Niantic Spatial Relights Gaussian Splats Without Recapture
Niantic Spatial’s September 18 beta uses aligned meshes to bake new lighting onto real-world Gaussian splats, from dawn to fog and rain, with no recapture.
News
Steam Sells Frame-Only VR Games That Won’t Run on a PC
Steam now sells Frame-only VR games such as Action Hero and The Thrill of the Fight 2 with no Windows build, and Valve says a PC target is optional.
EU Vision Pro Owners Get Siri AI. iPhone Still Waits.
EU Vision Pro owners can run Siri AI under visionOS 27, Apple confirms, as can Mac users, while iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch users in the EU still wait.
Valve Open-Sources Lepton Android Layer Behind Steam Frame
Valve quietly published Lepton, the Android container layer powering Steam Frame VR ports, on its SteamOS GitLab under MIT and GPL-3.0 licenses.
Meta May Demo Phoenix With Codec Avatars at Connect
Meta may show Project Phoenix at Connect 2026 with a full-body Codec Avatars hologram call, with CTO Andrew Bosworth as the hologram, UploadVR reports.
Mixed Reality Link Streams Quest Mic and Cameras to Windows
Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Link update exposes Quest 3 and 3S microphone, passthrough and avatar camera streams as Windows 11 inputs for meetings.
Sol Protocol Hits Quest Early Access at $11.99
Sol Protocol, Singular Perception’s bridge-crew roguelike, is live in Quest 3 and 3S Early Access at $11.99 after a two-day slip, with Steam in October.
visionOS 27 Opens IR LED Accessories to Third Parties
visionOS 27 opens IR LED spatial accessories to third parties at up to 90 Hz, with Apple naming MikroE and DFRobot kits for Vision Pro developers.
Snap’s Enterprise Specs Pitch Still Lacks Price and MDM
VR.org finds Hololight and Trifork ready to anchor a fall Snap Specs pilot, while Salesforce, AWS, NVIDIA, MDM support and business pricing lack dates.
Steam Frame Lottery Tracker Puts Reservations Under Half
PC Gamer’s read of the steamframeout tracker puts about 35,000 self-reports at 44.7% reserved and 51.6% waitlisted, a crowd signal, not Valve’s figure.