XR Daily: ArmorPaint 1.0 Finally Ships

ArmorPaint 1.0 Finally Ships After Seven Years

ArmorPaint, the open-source node-based 3D texture painting app long positioned as the free alternative to Adobe’s Substance 3D Painter, just hit version 1.0. It has been a seven year journey, and the release is a full rewrite rather than a version bump. The codebase started in Haxe running on V8; it is now written entirely in C with no external libraries, including a custom 3D engine, 2D drawing system, and UI built from scratch.

The renderer is the headline. ArmorPaint 1.0 supports Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal, and WebGPU, with hardware ray tracing through D3D12 on Windows, Vulkan on Linux and Android, and Metal on macOS and iOS. The codebase shrank so much that developer Armory says the whole thing now fits on two 1.44MB floppy disks, a fun stat that also says something real about how lean the engine got. New features include Decimate, Smooth, Bevel, and Subdivide modifiers for mesh editing, a basic UV editor, a Timeline tab, and skinning and tween animation playback. There are also local “Neural Nodes” for generative AI features that run on-device. If you do 3D texturing and have been dodging a Substance subscription, this is the release to try.

→ 80 Level

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Pico Space Pro Clears FCC, Teasing a Q4 Launch

Pico’s next headset, the Space Pro, appears to have received FCC certification, the US wireless approval it needs before it can ship. The filings list a “Mixed Reality Computer” with separate entries for the headset and its external tethered puck, and they landed one day before the originally planned September 2 launch event. That event was cancelled in August, with Pico pushing the release to Q4 2026 to fold in a last-minute software upgrade it found during user testing.

The specs Pico teased back in March under the “Project Swan” codename are ambitious: micro-OLED panels at 4000 pixels per inch, a dual-chip architecture with a self-developed coprocessor for computer vision, and a main processor with twice the CPU and GPU performance of the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 in the Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra. Pico OS 6 and the Pico Spatial Engine add visionOS-like features aimed squarely at the Vision Pro, and SDK leaks show a design that borrows from both the Vision Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy XR. FCC certification is not a launch announcement, but it means the hardware is essentially done and the clock is now running on a Q4 reveal.

→ UploadVR

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An LLM Ported a 1993 Amiga Game to Godot by Reading 68000 Assembly

Rabah Shihab built Babylonian Twins in 1993 in Baghdad on an Amiga 500 with 512KB of RAM and no hard drive, writing 72,758 lines of pure 68000 assembly by hand under sanctions with only a few hours of electricity a day. This week he published one of the more remarkable AI coding stories of the year: he handed that original assembly to an LLM and asked it to rebuild the game in Godot 4 at the Amiga’s original 50Hz.

It worked, faster than he expected. A year ago, getting a model to parse his binary level maps took several rounds of corrections. This time the model read the level format in a single pass with no hints. The project had three escalating goals: port the 2010 C++ engine into Godot as the control, rebuild the 68000 assembly in Godot as the “unfair ask,” then nest the 1993 original inside the modern Definitive Edition so buying one gets you both. All three shipped. The catch he is honest about: some of it was wrong, and he did not notice for weeks. The Definitive Edition is out on iOS and Android and hits Steam this fall, with the original 1993 disks free on itch.io. Since Amiga assembly barely exists in LLM training data, this is a genuinely useful test of how much a port is understanding versus recall.

→ Babylonian Twins

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Three-LLM Runs Transformers in the Browser with Three.js and WebGPU

Ben Houston shipped Three-LLM, a library that turns language model inference graphs into Three.js TSL compute shaders running on WebGPU. It runs GPT-2, SmolLM2, Phi, and Qwen models entirely in the browser, loading ordinary Hugging Face configs, tokenizers, and SafeTensors checkpoints on the client with no server-side runtime and no model-specific WASM binary.

The demo chat app ships five checkpoints from a 3 million parameter TinyStories story generator up to a 1.3 billion parameter Phi-1.5, with model files ranging from 15MB to 2.8GB before the weights expand to FP32. On a phone you are limited to the smaller models; Qwen and Phi need real GPU memory. Three.js is normally a rendering library, but its WebGPU backend already exposes storage buffers, compute dispatches, workgroup memory, and atomics, and a transformer happens to exercise every one of them. It is a neat proof that the line between rendering and general GPU compute keeps blurring.

→ Ben Houston

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The Blood of Dawnwalker Passes 1 Million Copies in Two Days

Rebel Wolves’ open-world RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker launched September 3 and cleared a million copies sold by September 5, per the studio. The game, led by former CD Projekt RED veterans, has built buzz since its reveal for its day-human, night-vampire structure and a time-as-resource system that gives the protagonist 30 days and 30 nights to save his family.

The interesting design choice is that time only advances when you actually play content, so the clock is a narrative device rather than a stress mechanic. Design Director Daniel Sadowski framed it as making inaction a choice with consequences instead of a countdown that punishes players. It is a strong sign for the single-player RPG crowd and for a studio betting that a story-driven game without live-service hooks can still sell. The game is out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

→ 80 Level

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FunFitLand Pipes Live Heart Rate Into VR Workouts

FunFitLand is moving fitness tracking off the wrist and into the headset. A new iOS and Android companion app relays live heart rate data from Bluetooth Low Energy straps, Apple Watch, and supported Samsung watches into its Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro workouts. During a session the reading appears in-headset alongside a circular progress indicator for the current song.

The plumbing is more interesting than it sounds. Founder Meng Zhang explained the chain: a watch sends its reading to the phone app, the phone forwards it to FunFitLand’s servers, which push it to the headset, all while fighting phone permissions, OS power management, and watches losing skin contact. The team’s stated approach is “measure, then monitor, then motivate,” and at launch heart rate does not yet influence scoring or calorie estimates. After a workout the phone app shows average and max heart rate, a session graph, and time spent across five zones. It is a small but real step toward closing the loop between VR exercise and actual physiological feedback.

→ UploadVR

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Quick Bites

• Red Matter 2’s grabber tools, revisited for the game’s fourth anniversary, are a masterclass in matching the in-game tool to your physical controller shape so your hand pose and button layout always feel right. → Road to VR
• Space Marine 3 is confirmed GenAI-free. Saber CCO Tim Willits told IGN the studio’s biggest titles, including Hellraiser and Jurassic Park, stay untouched by generative AI, with only Rideshare Simulator serving as the experiment. → 80 Level
• Museas and Astronoma bring curiosity-driven museum and astronomy experiences to Apple Vision Pro. → UploadVR
• A free VRChat shader turns hair into flowing animated liquid, and it looks far better than that description suggests. → 80 Level