XR Daily: Mario 64 on Your Table

Super Mario 64 Becomes a Diorama on Your Table

Michael Steil, the reverse engineer behind pagetable.com, rebuilt Super Mario 64 as an augmented reality diorama on Apple Vision Pro. Each level sits on your real table, and you are the camera: lean in, walk around the table, or scale up until you are standing inside Bob-omb Battlefield. The project is called diorama64, and the source is public.

The stack is community work end to end. Game logic comes from the SM64 decompilation project and sm64coopdx, visuals from SM64 Reloaded, the Render96 HD textures and models, plus SwagSkeleton95’s character replacements. Steil supplied the spatial layer that anchors that world to a real surface and renders it from a tracked viewpoint.

A diorama is a harder rendering problem than an emulator window. The whole level is visible at once from any angle, so nothing can be culled behind the camera, and the game’s original collision and camera logic keep running as if nothing had moved. It holds up because the world is small, static and self-contained, which is the case AR handles best. The depth reconstruction underneath is covered in how passthrough works.

Steil closes with a contrast worth noting. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote that games are being “rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support,” and called that good for players. Nintendo answered the same phenomenon with a DMCA takedown against the SM64 PC port in 2020 and a lawsuit against Yuzu in 2024. The technical barrier collapsed. The legal one did not. That is the theme of why VR’s next big games are modded, not published.

→ pagetable.com

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Owlchemy Labs Builds XREAL Aura a Launch Lineup

Owlchemy Labs, the Google owned studio behind Job Simulator, announced Hyper Visor, an arcade blaster shipping as a launch title for XREAL Aura. You clear eight levels of reality fractures hidden in your room, firing an energy stream from your hands, with one boss per level. It costs $1.99.

The slate matters more than the game. Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Dimensional Double Shift and Inside [JOB] all arrive on Aura at launch, so the first consumer pair of see-through AR glasses running Android XR gets a catalog instead of a demo reel. Aura is $1,279 for 256GB with 12GB of RAM and $1,499 for 512GB with 16GB. Pre-orders are open, with no shipping date announced.

CEO Andrew Eiche is candid about the constraint. Hyper Visor is “decidedly more 2D-based” than a fully immersive game, built to meet players where they are, because the headset form factor has been the biggest barrier to entry. Porting Job Simulator, a game built almost entirely on reach and scale inside a tracked volume, is the real test of what a narrower field of view and no occlusion can carry. For platform background, see what Android XR is.

→ Road to VR

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Gaussian Splatting Now Fits in a Browser Tab

Antoine MoPa’s splatting-rs turns a handful of phone photos into a Gaussian splat inside a browser tab. Drop in six to twelve images and it estimates cameras, optimises the Gaussians and hands you a .ply file. The photos never leave the machine, and the 137 MB network caches after one download.

The engineering choices are the story. The browser path runs ByteDance’s Depth Anything 3 Small in WebAssembly for depth and camera estimation, then optimises on WebGPU using the project’s own WGSL rasterizer. Desktop runs three Rust crates: MapAnything from Meta on candle with Metal, the InstantSplat recipe with a wgpu rasterizer, and the small Depth Anything variant that makes the web build feasible. MapAnything weighs 4.9 GB. Depth Anything 3 Small weighs 137 MB. That gap is what moves the pipeline from a workstation into a tab.

The pose free part is the quiet win. Classic 3DGS needs a COLMAP structure from motion pass first, which is slow, brittle on object scans and the usual reason a capture session dies. InstantSplat predicts poses and a point cloud with a feed forward network instead. Two photos of a rubber duck coming out as a usable splat is that idea working in practice, and the on device version of it is what matters for XR. Background is in Gaussian Splatting Is Eating 3D Reconstruction.

→ GitHub: splatting-rs

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Getty Images Files Chapter 11

Getty Images filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware on October 21, part of a restructuring that takes the company private. Assets and liabilities are each listed between $1 billion and $10 billion. Affiliates of the Getty family and Koch Equity Development committed up to $533 million in new equity and will own 100% of the company afterward, with up to $143 million of Koch financing supporting the process.

This is the plumbing under a lot of environment art. Getty’s library holds more than 477 million assets, and its licensing terms are what many studios’ legal reviews are built around. Getty also walked away from its Shutterstock merger after the UK competition authority’s investigation, with reporting citing debt and competition from AI generated content. A duopoly that was supposed to consolidate ended up restructuring instead.

→ 80 Level

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Half of Cyberpunk 2’s Quest Team Are Former Modders

On a CD Projekt Red livestream on October 21, Cyberpunk 2 associate game director Paweł Sasko said the quiet part out loud: “We actually hired so many modders. I would say, at this point, half of the quest team is all former modders.” He called modding a “foot-in-the-door technique and a gateway into gamedev.” The same stream covered cross platform mod support for Cyberpunk 2077 on PS5, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.

This is the hiring side of an argument this site keeps making. Modding teaches engine internals, animation state and memory budgets faster than most junior roles do, and CDPR now staffs quest design from that pool. The VR equivalent is the UEVR and Praydog crowd, retrofitting stereo rendering and motion controls onto games whose developers never planned for a headset. Half a team coming from that world says something about where the next XR engineers will come from.

→ 80 Level

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Croteam Returns to Serious Sam, and Its VR Record Comes With It

Croteam and Devolver Digital announced Serious Sam: The Third Encounter with an official teaser and a Steam page. It picks up exactly where 2002’s The Second Encounter left off, which makes it the seventh game in the series and the first mainline entry since Serious Sam 4 in 2020. Co-op is confirmed, new weapons are promised, and it is in early development.

The XR angle is the studio’s record. Croteam shipped Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, Serious Sam 3 VR and The Talos Principle VR on its own Serious Engine, years before most mid size studios attempted anything, and those were real conversions with motion controls rather than camera hacks. No VR support has been announced for The Third Encounter. But a Croteam shooter with native VR is one of the few bets left worth watching.

→ 80 Level

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Quick Bites

• Valve’s HLX project slipped out at GameSoundCon when audio designer Mike Morasky mentioned it alongside Deadlock while discussing HDR audio. 2024 datamining described HLX as a non-VR Half-Life title. → 80 Level
• Square Enix explains how Final Fantasy Resonance pushes HD-2D pixel art into cinematic territory, covering lighting, depth of field and how the diorama look survives camera moves. → 80 Level
• Sol Protocol brings co-op space adventure to PC VR in November, with a demo available now on Steam. → UploadVR
• A breakdown of layered water VFX inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender walks through the shader and simulation layers behind a stylised effect. → 80 Level