XR Daily: Astro Bot Jumps From PSVR to Quest

An AI-Assisted PS4 Emulator Puts Astro Bot on Quest 3

Astro Bot Rescue Mission, the 2018 PSVR platformer Sony never brought to PSVR 2, now runs on Quest 3 and PC VR. Modder Bigmak94 shipped the conversion, nicknamed AstroQuest, by pointing the Claude AI agent at shadPS4, the open-source PlayStation 4 emulator, and having it write the changes that turn a flatscreen PS4 render into a stereo, tracked frame.

The mod ships as two builds. One is native: you sideload it on Quest 3 and play on-device. The other targets PC VR and streams to any headset. Both add 6DOF headset tracking, native controller mapping, and immersive spatial audio, and both still require a copy of the game dumped from a console. Players can also pair a DualSense to stand in for the PS4 pad, with the proper buttons, sticks, touchpad, motion sensors, rumble and light bar all mapped.

The catch is performance. Bigmak94 says the Quest 3’s mobile GPU is pushed to its limits, and the standalone build renders at lower resolution and fidelity than either the original PS4 release or the PC VR path. That tradeoff is the familiar one for anyone who has tried to move a console-era render target onto a standalone headset.

The interesting shift is the workflow. Decompilation and emulator modding used to demand months of manual reverse engineering, and the effort rarely lined up with the reward for a single abandoned title. An agent that can read a codebase and emit the VR-side changes lowers that entry cost enough that a modder can clear several games in a season. It is the same pattern behind earlier conversions of classic console titles to tracked hands and motion controls, the route covered in Dolphin XR’s Metroid Prime port. Sony left a great VR game stranded on a dead platform; modders are deciding that is a solvable problem.

→ Road to VR: PSVR Exclusive Astro Bot Rescue Mission Running on Quest 3

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Meta VR Glasses’ Narrow FOV Is Now Something You Can Try Before Buying

Meta’s VR Glasses sell a specific pitch: high pixel density micro-OLED panels for productivity and casual content in a package that weighs around 100 g on-head. The cost is field of view, and Road to VR’s own hands-on could not describe it any better than “see it to believe it.” So Duuro Plays built a WebXR app you can open in Quest 3’s own browser, then toggle between Quest 3’s FOV and the reported VR Glasses FOV.

The numbers make the gap concrete. Quest 3 gives 110° horizontal by 96° vertical, roughly 119° diagonal. Meta VR Glasses give 70° horizontal by 66° vertical, roughly 88° diagonal. Quest 3 gets its wider view from comparatively bulky pancake lenses placed about 40 mm off large LCD panels, which along with battery and compute brings the whole package to 515 g. VR Glasses are tethered, cost $1,300, and arrive in Spring 2027.

Road to VR also flags a mistake in the tool’s FAQ: it claims VR Glasses use silicon carbide waveguides, when they actually use smaller pancake lenses with micro-OLED panels. That description belongs to Meta’s Orion AR prototype. It is a useful reminder that in this form factor the optics stack, not the display, is where the design fights are won. Meta published its own developer FOV tool as well. For the design argument behind shipping the headset without a controller at all, see Meta’s controller-free VR Glasses.

→ Road to VR: This App Lets You Actually Experience Meta VR Glasses’ Field of View

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Halo: Combat Evolved Now Runs in a Browser Tab

Developer Mitchell Hynes published a browser build of the 2001 Halo: Combat Evolved, with working split-screen co-op and multiplayer for up to 128 players. He says that within five hours, roughly 20,000 games were played across 115 countries and territories at an average of 94 FPS. The Gearbox PC port’s Master Chief model is absent, and Hynes notes the build does not play well on mobile devices.

The build rests on an open-source decompilation, Bnunu’s project, itself a fork of punpckhdq’s Halo decompilation, which had already been brought to Windows, Linux and Android. That lineage matters: this is not a reimplementation from scratch, it is original game code retargeted to a new runtime, with a web renderer and networking layer bolted on.

For XR, read it as a bar rather than a novelty. The browser is the delivery layer for WebXR, and WebAssembly plus WebGL and WebGPU are the same stack that ships 3D content to headsets with no install step. A 2001 Xbox shooter holding 94 FPS average in a tab, with 128-player sessions, sets a floor for what browser-delivered content can look like. Days where a headset browser is one click from a playable world are exactly the days when the install friction argument against WebXR starts to weaken.

→ 80 Level: Halo: Combat Evolved Can Now Be Played in a Browser

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Horizon+ Starts Bundling Free Game Add-Ons

Meta’s Horizon+ subscription now includes free add-ons for games, beginning with cosmetics and in-game currency for Orion Drift, the large-scale multiplayer title from the makers of Gorilla Tag. October’s two monthly games are Swarm 2, a grappling-heavy roguelike shooter, and Waltz of the Wizard, the reactive sandbox where you speak to NPCs and reshape objects. Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked and Deadly Delivery join the catalog, and subscribers get 50 percent off The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets and Red Matter 2, plus 67 percent off two Synth Riders songs.

Add-ons are the more revealing change. A monthly games catalog is a content bundle. Add-ons push the subscription into live-service territory, where the value keeps accruing in titles you already play and the churn argument gets stronger. Meta can add and remove catalog titles at any time, but a cosmetic unlock granted to your account is stickier.

It also reads as a hedge. With several VR studios shuttering this year and DLC release cadences slowing, a recurring revenue floor gives both Meta and developers a way to fund content that a one-time purchase used to carry. The economics that pushed studios under are unpacked in why Valve and Meta are shipping while XR’s best studios shut down.

→ UploadVR: Quest’s Horizon+ Subscription Now Offers Free Add-Ons For Games

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Jagex Builds Its Next RuneScape on Unreal Engine

At RuneFest in Birmingham, Jagex announced a fourth RuneScape MMO, working title RuneScape 4, powered by Unreal Engine. It is early in development and, by the studio’s own words, still a few years away. The game returns to Gielinor in the Sixth Age, years after Dragonwilds and the destruction of the Dragon Queen Kuldra, with the story opening in Ashenfall. Jagex says it wants to combine lessons from building Dragonwilds with the community co-development it learned across RuneScape and Old School.

The engine choice is the story. A 25-year-old MMO franchise moving its next flagship onto Unreal is a bet on a shared rendering, animation and tooling stack rather than a bespoke client, and it lines the project up with the artist and environment pipelines most studios already staff for. It also puts a long-lived franchise on a roadmap it does not control, which is the standing trade of adopting a commercial engine for a decade-long service game.

Jagex also announced an animated adaptation of Gielinor’s characters and stories with Charlie White, better known as MoistCr1TiKaL, and LA production company Lyrical Media, plus new content across RuneScape, Old School RuneScape and Dragonwilds.

→ 80 Level: Jagex Unveils Fourth RuneScape MMO Powered by Unreal Engine

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CatPin Brings Editable Cuts and Connectors to Blender

Separately in the 3D tooling world, Alex Sokol released CatPin, a Blender add-on for preparing models for FDM and resin printing. It splits a model into parts with matching pins and sockets, using straight or custom curved cuts, and exports the result while preserving the original mesh. Useful for figurines, statues and busts, and it supports Blender 4.2 through 5.2.

The control set is what makes it more than a boolean wrapper. Manual Cut lets you draw a line or place points for near-precise control over complex shapes, Polygonal Cut carves out a defined region, and Straight and Curved Cut cover the routine cases. Draft Mode keeps everything non-destructive and editable, while Easy Mode sets up a cut and connectors in fewer steps. The 1.0.7 update adds support for up to five connectors in a single cut, a double-sided connector, and an adaptive surface feature for cleaner cut quality, plus a mesh check for open edges.

Print-ready part splitting sounds far from real-time rendering until you remember that asset pipelines are shared. The same instinct, keeping cut geometry editable and connectors parameterized instead of baked, is what makes a sculpt usable both for a printer and for a real-time engine where those parts have to swap or deform at runtime.

→ 80 Level: Prepare Your 3D Models for Printing with This Blender Add-On

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Quick Bites

• A coffee machine rebuilds itself from its own technical drawing in a short film by creative director Ronan Mahon for Adobe, modeled from a CAD/STEP reference, textured in Substance 3D Painter and rendered in Unreal Engine, a clean look at taking CAD data to a digital twin. → 80 Level
• A lived-in stylized Viking house, broken down end to end: environment artist Tulika Roy walks through her Outstead project, and her first full hand-painted environment, across Unreal Engine, Maya, ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter. → 80 Level
• Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow brings miniature motorway management to Quest later this month, a small-scale sim worth watching on the strength of the form factor. → UploadVR
• Ten upcoming VR horror games get the roundup treatment, a useful scan of where the genre is heading into the holiday quarter. → UploadVR