XR Daily: Meta Puts Windows Around Android Apps

Meta Gives 2D Android Apps a Spatial Window Layer

The quiet problem with Horizon OS is that a normal Android app is still a flat tablet panel. Anything with floating UI had to be rebuilt with the Spatial SDK, a new activity model and render path for what is often a two week feature. Meta used Connect 2026 to ship three SDKs that attack that from different angles.

The Meta VR Layout SDK is the one that matters. It lets a standard Jetpack Compose or React Native app add spatial components and extra windows around its main window while the app itself stays non-immersive, keeps its existing activity and UI architecture, and coexists with other open apps. The demos show a main panel with satellite cards floating beside it, roughly the window grammar visionOS has had since 2024. The NBA app is one of the first to use it.

The limits are specific. Layout SDK places windows, it cannot spawn 3D objects or take over the environment, so anything volumetric still needs the Spatial SDK. Full support requires Horizon OS 2.7 or later, and on older builds each spatial component falls back to its configured non-spatial behavior.

The Gaze SDK answers a related issue: Meta VR Glasses default to look and pinch, and custom Compose or Android Views components can be misclassified by eye and hand tracking, so the SDK lets a developer hand the runtime layout hints and customize hover behavior. It is early access, needs 2.7, and cannot ship until it graduates. The Meta VR UI Set SDK is a Compose design system covering color schemes, typography, icons, dimensions and interaction feedback, the successor to the Horizon OS UI Set, and Meta says it is optimized to be implemented by an AI coding agent, which says something about who they expect to do the porting.

The timing is the story. Meta VR Glasses are due in 2027, and most of the app library that sells them will be phone and tablet software that has never drawn a spatial window. A Compose library gets those apps across without asking Android developers to learn a graphics runtime, and it puts Horizon OS on the same footing as the rest of Android XR. Disney+ is the proof point: its Quest app gets a November overhaul with 3D media and several visionOS environments.

→ UploadVR

---

Fallout: New Vegas Gets Real Lights, Sixteen Years Later

Kim2091 has released a path traced build of Fallout: New Vegas on NVIDIA RTX Remix, timed to the game’s 16th birthday. The feature list reads like a renderer replacement: a new render path, physically based sky with atmosphere, volumetric clouds, stars and a moon that follow the in-game clock, PBR materials with parallax mapping, and mod compatibility preserved.

The lighting change is the part worth understanding. Every engine light becomes a real light, including lights behind the camera and lights that move, so muzzle flashes, NPC torches and the Pip-Boy lamp all cast soft shadows and reflections. In the original Gamebryo engine those were largely faked or baked, which is why the world goes flat the moment a light source moves. Turning them into sampled emitters is also where the cost goes: path traced shadows from a moving muzzle flash mean the denoiser works on a scene that changes every frame.

The rest is texture adjacent. A physically based sky that blends with the game’s weather state, and recognizes mod added weather by type, means the sky shader reads the same state the gameplay scripts do. The Pip-Boy stops being a frozen sepia screenshot: the world stays live behind it and behind the barter and container menus, with a simulated CRT glass layer. It is still a work in progress, with untested DLCs and weather presets not yet configured for DLC worldspaces.

Why this belongs on an XR site: games like this are what people load into a headset with a VR mod, and what breaks immersion in VR is rarely polycount. It is lighting authored for a camera that never moves. Real time emitters and reflections are what let a 2008 world survive being walked through at human scale, the same argument behind why mods carry so much of VR’s release schedule.

→ 80 Level

---

Super Mario 64 as a Diorama on Your Table

Michael Steil published diorama64, a Vision Pro port of Super Mario 64 that renders each level as a living diorama on your real table. You hold a controller and play, but the camera is your head: lean in to look closer, walk around the table to see Mario from the side, and at the largest scale the level grows until you are standing inside it.

The stack shows how far the decompilation scene has come. The game code comes from the SM64 decompilation project and sm64coopdx, the textures from SM64 Reloaded by GhostlyDark and the Render96 HD pack by pokeheadroom, and the models from Render96 plus SwagSkeleton95’s replacements. All of it is community work, and all of it is what makes a 1996 game hold up three feet from your face.

The engineering question is what “the camera is your head” costs. A diorama view renders a game whose entire camera system assumes one moving viewpoint, then hands pose tracking to a viewer who moves independently, so projection and near plane are set by where you stand relative to a tracked table anchor. Steil notes the captures are the headset’s full field of view, so the diorama occupies a modest slice of the frame, which is the honest version of what tabletop mixed reality looks like today.

The legal framing is pointed. Steil quotes Xbox CEO Asha Sharma saying games are being “rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support”. He then counters with Nintendo’s DMCA takedowns against the Super Mario 64 PC port in 2020 and its Yuzu lawsuit in 2024, and asks whether Nintendo could be more like Microsoft.

→ pagetable.com

---

Virtuix Becomes a Meta Reseller, Bundles the Treadmill With a Quest

Virtuix now sells through Meta as an official reseller, offering Omni One bundles with a Quest 3 or 3S. The treadmill alone is $2,595, the Quest 3 bundle adds $599, the 3S bundle adds $349, and a $49 Bluetooth adapter opens PC VR. Omni One Core, for people who already own a headset and controllers, is $2,495.

The numbers behind the deal are the interesting part. Omni One for Quest launched in June, the treadmill works with more than 75 released and upcoming Quest games plus over 100 PC VR titles, and Virtuix says sales are up roughly 3x year over year since that release. Bundling fixes a distribution problem, since the treadmill is useless without the headset and one checkout removes the step where a curious buyer stalls. The catch is unchanged: a kit near $3,000 that needs floor space and only works with games implementing its locomotion model is a fitness and arcade product, which is what the “Peloton for gamers” pitch admits.

→ UploadVR

---

VMAF v1 Is the Metric Your Streaming Pipeline Should Be Using

Netflix’s VMAF repository hit the Hacker News front page this week, a good excuse to look at what the library does now. VMAF is an Emmy winning full reference perceptual quality metric that fuses several elementary measurements into a score tracking how humans rate a compressed frame, shipped as the libvmaf C library plus a Python wrapper for training custom models. The same package implements PSNR, PSNR-HVS, SSIM, MS-SSIM and CIEDE2000. Netflix shipped a new v1 model generation in June, with the older v0 models still documented for reproducing old results.

Two details matter for anyone encoding video for a headset. First, libvmaf includes CAMBI, a contrast aware multiscale banding detector. Banding is the artifact PSNR is worst at catching and the one viewers notice most on dark gradients, and dark gradients across a wide field of view are exactly what micro-OLED near-eye displays produce. If a starfield looks stepped in a headset and clean on a monitor, CAMBI explains why. Second, VMAF is frame level and full reference, the wrong shape for foveated encoding: once the fovea is encoded at one quality and the periphery at another, a whole-frame score hides the only thing you care about. Teams working on it compute per region scores weighted by gaze probability, the video equivalent of the per container resolution decisions showing up in XR runtimes, the same math as why headsets render below native resolution.

→ GitHub

---

Quick Bites

• Titan Isles adds a fifth exo suit, Cage, with anti-gravity rotors, laser-guided homing rockets and charged power shots, plus a new encounter in the seventh campaign. Free update. → UploadVR
• Halloween 2026 roundup: spooky themed updates and in-game events across Quest and PC VR. → UploadVR
• Loony Laps brings its kart racing to Quest in December, with preorders open now. → UploadVR
• Shrek 2 Remastered gets a November release date and a GTA 6 style trailer, which is a sentence about the current state of game marketing. → 80 Level