SteamOS is based on Arch Linux. The desktop here is powered by Plasma, so it's KDE Plasma, which is one of the major two desktops available on Linux. For the better part of a decade, we've been actually working directly with Plasma developers and funding them so they can improve the desktop with just gaming use cases in mind."

"If folks on an experience that's more curated and more closed off are having a good experience, that's fine. But in general, we see people that are trying to experience a variety of games in different ways. There's a bunch of stuff that they might wanna do that we haven't thought of," the Valve representative said. "And what we always observe is that there's a ton of value that is usually distributed laterally in the community, where users between themselves will share stuff that will make the experience better. And that is only possible in an open platform. We don't want all the value in a platform like that to be flowing up and down through us, and for us to be determining what's a good experience or not on behalf of all those users that might have different opinions and different aspirations. So it's really important for us to keep that open because it creates those kinds of effects that eventually leads to a better experience. Also anyone that's using this stuff can also go and contribute patches and develop on it. And so we're excited to be able to have stuff get even better because people now want to contribute to it."

"In fact, a lot of the developers that are working on open source have started because they were users and they just want to improve a specific aspect and they go deep into it. The lines between user and developer has always been very blurry for us. We've always come from a world where some of our most popular game properties actually started out as mods. And modding on PC was always like a strong thing that we were always trying to support. Because so many good concepts and new game genres, free to play, MOBAs, all that stuff came through mods, initially, right? If you look at the history of video games–different genres, different ways to experience games, different peripherals–a lot of it came from PC because PC was an open platform where different companies could innovate in different ways, but also users could mod. And people that created closed off platforms based on some of those concepts, they're gonna take some of those concepts and kind of freeze them in time. And then PC's gonna keep moving forward because it's open and we have all this value. And we are just applying PC to VR, so it's nothing new for us. We've always applied PC to VR. Some folks have opted to like branch it off in different directions, but I think we're just doing the same thing as we've always been doing."

Meta is delaying the international roll-out for Ray-Ban Display Glasses with Neural Band while a handwriting feature arrives in the United States.

Meta's handwriting feature promises heads-up input on any surface while wearing the Neural Band. The feature launches first in Early Access in the United States for the English language with the "ability to send messages on WhatsApp and Messenger by writing with their finger on any surface."

Citing "unprecedented demand and limited inventory," Meta said it is also pausing "our planned international expansion to the UK, France, Italy, and Canada, which was originally scheduled for early 2026."

"Product waitlists now extend well into 2026," a Meta blog post reads. "We’ll continue to focus on fulfilling orders in the US while we re-evaluate our approach to international availability."

Meanwhile, Meta is rolling out pedestrian navigation for the Display glasses in Denver, Las Vegas, Portland and Salt Lake City joining dozens of existing cities with support. Meta also announced a "phased rollout" for a new teleprompter feature for the Display glasses.

Our review described the Display glasses as "first generation heads-up mobile computing" and we awarded the band "Best New Hardware" of 2025 for its breakthrough interface.

The Canada-based development studio that describes itself as "VR's Creative Heart" laid off 70 percent of its staff.

CEO Denny Unger of Cloudhead Games released a statement announcing deep cuts at the studio behind Pistol Whip and The Gallery.

"Due to industry forces beyond our control, Cloudhead must make the difficult choice to reduce our workforce effective January 7th 2026. 30% of us will remain to continue the mission," a note from Unger reads. "Our belief remains in the power of VR as a medium, as a shared dream machine that will one day transform humanity. We have no doubt VR's mainstream relevance is predestined, with future devices that do "everything", but it will take studios like ours to be there when that time comes."

Unger promised further updates about the "challenges and potential opportunities of our industry" while posting a document titled "reverse recruitment" with contact details for more than 30 staffers departing Cloudhead in the layoffs. Most are based in Canada and list a preference for a remote job.

16 people remain at Cloudhead following the cuts, according to Unger, with 40 people in total affected by the layoffs. The studio had been hinting at work on additional projects back in 2022.

"We released a steady stream of new content for Pistol Whip over a 5 year period but more importantly we've been working on new projects in stealth for 3 years," Unger wrote in our comments below. "Games take a long time to fund and produce."

Cloudhead released Pistol Whip in 2019 to wide acclaim. I rated it "fantastic" at launch and, in the years after, the studio stacked on considerable updates including multiple campaigns and even a "growing library of explosive Scenes created by the Pistol Whip modding community directly in-game." At $29.99 today on Steam, Quest, and PlayStation VR2, the title remains a fantastic cinematic action experience delivered in one big package rather than metered out as paid DLCs.

Pistol Whip is also a member of Meta's Horizon+ subscription games program and the title is offered at a discount with new membership in Sony's program. A large number of other top tier VR developers have their games in those games programs, which have helped supplement income from sales in the past.

We'll be curious to hear more from Unger about his particular path at Cloudhead. In 2019, the studio was buoyed by the development of Aperture Hand Lab for Valve as a sampler experience for the Valve Index. With Steam Frame around the corner, Cloudhead will have a new surface for Pistol Whip sales in 2026, but the layoffs would suggest no partnership materialized for a project specific to the system.

The layoffs are unlikely to be the last major reduction in the VR space for an experienced development studio – Myst creator Cyan let half go last year among many others – as creative groups continue to be shocked by shifting platform priorities.

Please reach out to ian@uploadvr.com if you have anything to share regarding funding and recruitment in the VR and AR space.

Apple revealed six upcoming Lakers games broadcasting live in Apple Immersive format to local Vision Pro owners.

The live schedule broadcasts from several angles at the Crypto.com Arena with one game from Ball Arena. Some angles are closer than a courtside seat with wide field of view stereoscopic views including "the scorer’s table, the area beneath each basket, a high-and-wide view of the arena, the player tunnel, the broadcast booth, and a roaming courtside perspective for interviews and commentary." We'll be curious to see how Lakers fans feel watching these games live as they air simultaneously on TV for most others.

Here's the schedule:

• Friday, January 9 – Milwaukee Bucks vs. Los Angeles Lakers – 7:30 p.m. PT
• Thursday, February 5 – Philadelphia 76ers vs. Los Angeles Lakers – 7 p.m. PT
• Friday, February 20 – Los Angeles Clippers vs. Los Angeles Lakers – 7 p.m. PT
• Thursday, March 5 – Los Angeles Lakers at Denver Nuggets – 7 p.m. PT
• Tuesday, March 10 – Minnesota Timberwolves vs. Los Angeles Lakers – 8 p.m. PT
• Monday, March 30 – Washington Wizards vs. Los Angeles Lakers – 7 p.m. PT

NextVR's full broadcasting schedule from 2016 is here on UploadVR for you to compare, with our report at the time noting that a free trial was offered ahead of the full broadcast schedule locked to NBA League Pass.

Here Is The NBA’s Full NextVR Live Broadcasting Schedule For This Season

NextVR has previously pulled in massive funding through big investment rounds, including $30 million and another 80 million, to continue live broadcasting in VR. Earlier this month we reported the startup took a major step forward, going into a full time stream schedule with the NBA. Now we have the

UploadVRCharles Singletary

Apple later acquired the "leading broadcaster of VR events" and the technology has been reborn as Apple Immersive, with the company investing heavily in broadcast rights and equipping sports venues with immersive camera systems that can offer better than a front row seat. In the case of "Spectrum Front Row" in 2026, Apple, the NBA, and Charter Communications require some authentication to view a live broadcast in headset.

"In Southern California, Hawaii, and parts of Nevada, Spectrum Internet customers and video subscribers of any provider with a package that includes Spectrum SportsNet can access live games, full-game replays, and highlights by downloading the new Spectrum SportsNet app for Apple Vision Pro and authenticating their active subscription. Users with a free NBA ID will also have access to live games, full-game replays, and highlights via the NBA app."

After-game replays should be available in markets where Apple Vision Pro is sold as early as 24 hours after each live game, with the first available on Sunday, January 11.

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/controller setup."

With Valve preparing to launch the Frame headset, I asked Shankar whether Bigscreen would support flat screen co-watching to devices like Steam Deck. Shankar responded:

"This has regularly come up in the past decade. We've stayed focused on VR, and I think that's our strength. Many others (especially Valve) will do a good job of cross-play across PC and VR. We're focused on the areas in which we think we have an exceptional edge in capability and knowledge. We have nothing to announce yet on our software development, need more time to develop :) but we haven’t been sitting idle, that’s for sure.

Bigscreen just launched Dynamic Foveated Rendering for the Beyond 2e headset with early access in iRacing and DCS World among the first to explore support for the feature, which promises "eye tracking-driven performance improvements." I purchased a Beyond 2 without eye tracking and received it near the end of 2025 to keep my base stations in service another couple years. We'll be curious to hear reports from 2e customers when it comes to their real world performance using the feature.

"Many customers – hundreds of thousands around the world – are actively using SteamVR Base Stations and Controllers right now with their Valve Index, HTC Vive, etc., and 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/controller setup," Shankar wrote. "We are firmly committed to manufacturing the Beyond 2 with SteamVR Lighthouse tracking for the next 2 years. We can say this with certainty as we've inventoried components and have setup a continuously running production line. We've signed commitments to enterprise customers as they are reliant on our hardware for their businesses."

Beyond 2 was announced in March 2025, shipping started in July 2025 with a universal fit cushion shipping near the end of the year.

"December is our biggest month of shipping, shipping more units in a single month than we typically did in an entire year with Beyond 1 in 2023 or 2024," Shankar wrote. "We faced a lot more demand than we expected, with Beyond 2 already selling approximately 3 times more than Beyond 1 did."

"We thought we would have inventory on hand for fast-shipping by August/September, but demand has just been too high. Each time we ramp up supply/production, demand was going up even further."

The Steam Hardware Survey suggests that, as of this writing, Beyond headsets still need to climb past PlayStation VR2, Meta Quest Pro and both Windows Mixed Reality and the Oculus Rifts to make it into the top five.

"Perhaps within 1-2 years, we'll be Top 5 alongside Steam Frame, Quest 3, etc," Shankar wrote. "Beyond 2e's built-in eyetracking cameras is the first computer vision-driven product we've shipped. It should be no surprise that we'll eventually have more cameras inside Bigscreen Beyond, but there is no timeline for that. Camera R&D started years ago, and it'll still take years before we release anything. The bar is very high for any camera-based feature."

"I think the size of the existing SteamVR ecosystem is underestimated, and with Steam Frame dropping Lighthouse support, we're actually seeing growing sales."

Shankar said 2026 will see Bigscreen focus on expanding the company's international presence.

"We currently sell in the US, Japan, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (>50% of sales are international). To improve the speed of European fulfillment and support, we're planning to open a facility in The Netherlands in early 2026," Shankar wrote. "It currently takes 3-10 days to ship products into the EU from our Los Angeles factory, and we aim to improve this to 1-2 days with our local European center," Shankar wrote. "We've achieved meaningful scale as a company (expecting to cross $100 million in annual revenue in the next year). We've stayed true to our values, built by passionate VR enthusiasts for VR enthusiasts, and we're here for the long run."

William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer describes jacking into "the consensual hallucination" of "the matrix" with a "custom cyberspace deck" projecting one's "disembodied consciousness" there. The hardware necessary to spend time in VR is a "cyberspace deck" seen "banging against" the hip of the main character.

In 2026, the "Realworld cyberdecks" page on Reddit says "The era of virtual reality is coming, so it is also time for cyberdecks to come" as hundreds contribute new rigs weekly.

If the "era of virtual reality" is coming and a "cyberspace deck" is how we get there, what do the first “realworld” decks look like? What are their functions?

Unlocking Digital Data In VR By Locking It To The Real World

What is a cyberdeck?

My custom deck begins at a couple terabytes of local storage of videos, photos, music, games, and other personal files. I've been able to access this data store in VR since about 2016 with Virtual Desktop. I don't buy much software from Microsoft, though, so my data has been an ill fit inside Windows. Looking ahead, I’d love to build on my data with a Framework laptop to drive VR directly with Linux. In the meantime, I'm using macOS, iOS, Windows 11, SteamOS, and various flavors of Android to operate my file systems.

Many of us already carry, at the very least, 50 gigabytes of storage in our phones everywhere we go. Is it so difficult for us to imagine a couple years more and almost everyone finding use for terabytes carried with us?

After roughly a decade of headsets from Gear VR in 2014 to Quest 3 in 2023, when the Vision Pro arrived in 2024 I first experienced a standalone system unlock terabytes of digital information to use in VR. Apple brought apps from my iPad and iPhone, sure, but I also started perusing my own personal data store on local drives wirelessly through Mac Virtual Display. When I use the feature, my Mac's screen turns off in the "realworld" and a resizable virtual panel opens in VR instead. If anybody else happens to be watching my screen my data isn't displayed there anymore. For some scenarios that's a bug, but for many it's a feature.

Gibson's fiction understood the value of cyberspace before "the matrix" could actually be. Now VR is a consumer reality and our model for personal storage of digital content collides with Gibson's idea of a deck and the technical delivery of cyberspace. For example, you discover the confines of your digital keepers when you apply personal computing to your life without any specific platform limitations. The FAT god commands us to store no file greater than 4 gigabytes. And beware special characters in thy filenames.

In my view, a "custom deck" starts with pouring one's personal data into any portable device. MicroSD cards are readable in Steam Decks and Steam Frames while thumb drives include their universal connector. So you can start building a deck starting from a $15 thumb drive or MicroSD card, and build up over time to a multi-thousand dollar laptop with the very latest graphics card to cyberspace.

Entry Level Decks

Hanging from a bag in the corner of my office is the latest personal computer from Raspberry Pi. Described as a "premium desktop computer" the Raspberry Pi 500+ is a keyboard selling for $200 with a 256-gigabyte solid-state drive built in running Linux.

Just send USB-C power into the Raspberry Pi and the keyboard starts computing. I used the included tools for the 500+ to unscrew the bottom of the keyboard and swap out its drive. The custom computer boots to the desktop quickly and now carries four terabytes of storage underneath satisfying mechanical keys.

Now I just need somewhere to display my files.

Conceptually, Raspberry Pi and I put together a custom deck of hardware and software that's cheaper and more portable than anything made by Apple. The Pi doesn't take me to cyberspace but it can display in cyberspace, and I can access it there as if from a floating terminal just like my Mac. And all of it is running in the space occupied by the keyboard traditionally used to operate a personal computer.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth emanate from the keyboard. In the back, ethernet, USB and micro HDMI ports connect physical accessories. The biggest problem is that the year is 2026 and we don't have the easy-to-use software I need in virtual reality to access my deck's files wirelessly. Instead, I hack my keyboard PC into VR by any means necessary. That means dealing with stuff like VNC and IP addresses or perhaps a latency-inducing capture card.

The Steam Deck offers access to Linux in a more user-friendly handheld console-like form factor compared with any Pi or Mac. If logging into Steam online before you can do fun things with your computer is too restrictive, then you can build your own deck of hardware and software and log in online only if you want.

A Framework For The Future

Readers who invest multiple thousands of dollars in their personal computing rigs know $200 or even $500 doesn't truly buy a "premium desktop computer". If a Raspberry Pi can only display a flat screen in VR, then a Framework laptop should be able to fully embrace the concept of a cyberdeck carrying an NVIDIA RTX 5070 and 64 gigabytes of RAM.

My ideal configuration for a personal computer essentially matches the price of a top-of-the-line headset for a top-of-the-line deck that's upgradeable for years. To me, it doesn't really matter if my "deck" starts with my data on a thumb drive in a well-structured folder system, or if there's a complex operating system and graphics card and central processor with a virtual assistant managing my data. The computer becomes "custom" and "personal" when I put my data inside.

The aim is to bring personal computing with me wherever I go. It's not to the cafe or on a plane I really care about my deck of data and hardware going. Sure, those places would be great, but the most important place a deck goes is in VR.

Everyone Already Owns A Cyberdeck Lacking Direct VR Support

A cyberdeck is the missing key to Bigscreen Beyond.

As long as you're seated there in your chair and have a good supply of clean power, conceptually speaking, Bigscreen Beyond and a Framework laptop should put you in cyberspace when the headset touches your face.

Yes you need lasers sweeping the room right now for Beyond and a network connection added to this core experience would bring a lot. Yes you could also add accounts, friends, entitlements, digital rights management and thousands upon thousands of other services and software packages as with any open computer.

Whether Beyond is running from a desktop PC or the Framework laptop is a secondary concern. All that fundamentally matters is that when you go to VR you have at your fingertips a storage device you can separate from your computer with all your personal and favorite files organized, indexed, searchable, accessible and playable.

As of this writing, data portability in the "cloud" typically means waiting hours or days to download a store of information from a provider. There's a more immediate and extreme example of data portability, however, and we've had it for decades with removable storage systems.

If you have the freedom to immediately unplug both your content and yourself from the network and the headset, you also have the freedom to take your stuff with you anywhere and everywhere, in VR or otherwise.

From MP3 Players & Headphones To PCs & Assistants

Over the last quarter century, the MP3 player became the iPod and music libraries became the launchpad for iPhone – a new kind of hyper-connected deck filled with personal information. From iPhone and Android, our pocket decks consumed almost every product category of personal computing and remade a few others.

Something new is happening with spatial computing starting with experiences in virtual reality and extending into passthrough views and mixed reality. Any surface can become a touch-sensitive display. And our existing touch-sensitive displays become even more useful accepting touch input while turning off the flow of photons. They just send that data as bits over the network when needed. With reskinnable passthrough views, that "deck" in hand can become anything from a camera to a map to a tool to drag objects. Even non-interactive displays can become frames for new functionality. Watch a movie with closed captions while a friend seated on the same couch enjoys the same film in 3D without any text distractions.

That's just for starters. Now imagine looking down at your phone in hand in VR and swiping along its surface, but in the real world the screen is off. Or imagine playing Breath of the Wild while standing in Hyrule and holding a Sheikah Slate.

Like the words "virtual reality" before we could go there anytime, the word "cyberdeck" right now still exists largely in the realm of fiction, except to the people posting to a creative subreddit. It is still mostly a concept. But as a concept, consider the possibility that VR is taking so long to become accepted by mainstream audiences because we lack our companion devices, data, and services as we walk around another universe. To interact with VR, we hold a pair of controllers standing in for hands instead of a cyberdeck displaying a map of where to go.

Bring on the pucks to access cyberspace with terabytes carried between headsets and glasses. In the meantime, Neuromancer is in production for Apple TV.

More people than ever before chose VRChat to ring in the New 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."

As Bigscreen Beyond 2 continues scaling production of its ultralight headset design in 2026 and Valve prepares to sell the lightweight modular Steam Frame as well, we'll be curious to see where VRChat's peak figures land on January 1, 2027.

If you were in VRChat for New Year's Eve, please share in the comments below the name of the space you chose to be in to celebrate the new year. And for those outside VR who still might not see the overall trend here, did the people who stood freezing under the lights of Times Square in New York for most of New Year's Eve spend their time any better than the people cozy at home wearing Bigscreen Beyond 2 to visit VRChat?

Our second round of UploadVR's Best of 2025 awards is now live.

We kicked things off earlier today with our favorite games this year across individual platforms: Quest, PC VR, PlayStation VR2, and Apple Vision Pro. This also discussed our top immersive entertainment titles outside of gaming, looking to more film-adjacent experiences.

Now, we're focusing on mixed reality apps and games as developers continue to embrace this approach. We're also diving into the best uses of hand tracking across the year, alongside dedicated early access categories for both mixed reality and VR games. While most of our categories are only applicable for full releases, Best Hand Tracking also factors in early access launches.

So then, onto round two. Here are our favorite hand tracking, mixed reality, and early access experiences in 2025.

Best Hand Tracking Game

Demeo x D&D is a great game but fundamentally similar to the same experience we've already had in Demeo, and Dimensional Double Shift unlocks the fun of Job Simulator in multiplayer after it left open beta. Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between, Banners & Bastions, Little Critters, and Pocket Lands all caught our eye this year.

There's one game, though, that stands out in 2025 – Jigsaw Night. You can grab the pieces whether they are close or far away and easily hand them to friends. At any time you can also pick up a controller and use it for more precise grabbing of faraway objects. This robust support, alongside other features like LIV integration, colocation, and puzzling with your own photos, means that solo developer Steve Lukas' project is an absolute delight to spend time in and a strong reason to bring just your headset with you.

Best Early Access Mixed Reality Game

We've seen some intriguing first looks at mixed reality games in early access this year. Pocket Lands has been a recent favorite where you create Minecraft-esque worlds, while Loop One: Done is an MR automation game where you record loops with drones and robots. We'd also note Super RC, Jigsaw Night, Galactic Traffic Control, and Healer.

This time around, Laser Dance takes our award for the Best Early Access Mixed Reality Game of 2025. Thomas Van Bouwel delivered what we called “the first essential mixed reality game” and a go-to party game in our review. Offering an instantly relatable premise that feels ripped out of a spy film, it's one of the first experiences anyone should try when putting on a headset.

Laser Dance Early Access Review: The Mixed Reality Game Quest 3 Needs

Laser Dance in early access is the first essential mixed reality game.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

Best Early Access VR Game

Whether it's to gather community feedback or bring in crucial funding, more developers continue choosing early access launches across Quest and Steam, and 2025 has plenty of picks.

This year brought us a sequel to one of VR's earliest roomscale hits with Unseen Diplomacy 2, Another Axiom followed up on Gorilla Tag with Orion Drift, and Final Fury continues showing promise. Rounding this out is Boxing Underdog, The Pirate: Republic of Nassau, How to God, ZIX, and Out of Sight VR.

For 2025, Forefront is UploadVR's Best Early Access VR Game of the Year. Triangle Factory's latest game following Breachers provides a 32-player shooter comparable to EA's Battlefield series. “Combat is exciting and tense, its VR gunplay is tactile and satisfying, and its environments are dynamic and engaging,” we said at the time, and we'll continue watching its next moves.

Forefront Hands-On: The Battlefield Multiplayer Experience In VR

Forefront in early access brings excitingly tense, large-scale multiplayer warfare reminiscent of Battlefield to VR.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Best Mixed Reality Game

As mixed reality continues to find its footing, we're continuing to see intriguing projects emerge from across the board. What we're seeing today feels like an early look at what we can expect in the years ahead. We're focused on games where mixed reality is the clear focus, and not an optional extra in otherwise fully immersive games.

On Quest 3, Star Wars: Beyond Victory took us back to a galaxy far, far away once again. We explored new worlds in Mythic Realms, raised a fluffy companion in Stay: Forever Home, while both Banners & Bastions and Table Troopers delivered strong tabletop style thrills. Other titles include Project AEROES, BEATABLE, Crystal Commanders, and Detective VR.

This year, our winner for Best Mixed Reality Game is Little Critters by Purple Yonder. Following the studio's work on Little Cities, we found an innovative take on the tower defense genre that puts you front and center in the fight. Its compelling gameplay has real impact, there's great strategic depth, and Little Critters keeps us coming back for more.

Little Critters Is A Tower Defense Game That Hits Home

Little Critters delivers a frenetic, accessible tower defense game in mixed reality today on Quest 3 and 3S.

UploadVRJosh Petersel

Best Mixed Reality App - Figmin XR

Apps like Pencil continue to show promise building out from innovative ideas – you can learn to draw Walkabout Mini Golf characters with a good old-fashioned pencil in hand and a headset on your head, and that's pretty cool.

Our award for best mixed reality app of 2025, though, goes to the gradually improving spatial playground Figmin XR. The app won last year too, and this year solo developer Javier Davalos essentially brought Tilt Brush to iPhone with the launch of Figmin XR there. Last year, we were able to get a pretty impressive colocation experience going in Figmin XR from Quest to Vision Pro.

This year, I single-handedly logged in with iPhone to the same virtual room as my headset. I could hold a digital object with my finger pressed to the iPhone and carry it around without even looking at it. Capturing mixed reality videos of Figmin playgrounds from iPhone could be a big use of this integration, or to let a friend or family member see into a spatial creation when they aren't in a headset.

How Figmin XR’s Colocation Works And Why Other Apps Need To Emulate It

How to use Figmin XR’s “scene center” menu to colocate headsets from Apple, Meta and others.

UploadVRIan Hamilton