XR Daily: No Man's Sky Preps for Steam Frame

No Man’s Sky Adds Eye-Tracked Foveated Rendering Ahead of Steam Frame

Hello Games dropped the Cosmos update today, and buried about a third of the way down the patch notes, under “Rendering,” is the news PC VR players have wanted for years: eye-tracked dynamic foveated rendering on SteamVR. The technique concentrates rendering resources where your eyes are actually looking, sharpening the center of your vision while the GPU coasts on the periphery. No Man’s Sky has had this on PSVR 2 since August 2023, and players who own both headsets have long said the PlayStation version looks better in VR. The timing is not subtle. Valve’s eye-tracking Steam Frame is imminent, and this update means No Man’s Sky will be ready to show off on it day one. Background: Quest 3 vs Steam Frame specs.

The performance argument is real. UploadVR’s reviewer notes that even on a Ryzen 7 9850X3D and an RTX 5070 Ti, they still have to dial the graphics down from flatscreen max settings to keep VR playable. Procedural generation hammers the CPU, and VR’s resolution demands punish the GPU. Foveated rendering is one of the few levers that buys back meaningful frame time, so getting it working before a wave of eye-tracking headsets lands on the platform is smart business. Background: foveated rendering in XR design.

Cosmos itself is the bigger headline for existing players. Space finally feels alive, with salvageable Space Hulks you can strip using the Gravitino Coil gravity gun, trade outposts, asteroid belts big enough to build star bases on, free-floating orbital bases, and space station ownership, which Hello Games calls the most requested feature in the game’s history. There’s a free expedition, “Our Journey Continues,” with milestones tied to each of the 40 major updates since 2016.

→ UploadVR and UploadVR

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HiPR Makes Path Tracing Responsive by Rendering What Matters First

Path tracing produces gorgeous lighting, but it has a fundamental responsiveness problem: move an object, tweak a material, or adjust a light, and the renderer effectively restarts the whole image even when only a small region is affected. That interruption kills the iterative flow in look development, virtual production, and level design. Hierarchical Progressive Rendering, or HiPR, attacks the problem as a scheduling issue.

Built by University of Utah researcher Rafael Padilla alongside Andrew Tate, Dhruv Ram, and Cem Yuksel, HiPR identifies where an edit is directly visible and traces its influence through reflections, shadows, and indirect light transport. It updates the most important regions first while the rest of the image progressively catches up, still converging to the same unbiased path-traced result. Padilla, whose background includes production work at Walt Disney Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation, frames it as making the renderer smarter about where it spends its time rather than giving every pixel equal priority after each edit. The clear target is interactive path tracing in creative tools, games, and XR. See also path tracing on the GPU.

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ByteDance’s XR Push: Space Pro Clears FCC, Genie Rival Reportedly Next

Pico’s upcoming Apple Vision Pro competitor just cleared the FCC, one of the last regulatory hurdles before a device can be sold in the US. The headset, previously codenamed Project Swan, is described in filings as a “Mixed Reality Computer,” and leaked specs point to microOLED displays at 4,000 pixels per inch (roughly 40 pixels per degree), plus a dual-chip design: a custom XR silicon for perception and imaging with a claimed ~12 ms latency, and a flagship SoC with more than twice the CPU and GPU performance of the XR2 Gen 2. The September 2 reveal was cancelled, with launch now expected in Q4 2026, though Pico blames a software upgrade while the global component shortage looms as a plausible second factor. Background: the Pico Space Pro FCC filing.

Separately, Bloomberg reports ByteDance is readying an AI model for real-time spatial video to rival Google’s Genie, which generates interactive virtual environments and can simulate physical environments for AI agents. Founder Zhang Yiming is reportedly overseeing it personally, with a launch as soon as next month, and the model is said to be built on Seedance, ByteDance’s cinematic video generator. The strategy is a flywheel: connect ByteDance’s AI and cloud resources to TikTok on one end and Pico hardware on the other. Given the Space Pro delay, it’s fair to wonder whether the software the company wanted more time on is exactly this.

→ Road to VR: Space Pro FCC and Road to VR: Genie rival

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Valheim Leaves Early Access After Five Years

Valheim 1.0 is officially out, five years after the survival game’s explosive early access debut. The launch update adds the Deep North biome, 40+ new weapons, four armor sets, ten new creatures, 80+ buildable pieces, 30+ crafting materials, and a stack of new tools, food, music, and mechanics. Old saves carry over, but biome generation only works on unexplored areas, so the studio suggests starting fresh.

The numbers tell the story of a slow burn rather than a fading one. Valheim peaked at 502,387 concurrent players in 2021, and the 1.0 release has already pushed it back up to 140,222 and climbing. The new price is $29.99 across Steam, Mac App Store, Humble, Microsoft Store, plus Xbox, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2. Mod support is still unofficial, so mods will need time to catch up.

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Tomb Raider Devs Break Down Bringing Greek Ruins to Life

Crystal Dynamics shared a new episode of its Legacy of Atlantis mini-doc, this time focused on the game’s Greece setting. Lead Level Designer Maciej Nowak described the goal as making Greece feel like a real hidden place that’s slowly uncovered, while Experience Director Jeff Adams explained an aesthetic that blends ancient Greek temple architecture with modern Byzantine elements for believability. Narrative Director John Stafford summed up the chapter’s role: “Greece is where Lara really starts to see the bigger picture.”

The level itself is being pitched as denser than the original, with more puzzles, timed tasks, and a stronger sense of exploration. For environment artists, the blend of historical and mythic reference is the interesting part, grounding fantasy in recognizable ruins rather than generic rubble.

→ 80 Level

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Modder Unearths 1,000+ Unused Voice Lines in Resident Evil 4

Modder Keff0 posted two videos revealing over a thousand cut voice lines from the Resident Evil 4 remake and Resident Evil Requiem, and some of them change how you read the games. In the remake, the Merchant references The Duke from Resident Evil Village, and unused death animations suggest he was originally meant to be killable. In Requiem, the infected were written to remember fragments of their former lives: burning zombies beg for water, a character named Chunk pleads for his life, and some infected even thank you when you put them down. There’s also a poignant cut line from Leon, “I promise I’ll make it home,” and evidence Ashley was meant to wield a pipe as a weapon. It’s a reminder of how much narrative and texture gets left on the cutting room floor.

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Quick Bites

• Squingle Arcade is free now on PC VR, bringing the psychedelic puzzle series to SteamVR players. → UploadVR
• In Death: Unchained returns with a new season later this month, reviving the bow-and-arrow roguelite on Quest. → UploadVR
• Color-A-Cube voxelizes Walkabout Mini Golf courses in a new collab, converting the mini-golf maps into blocky dioramas. → UploadVR
• A free CAD retopology tool for Blender turns dense CAD meshes into clean topology without the manual cleanup. → 80 Level