XR Daily: Valve Retires the Index

Valve Retires the Index, and Discounts It for the First Time

Valve has stopped producing the Index, and for the first time since the headset launched in 2019 it is on sale. Everything on the Index page is 20% off: the headset from $499 to $399.20, a replacement left controller from $149 to $119.20, and the tether cable from $129 to $103.20. Existing owners lose nothing, since Index stays supported on Steam and SteamVR.

The bundle math is awkward. The headset does not include the two SteamVR 2.0 base stations that give it 6DOF, and HTC sells those at $229 each, which puts a full kit near $1,200. That is roughly $100 less than a 1TB Steam Frame, the standalone Valve shipped last month, and $200 more than the original 2019 bundle. Our Quest 3 vs Steam Frame comparison covers where the money goes now.

The architecture is why this matters. Index was the last flagship built on outside-in lighthouse tracking, where base stations sweep the room with infrared lasers and photodiodes on the headset solve their own position. That buys sub-millimeter accuracy and scales to any number of tracked objects, at the cost of two wall-mounted boxes. Every headset that matters now uses inside-out cameras instead, so the ecosystem Index anchored is winding down.

→ Road to VR

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Xbox Builds a Lab to Port Old Games to the Browser

Asha Sharma, Xbox’s CEO, announced Xbox Labs, a small team of game makers, engineers, and scientists led by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, with a mandate to revive classics, port them to new platforms, support modders, and build in the open. The framing in her public note is the part worth reading: Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon, or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, “the latter now approaching 90% global browser support.”

That is a status report on the graphics stack this blog watches. WebGPU is the successor to WebGL that exposes modern GPU capability (compute shaders, storage buffers, explicit pipelines) through a browser API, and near-universal support turns the browser into a deployment target instead of a demo space. It is the same plumbing under WebXR, where a headset browser is the runtime. We compared what each API can actually express in WebGPU vs WebGL.

→ 80 Level

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SideQuest Kills the Cable and the Developer Account

SideQuest has been the unofficial store for Quest games since 2019, and installing it was always the worst part of using it: register as a developer, create an organization, enable developer mode, plug in USB, and hope ADB cooperates. CEO Shane Harris says the team collapsed that into signing into your Meta account and letting SideQuest connect over Bluetooth, which enables wireless ADB. You then grab the SideQuest APK in the Quest Browser, open it through the package installer, and it adds itself to your library with no unknown-sources toggle. Steam game ports install from inside the headset too, after you sign into Steam, though only existing ports are covered.

Wireless ADB matters more than the convenience. It is the same channel developers use for deploy, logcat, and on-device performance capture, so the Quest tooling loop can now start and end inside the headset. It also widens the distribution path that keeps VR’s long tail alive, which is the argument in why VR’s next big games are modded, not published.

→ Road to VR

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Mothergunship: Forge Moves to Unreal 5.7 and Learns Your Hands

Terrible Posture Games ships the “Thank You, Recruit! Update” for Mothergunship: Forge on October 15, the roguelite’s first major update in more than three years, and it is closer to a re-platforming than a content patch. The engine moves from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5.7, and two modes arrive with it: Ascension, an escalating difficulty ladder, and Daily, with fresh leaderboards and modifiers.

The consequential change is hand tracking on Quest. It is optional and auto-detected, so players can swap between hands and controllers mid-run. Meta’s VR Glasses ship without controllers and play Quest games, and every title Meta spotlighted at Connect emphasized hand-tracked schemes, a shift we unpacked in Meta’s $1,300 VR Glasses ship without a controller. Retrofitting that into a shooter built around controller-driven gun crafting is real design work: grip poses, assembly UI, and aiming feedback all need a hand-only path, and the interaction vocabulary of a 2022 build rarely survives untouched.

→ UploadVR

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A Painterly Cinematic Built Entirely Inside Unreal

Dardo Studios started Ghost Stride as a 15 to 20 second parkour demo and ended up with a full stylized short, and the pipeline is the point. Rigs were built with Control Rig and animated in Sequencer rather than authored in Maya or Blender and exported, so the character work never left the engine. Lighting runs on Lumen, and the painterly look comes from more than 60 painted keyframes, hand-drawn 2D effects, and projected paintovers layered over real-time renders.

For a studio with 60+ artists, that is a statement about iteration cost. When animation and lighting are native to the engine, a lighting change is a change, not a re-render plus a round trip through a DCC tool. Stylized rendering is also where real-time pipelines now beat offline ones, which is why the same approach keeps showing up in XR work, where every frame has to render live.

→ 80 Level

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Mystery House Comes Back, Line by Line

Guillotine Games is rebuilding Mystery House, the 1980 Apple II adventure Roberta and Ken Williams wrote, as a 3D game, and the hard problem is having almost nothing to work from. The original drew rooms as sparse black-and-white line art, so the team treats those screenshots as architectural evidence: staircase, doors, furniture, room relationships, composition. Everything else has to be invented. Their example is a pitcher in a refrigerator that was a handful of lines in 1980 and now needs a shape, a material, a scale, and an interaction.

The pipeline is modern: assets in Blender, characters through Reallusion’s Character Creator 5 into iClone 8 for lip-sync. They started on Unity HDRP and pivoted to URP, a scope decision that trades fidelity for performance headroom. Scale was the other argument, resolved in favor of intimate rooms, since mansion-sized floor plans kill the claustrophobia the original traded on. Fidelity and legibility are not the same thing, and the second one is what survived 45 years.

→ 80 Level

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Quick Bites

• GTA 6 on PC, reportedly Q1 2027: GamesBeat’s four anonymous sources put the PC version in the first quarter of 2027, months after the November 19 console launch, against the 19-month gap GTA 5 took. → 80 Level
• Metro 2039 pre-orders open: the post-apocalyptic FPS is taking orders ahead of launch. → 80 Level
• 19 free Halloween mocap animations: a free motion capture pack for anyone blocking out creature animation this month. → 80 Level
• Per-object undo in Blender: an add-on that keeps up to 10,000 undo steps per object independently, useful when one prop keeps eating your history. → 80 Level