XR Daily: Holograms Before Connect

Meta Wants Bosworth on Stage as a Photoreal Hologram

The Information’s Jyoti Mann reports that Meta could use its Connect 2026 keynote, which runs September 23 and 24, to show Project Phoenix alongside a “full-body, photorealistic hologram call experience” powered by Codec Avatars, with CTO Andrew Bosworth appearing as the hologram. The same report says Zuckerberg and Bosworth reviewed the company’s hologram call work earlier this month. Treat the demo itself as unconfirmed, since UploadVR notes plans can still change, but the surrounding signal is loud: Horizon OS firmware now contains what look like sub-frameworks for a “Hologram Calling” system with extensive Codec Avatar references, and strings in the Meta AI mobile app describe setting up a “Hologram” avatar.

Phoenix itself has been leaking for months under the codenames Phoenix, Stanley, and Loma. UploadVR’s reporting describes a premium, ultralight, open-periphery headset with a tethered compute puck, sitting in the slot Quest Pro once occupied, and official visuals turned up in Horizon OS firmware this month. The Information’s framing of it as “AR glasses” is likely wrong on the technical merits: firmware strings call it “VR Glasses”, and it is a passthrough mixed reality device on the same principle as Quest 3, just marketed for virtual screens and films.

The interesting engineering thread is how far Codec Avatars have moved from a rig. The famous Zuckerberg interview with Lex Fridman used a capture rig and high-end desktop rendering. Meta has since shown avatar generation from sparse photos and decode on Quest 3 class hardware, and this year’s CVPR paper, “Large-scale Codec Avatars: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large-scale Avatar Pretraining”, generates full-body avatars from limited input and drives them from inward-facing and SLAM sensors on the headset. Full-body motion inferred from head and controller tracking is the hard part, because the headset cannot see your legs. A photoreal avatar stream also has to survive an encode, a network hop, and a neural decode inside a frame budget, which is exactly the kind of workload that justifies putting an NPU in a puck instead of a battery in the glasses. Background: which XR parts stay on your head.

→ UploadVR

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What a VR-Ready PC Actually Costs in 2026

Road to VR’s Scott Hayden rebuilt the budget question from scratch for three headset tiers, and the pricing is a useful reality check for anyone who assumed Moore’s law still applies to VR. Entry level, aimed at last-gen tethered headsets at up to 5MP per eye (2,250 by 2,250), lands at $1,100 for a ZOTAC MEK prebuilt with a Ryzen 5 5500, RTX 5060 with 8GB, 16GB of DDR4-3200 and a 1TB NVMe drive. Enthusiast, which covers Quest 3, Quest 3S, PSVR 2, Pico 4 and Steam Frame, is $1,700 for a Skytech build with an i7-14700F and RTX 5070 12GB. High-end, for Bigscreen Beyond, Pimax Crystal Super, Pimax Dream Air, Shiftall MeganeX 8K, Vision Pro and Galaxy XR, is $3,000 for an HP OMEN 45L with a Core Ultra 7 265K, RTX 5080 16GB, 32GB DDR5-5600 and 2TB of storage. See also Quest 3 vs Steam Frame.

The DIY comparison is the part worth reading twice. Building the same entry tier yourself costs $1,181, more than the prebuilt. The enthusiast parts list comes to $2,382 against the $1,700 machine, and the high-end build is $3,205 against $3,000. Component pricing, memory in particular, has flipped the old assumption that assembling is cheaper, and Hayden says so directly.

For developers the tiering itself carries the information. Streaming headsets like Quest and Steam Frame pay a hidden tax, because the CPU and GPU have to encode and packetize a high-resolution stereo frame in addition to rendering it, which is why the enthusiast tier jumps two GPU classes for the same apparent workload. The entry tier’s 8GB of VRAM is the other number to watch: it is enough for a 5MP per eye tethered display, and it will not be enough the moment you add high-resolution textures or a sim-heavy scene.

→ Road to VR

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A 93g Headset With No Battery Closes Kickstarter at $1.29M

Unseen Reality’s URXR One wrapped its Kickstarter at $1,288,712, after clearing a $50,000 goal within minutes of opening on August 4. The specs explain the weight. There is no compute and no battery on the frame because the headset tethers over USB-C DisplayPort Alt Mode to a laptop, phone, tablet, or handheld, which leaves 93g on your face with the center of mass behind the nose bridge.

What is on the glasses: dual 1.03-inch micro-OLED panels at 2,448 by 2,064 per eye, mini pancake optics, 90Hz, 36 pixels per degree, a 90-degree diagonal field of view (about 80 degrees horizontal by 56 vertical), and 120 to 140 nits in-eye at a virtual image distance near 1.1 metres. Tracking is dual-camera SLAM at 6DOF with a 1000Hz IMU, hand tracking plus a physical button, and four forward cameras driving passthrough at 2,328 by 1,728 and 90fps, with the company claiming under 10ms passthrough latency. An on-glasses spatial processing unit and NPU handle the tracking and video work. Background: how passthrough works.

Two omissions matter as much as the numbers. There are no speakers, and IPD is manual at 58 to 68mm. The 10,000mAh power bank in the box weighs 215g and can also charge the phone or handheld you plugged in, which is a candid admission that this is a desk-and-couch accessory rather than a walking-around device. Early backers paid $800 with shipping targeted for mid-October 2026, and MSRP is $900.

For anyone building content, the fixed 90Hz, DP Alt Mode target is a clean, predictable platform compared to a wireless stream, and the 36 PPD figure sits above the roughly 25 PPD of current standalone headsets. The catch is the 1.35m cable and the lack of standalone mode, which rules out room-scale anything.

→ Road to VR

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Immersive Video Gets a White-Label Pipeline on visionOS

Acute Immersive has been quietly building the plumbing that studios use instead of shipping their own Vision Pro app. The company powered Primary: News in Depth, the 2026 Apple Design Award winner for Social Impact, along with Blue Frog Immersive, and its Acute Pro app exists for private content review. Upcoming Android XR support includes XREAL Aura glasses, which would take the same content beyond Apple’s headset.

The platform is aimed mainly at footage shot on Blackmagic’s URSA Cine Immersive camera, with support for standard 16:9, 3D movies, mono and stereo 180 and 360, and Spatial Video from iPhone. The operational detail worth noting is that publishers upload and organize files into playlists, review in-headset, add titles and thumbnails, then push new content without submitting a new app build. Analytics cover consumption, deep-link attribution, and thumbnail conversion, and push notifications can fire on new uploads.

Pricing is a licensing fee for the app, bandwidth billed separately, plus a service fee for customizations. That bandwidth line is the one to model carefully, because stereo 180 and 360 at production bitrates are not cheap to deliver, and the platform brings no built-in audience with it. For XR teams, the appeal is outsourcing the store review cycle and the player shell while keeping the monetization model, whether that is per-video, bundles, or subscriptions.

→ UploadVR

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A Shader On-Ramp That Teaches the Right Mental Model

GDQuest published a study guide titled “Your First Shader from ZERO in Godot 4” earlier this month, and it is a better starting point than most because it does not start with syntax. It starts with the pipeline, explaining that the vertex stage decides how many triangles exist and the fragment stage decides what color each pixel of those triangles becomes, then walks through an animated portal effect that exercises the techniques you actually reuse: shapes drawn from math, smoothstep for soft edges, masks to combine shapes, periodic functions to animate over time, noise to break up the regularity, and texture sampling.

The guide assumes GDScript familiarity and no graphics background, and it ends with driving uniforms from a game script and using gradients to fake depth. It also points at Godot’s shader debugger, which is the tool that turns “my effect looks wrong” into a specific intermediate value. Code is MIT and assets are CC BY-NC-SA.

The reason this belongs in an XR reading list is that these are the primitives behind a lot of headset work that never looks like a shader problem at first: comfort vignettes, foveation masks, lens distortion passes, and any custom compositing you write on top of a stereo render. Being fluent in a fragment stage that runs in parallel, without loops over pixels and without state carried between them, is the part of graphics programming that transfers to every engine.

→ GDQuest

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Wētā’s Wave Curves, Rebuilt in Houdini by One Artist

Junior FX artist Fred Bello published RiverFX, a Houdini water simulation built on Wave Curves, the technique for simulating Lagrangian water waves on dynamically deforming surfaces. His starting point was a bare-bones Houdini VEX implementation of the approach that Michael Stark assembled from Wētā’s research paper, which is a nice example of a studio research result escaping into a tool that one artist can drive.

Bello’s additions are where the realism comes from. He placed rocks first, then built a custom velocity field around them so the flow breaks into disturbances, redirects around obstacles, and crashes into the rock faces instead of passing through them. Wave curves generated the natural flow, a low mesh came first, and the high mesh was derived from the same wave curves for definition. Whitewater on top adds the foam where the waves hit.

The transferable idea is that Lagrangian wave curves track a wave front across a deforming surface rather than solving a full volumetric grid, which is what makes large-scale water motion affordable. That tradeoff is directly relevant to XR, where a heavy solver per eye at 90Hz is off the table and the practical answer is usually baked flow data and vertex animation plus a convincing foam layer. Seeing a solo artist land a convincing result on that class of technique is a good calibration point for the budget you actually have.

→ 80 Level

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A 27-Year Modding Archive Is Going Dark

Warcraft 3 World Editor Help is closing. The forum holds more than 100,000 threads and 850,000 comments dating back to Warcraft 3’s 2002 release, covering the World Editor, custom maps, triggers, and models. The admin, known as The Helper, announced the shutdown, describing 27 years that ran from a personal homepage to a Blizzard tech support site to a World Editor help site, and said his path has changed. The site will be archived and left accessible, but it will not be promoted or made findable by bots or search engines, which in practice is a slow deletion for anyone who does not already have the URL. No closure date is set, though The Helper expects it before the end of the month.

This one is worth a moment even if you have never opened the World Editor. Custom map scenes have been one of the most reliable pipelines into professional development, and a forum of this age is a record of how those scenes were learned, from trigger workarounds to model import quirks. The Reforged release in 2020 kept the community alive, and there are still ongoing projects like LoreCraft Designs’ recreation of Warcraft 2 on the Reforged engine, but the institutional memory is not transferable to a Discord that forgets in a week.

The XR parallel is uncomfortable but direct. Early knowledge about engine internals, driver quirks, and hardware workarounds tends to live in forums that no vendor is obligated to maintain, and when those go dark without a proper archive, the next generation of developers pays the cost again.

→ 80 Level

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Quick Bites

• A free Blender tool that merges your add-on panels. Plugin Hub collects the sidebar tabs you choose into one Plugins tab with collapsible sections, exposes the same list through a top-bar menu and a floating window, and replays a captured state so restoring original tabs is exact. The author reports 16 of 16 tests passing on Blender 4.5.11 and 5.2.0 against 11 real add-on tabs. → 80 Level
• TopoPen brings quad drawing into Edit Mode. A paid Blender add-on for organic and hard-surface retopology with Draw, Precise Draw, and Manual Draw modes plus Edge Flow, Circle Loop, Surface Cut, Relax, and density control through quad size, compatible with Blender 4.5 through 5.2 LTS. → 80 Level
• Flow Chaser generates levels from any song you own. The Vision Pro rhythm game shipped alongside visionOS 27, uses Apple’s on-device music intelligence to analyze structure and build the level, and ships with 140 tracks (over 7.5 hours) while accepting your own DRM-free imports. It costs $14.99, and the trick nods back to Vib Ribbon. → UploadVR
• Echoes of Mora VR is out on Steam, in two versions. The two to three hour underwater puzzle game from a three-person German student team released after a delay caused by publisher talks that came and went. Watch the store page: the $14.99 edition is flatscreen only and the $17.99 edition covers both VR and flatscreen. → UploadVR