XR Daily: Quest Rebuilds Window Management

Horizon OS 2.9 Rebuilds Quest’s Windows, Then Brings Back the Old Homes

Meta’s Public Test Channel is now shipping Horizon OS 2.9 (v209), and its headline change is a rebuild of 2D window management that Meta codenamed Display Evo. The old system was a tablet-style dock and a restrictive triple-monitor layout. Display Evo removes the dock: windows open spatially around you, group when you drag their edges close, and fold into a “Stack” you flip through like a deck of cards. A new Window Manager in Quick Settings lists every open 2D window in one place, which is a clear move toward Android XR’s model, where spatial windows live in a single roster instead of scattered around the room.

Two details point at hardware Meta has not shipped yet. The redesigned Control Bars now have a dedicated grab handle and separated buttons, a layout built around the gaze-and-pinch input coming with Meta VR Glasses. The standalone “Anchor” option is gone too, folded into Magnetism, the wall-snapping behavior from Horizon OS 2.1. For a headset that ships without a controller, window handling and surface anchoring are not polish, they are the product.

The update also undoes an old complaint. Horizon OS 2.9 adds a Classic Environments submenu in the Home Editor, restoring pre-v81 rooms ported to the Horizon Engine with Loft’s free locomotion. The launch pair is Desert Terrace, the Quest 2 default, and Space Station, from the original Quest in April 2020. Dataminer Nori has found many more in active development channels, so expect a rolling release.

→ UploadVR: Quest PTC Overhauls Window Management & Brings Back Classic Home Environments

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Titanfall 2 Arrives in VR, Wall Running and All

Titanfall 2, the 2016 movement shooter that still has a daily player base a decade on, now runs in VR through a free conversion by modder CircuitLord. The mod adds head tracking, weapon aiming, mech weapon controls, and manual reloading across the entire weapon roster, including gesture-based reloads for weapons like the Wingman. It installs through CircuitLord’s own installer, the base game is currently 85 percent off, and it covers only the single-player campaign so far.

The technical interest here is control fidelity, not novelty. Titanfall 2 is defined by wall running, double jumps, slides, and grappling hooks, and a straight camera swap would break all of it, because your hands and your aim have to stay independent of the direction your character moves. Reworking every weapon for tracked hands is the part most mods skip. The catch is motion sickness: the movement exceeds a normal flatscreen shooter, and snap turning only does so much when you are whipping through the air on a grapple. The wider pattern behind conversions like this is covered in why VR’s next big games are modded, not published.

→ Road to VR: Titanfall 2 VR Mod Brings the Legendary Movement Shooter to VR

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RBF Nodes Brings Studio Rigging Math to Blender

Brave Rabbit released RBF Nodes, an add-on that brings radial basis function solvers to Blender as a node setup. RBFs have been standard in character rigging at large studios for a specific reason: Blender’s stock drivers handle one input driving one output well, but shoulders, hips, and faces need several inputs to blend several outputs smoothly. With RBF Nodes you define inputs and outputs, set a handful of key poses, and the solver interpolates between them, covering corrective shapes at tricky joints, facial rigs that blend multiple shapes at once, and even Shader or Geometry Node parameters driven from a transform, without helper bones or long expression stacks.

It needs Blender 4.2 or later, and a free runtime ships with the purchase so rigs can go to clients or a render farm. The developer is upfront that RBF is meant for the point where regular drivers stop scaling. The timing matters too: the same pipeline is about to absorb 3D Gaussian Splatting as a first-class media type, with Blender 5.3 landing November 10 with native 3DGS support.

→ 80 Level: Bring RBF Solver To Your Blender Rigs

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Endless Smoke Built From a Space Colonization Solver

Karlis Stigis, a 3D and motion designer in Nuremberg, published a breakdown of a looping smoke effect whose interior branches and bursts like a circulatory system. The branching geometry comes from a space colonization algorithm, the 2007 method by Adam Runions, Brendan Lane, and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz that models tree growth by having active points search for unused neighbors, connect to the closest proposing parent, then advance. Stigis adapted it to connect existing points rather than generate new growth positions from averaged attraction directions, using an Entagma VEX tutorial as the starting point.

From there the work is mapping growth into simulation inputs: path directions become velocity, selected emission points supply density, and Houdini’s Pyro solver turns the network into smoke, rendered in Solaris with Karma. Point spacing in the seed volume controls how densely branches develop, which is the knob that decides whether you get a clean arterial shape or noise. The same class of algorithm generates vegetation and procedural level geometry, so it is worth reading even if you never touch smoke.

→ 80 Level: Merging Space Colonization Solver with Pyro Simulation to Create Looping Smoke Bursts

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Ninja Theory’s Layoffs Are the Other Half of Xbox’s Reset

Employees at Ninja Theory, the UK studio behind Hellblade and Hellblade II, have begun posting on LinkedIn that their roles are at risk of redundancy, a wave surfaced by former Game Developer journalist Chris Kerr. Technical Director Loong-Wei Ding, Technical Sound Designer Alessio Mellina, Senior Technical Artist Matt Le-Fevre, and others have written farewells. The reports follow Xbox saying that deals involving Ninja Theory fell through and that it had begun consulting staff about a possible closure. Headcount affected is still unclear.

The timing stings. In June, Xbox announced Senua, a Hellblade II sequel with a 2027 window for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 5, after cancelling the experimental horror project Mara to make room for it. Now nobody will say what happens to Senua. Read next to the same week’s news that Halo is moving to Activision, this is a platform owner reshuffling its first-party slate and dropping its smaller, more atmospheric bets. Mood-driven, technically ambitious games are what translates best to immersive formats, so each closure thins a skill pool XR cannot easily rebuild. The same squeeze is unpacked in why Valve and Meta are shipping while XR’s best studios shut down.

→ 80 Level: Hellblade Dev Reportedly Begins Layoffs

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GrapheneOS Fixes a Kernel Regression Android XR Should Watch

Android 17 QPR1 shipped for Pixel phones on September 15 carrying a regression in the Pixel kernel driver tree that causes stuttering, lag, and outright freezes under memory pressure, severe enough that the system kills processes for stalls. Google has not shipped a public fix, and GrapheneOS says a December 2026 date would not surprise it, so the GrapheneOS team patched the kernel itself and cut its own release.

That sounds like phone news until you recall where XR’s next platforms live. Android XR is the base for Samsung’s headset and a growing class of standalone devices, and all of them run the same mobile silicon under a harder thermal and memory ceiling than a phone, because two displays have to stay frame-locked. A driver stack that stalls under memory pressure is the one failure mode a headset cannot absorb: dropped frames on a phone are an annoyance, dropped frames in a headset are nausea. GrapheneOS matters here as a signal, because it stress-tests the update and regression-response layer that a consumer XR platform otherwise inherits untested.

→ GrapheneOS Discussion Forum: GrapheneOS has fixed the massive Android 17 QPR1 kernel performance regression

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Quick Bites

• Birdseed VR leaves Quest exclusivity and lands on SteamVR on October 8, with crossplay so Steam and Meta players share the same cozy birdwatching sessions. → UploadVR
• Ace Combat 8 is the highest-reviewed entry in the series since the PS2 era, an unusual result for a long-running flight-combat franchise. → 80 Level
• Open Season on Draymond Green is being cited as proof the VR docuseries format works when the subject is built for a camera you control. → UploadVR
• A hand-drawn industrial illustration becomes a 3D scene in Blender with Geometry Nodes and Grease Pencil, a workflow breakdown for moving 2D concept art into engine-ready geometry. → 80 Level