XR Daily: The Memory Crunch Reaches XR

PS6 Memory Alone Reportedly Costs More Than $680

Kepler_L2, the hardware leaker whose earlier PlayStation claims have held up, posted on NeoGAF that RAM and NAND for the PS6 will cost over $680 on their own. That puts his bill of materials estimate near $1,000, up from $760 in March. Eurogamer picked the thread up, and the framing matters: the reply he was answering argued that a 20 to 30 percent error could be absorbed by platform subsidies, and his answer was that memory is the subsidy problem.

Memory makers have been steering DRAM supply toward AI datacenter customers, and prices have climbed far enough that some RAM configurations cost more than a modern GPU. Nikkei reported in April that the shortage should persist into next year and probably longer. Sony has already pushed the PS6 to 2028 or 2029.

An XR reader should care because headsets are memory consumers with the same supply chain and none of the console volume. Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat has said the situation was worse than the team expected and that Steam Machine pricing took a heavy hit from it. If a $1,000 console bill of materials is the new normal, a $500 standalone headset is the first thing to disappear from a roadmap, and the Steam Frame’s spec sheet was already priced like a premium product before this squeeze.

→ 80 Level

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Apple Immersive Gets Its First Horror Film, Directed by Ti West

Remnants is now in the Apple TV app and it is the first horror entry in Apple Immersive. Ti West, who made The House of the Devil, X, Pearl and MaXXXine, shot a 19th century London ghost story that runs about 24 minutes in 180 degree video. You are not a character. You watch a woman named Eleanor arrive at a haunted castle, and the camera decides where you stand.

The constraint is the interesting part. UploadVR’s review notes the shot grammar is closer to traditional film than to typical immersive video: extreme close ups, cuts between dialogue, bird’s eye views from inside and outside the building. Early on the cuts feel like they belong to the director, then they start to feel like a trap. Because you cannot choose your vantage point, the experience strips out the small agency passive 180 video usually leaves you.

Immersive video has spent two years proving it can put you in a stadium. Remnants tests the opposite claim: that a fixed frame, edited like cinema, can carry tension better than a free look camera. For spatial storytellers the lesson is that 180 degrees is a frame with rules, and cutting inside it is a language.

→ UploadVR

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Virtuix Becomes a Meta Reseller, Sells Treadmills With Quests

Virtuix is now an official Meta reseller, so you can buy an Omni One treadmill with a Quest 3 or 3S in one order. The math: $2,595 for the treadmill, plus $599 for a Quest 3 or $349 for a 3S, plus $49 for the PC VR Bluetooth adapter. Omni One Core, for people who already own a headset, is $2,495.

The Quest version shipped in June and now claims compatibility with more than 75 released or upcoming Quest games and over 100 PC VR titles. Virtuix says sales are up roughly threefold year over year since that launch. The “Peloton for gamers” pitch is doing real work, because a treadmill is a fitness purchase with a game attached.

Distribution is the actual news. An omni directional treadmill is a large, single purpose object most people will never see in a store, and bundling it with the headset removes the “which headset do I need” question. Locomotion hardware has always fought the comfort problem, which is why comfort keeps deciding which VR ideas ship, and a bundle bets that the remaining friction is logistics rather than nausea.

→ UploadVR

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Supernatural Relaunches as an Independent Studio, In Early Access

Supernatural returns to the Quest store in Early Access “soon,” built by Supernatural Health, the independent company that took the app over after Meta put it into maintenance mode in January 2026. The team is 15 people and the coaches are back.

The feature list targets people with streaks to protect. Workout history carries over, including points, streaks, favorites and badges, which was the loudest complaint when the service went quiet. Early Access opens with thousands of workouts, weekly additions and new environments. Collectible gear is new for the app: Founding Members get a custom bat, where previously every user had the same one. A multiplayer workout mode and a companion mobile app are on the roadmap.

Pricing is $20 per month or $200 per year, with $180 for the first year for Founding Members who register before Early Access opens. That window closing on launch day is a clean conversion deadline, and the relaunch needs committed subscribers rather than curious ones. Supernatural is the rare case of a first party studio spun back out instead of shut, which fits the pattern behind why Valve and Meta ship while XR studios close.

→ UploadVR

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Netflix’s VMAF Picked Up New Models, and Streaming XR Leans on It

Netflix’s VMAF repository hit Hacker News this week after a June release most people missed: a new set of VMAF v1 models. VMAF, Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion, is the Emmy winning perceptual quality metric Netflix developed, and it ships as libvmaf, a standalone C library with a Python wrapper for training custom models. The library also implements PSNR, PSNR-HVS, SSIM, MS-SSIM and CIEDE2000.

The method is a fusion model, not a single measurement. It combines elementary metrics with a learned model trained on subjective human scores, so its output tracks what viewers report rather than what a pixel difference says. That is why encoders tune against it: older metrics punish compression choices humans do not notice and forgive artifacts they do. A NEG mode handles codec evaluation with a no enhancement gain model, so a filter that sharpens the image cannot buy back quality it did not preserve. Recent releases are SIMD optimised for AVX2 and AVX-512.

For XR the relevance is direct. Every wireless PC VR setup, every cloud rendered frame and every immersive video stream is a compression decision made under a latency budget, and the metric you optimise decides which artifacts survive. A headset stream is judged on a screen inches from the eye, where blocking that a television forgives is obvious. VMAF models trained on film and television are a starting point, not an answer, and the refresh is a reminder that the codec layer under streaming XR is still moving.

→ Netflix VMAF on GitHub

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Quick Bites

• TexBridge automates Substance Painter to Unreal: Moss3D’s tool reimports maps, builds a Material Instance per texture set, applies per map type compression and sRGB, and converts OpenGL normals to DirectX. → 80 Level
• Parin, a 2D engine for D: a code driven engine between raylib and Godot, with animation and pathfinding helpers included. → GitHub
• GOLF+ spins putting into its own app: a new course plus a separate immersive putting experience, a bet that one mechanic can carry a product. → UploadVR
• Fabula Rasa brings improv to Quest in November: an interactive experience built around audience suggestions rather than scripted branches. → UploadVR