XR Daily: Apple Pulls Back on Vision Pro
Apple Lays Off 200+ Across Vision Pro and Siri Teams
Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs across its Vision Pro, Siri, and software engineering teams, according to Bloomberg reporting picked up by The Verge and 9to5Mac. Roughly 100 of the cuts fall in the Vision Products Group, where Apple is “largely shutting down” a team focused on gaming and scaling back the group that produces Immersive Video. The other hundred or so come from Siri and software engineering.
Apple’s statement frames the move as evolving “to deliver the best experiences for our users,” while noting it will also create new roles. The company has told employees that Vision Pro and visionOS are not going away, but the near term focus shifts to smart glasses. Those glasses are expected to be announced at WWDC 2027 and ship by the end of that year. A next generation Vision Pro is reportedly still under consideration, possibly as early as the end of 2028.
The catch: this is a direct pullback from Apple’s “spatial computing” bet. The $3,499 Vision Pro launched in early 2024 but never became a hit, and Apple had already suspended work with Samsung Display on an entry level XR display earlier this year. The Vision Pro will keep receiving a smaller number of in house Immersive Video releases, with Apple leaning on third parties to fill the content gap.
Steam Frame Unboxing and Setup Videos Leak
Valve looks ready to launch Steam Frame, its first standalone VR headset. An update to the ARM Steam Client this week shipped with unboxing, sign in, and setup videos for the headset. Valve pulled them in a follow up update, but the clips have since been reuploaded multiple times.
The leak lands after a string of launch signals. Steam Frame received FCC certification late last month, and imports of “literal tons” of units were already flowing into the US in June. Valve’s “Great on Frame” page now lists 50+ optimized games, and the company has been quietly lowering requirements for developers porting native, standalone content to the headset.
The catch: price and release date remain unknown, and the launch may slip further. Valve has already flagged the ongoing memory and storage crisis as a factor, and Qualcomm now says it must raise mobile chip prices too. Steam Frame is built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset.
Pico’s Vision Pro Competitor Is Named Space Pro, Debuts September 2
Pico’s Project Swan headset now has an official name: Pico Space Pro. It debuts at a special event in Beijing on September 2, where Pico is expected to reveal pricing, full specs, and global availability.
What we know so far points to a serious Vision Pro style device. It uses microOLED displays at 4,000 pixels per inch and roughly 40 pixels per degree, with a dual chip architecture. A custom XR silicon handles perception and imaging with a claimed ~12 ms perception latency, alongside a flagship SoC that Pico says delivers more than 2x the CPU and GPU performance of Qualcomm’s XR2 Gen 2.
The catch: beyond a leaked setup video that has since been removed, nobody has seen the headset in the flesh. Pico typically livestreams these events with English dubbing, so expect the full picture on September 2.
XREAL AURA Passes 10,000 Reservations
XREAL’s AURA, the first AR glasses to run Google’s Android XR operating system, has crossed 10,000 global reservations. The initial $99 reservation offer, which came with a $199 launch credit, has sold out. XREAL says the milestone shows demand across consumers, developers, and enterprise customers.
The specs remain aggressive for a pair of glasses: birdbath optics with a 70 degree field of view, under 95 grams of on head weight, and a split compute design pairing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite chip with XREAL’s in house X1S spatial coprocessor. Aura supports 6DOF tracking, hand tracking, and multimodal AI, and it gains access to the Play Store through Android XR.
The catch: final pricing is still unannounced. XREAL says Aura will not exceed $1,500 before tax, but refundable $199 deposits remain open as the Fall 2026 launch approaches.
Linux 7.3 Lands VRAM Overcommit Improvements
Kernel patches improving VRAM management have been merged upstream and queued for Linux 7.3, according to the developer behind them. The work targets what happens when a game requests more video memory than the GPU physically has, the point where performance craters because memory gets evicted to slower system RAM over the PCI bus.
The author lays out the hard limits. Over a PCIe 4.0 x16 link you get a bit under 32 GiB/s, so at 30 FPS a GPU can pull in a little over 1 GiB per frame from evicted memory before smooth framerates become physically impossible. The patches aim to make overcommit degrade more gracefully rather than collapse into crashes and stutter.
The catch: this is the patch author’s own blog rather than an official kernel announcement, so treat the specifics as first party but still single source until the merge shows up in release notes.
Into the Radius 2 Hits Full Release on Quest 3 August 27
Dystopian survival shooter Into the Radius 2 leaves Early Access on Meta Quest 3 and 3S on August 27. The 1.0 update adds a complete story campaign with fully voice acted characters, new zones, anomaly types, and weapons, matching the full release that already shipped on Steam.
The Quest port arrives after some course correction on Steam. Developer CM Immersive briefly introduced two new NPCs, Guide Lauri and Supervisor Eva, then scaled back their appearances after players found them too cheery for the game’s isolated, dystopian atmosphere. Some in person segments became voice messages or interactive figures, and those changes should carry over to the Quest 3 port.
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Quick Bites
- Godot ships two maintenance releases. 3.6.3 and 4.7.2 both landed this week. 4.7.2 bundles 57 fixes from 39 contributors, touching PCSS shadows, Windows input polling, and Wayland IME positioning on KDE. → Godot 4.7.2 · Godot 3.6.3
- Supernatural gets a second life without Meta. UploadVR looks at the VR fitness app’s path after splitting from its former owner. → UploadVR
- Sol Protocol sets a September release on Quest 3. The co-op space roguelike gets a launch date. → UploadVR
- Black Myth: Zhong Kui shows 15 minutes of gameplay. Game Science’s next title gets a long trailer. → 80.lv