XR Daily: An Open Headset With Two Brains

Vector Gear Gives Tracking Its Own Chip

Walker Industries has opened a Kickstarter for Vector Gear, a standalone headset from a small team in Japan, and the spec sheet reads like a community wishlist: two 2160 x 2160 LCD panels at 90 Hz, automatic IPD, eye and mouth tracking, inside-out tracked controllers, an 85 Wh silicon battery, and a promise that the hardware and software both get open sourced. Resolution sits in the same ballpark as Quest 3 and Steam Frame, so the pitch is not pixel count. It is control.

The architecture is the interesting part. Vector Gear runs a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with 8 GB of RAM for applications and a separate Rockchip RK3588S with another 8 GB dedicated to SLAM and face tracking. Each controller carries its own RK3576, which is why the controllers track themselves from cameras rather than depending on the headset. Splitting tracking onto its own chip follows the argument phones settled with sensor hubs: pose estimation runs on a fixed cadence, a game cannot starve it during a heavy frame, and the tracking island stays awake while the main SoC sleeps. The team wrote its own tracking, AstroSLAM, and its own face tracker, Shinra Meisin, which streams over OSC for VRChat.

The software is YuukOS, an Arch-based XR distribution with a spatial layer called XRUIOS, a Monado driver still in progress, and FEX plus Proton for x86 software. That is a lot of ambition for a Kickstarter. Renders and dev boards are not shippable headsets, the SteamVR path depends on unfinished Monado work, and Lighthouse support is still being considered. For the baseline these specs are judged against, see how Quest 3 and Steam Frame compare.

→ The Ghost Howls

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Owlchemy Brings Job Simulator to a Pair of Shades

Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned studio behind Job Simulator, revealed Hyper Visor as a launch title for XREAL Aura, the first pair of see-through AR glasses running Android XR. Aura costs $1,279 for 256 GB with 12 GB of RAM and $1,499 for 512 GB with 16 GB, and it is in pre-order with no shipping date.

The launch catalog is the story. Google’s own studio is putting five titles on the device: Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Dimensional Double Shift, Inside [JOB] and Hyper Visor, the last at $1.99. Hyper Visor turns the room into an arcade with eight levels, hand-tracked energy streams and bosses. CEO Andrew Eiche calls it more 2D-based than a fully immersive game, built to meet players where they are, and names the form factor as the real barrier: shades are less intimidating than a headset.

That choice is rational. See-through glasses present a far smaller field of view than a VR headset, so keeping the action in a window in front of the user is safer than expecting peripheral immersion. For the platform background, see what Android XR actually is.

→ Road to VR

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Alibaba Puts Eye Tracking in $490 Glasses

Alibaba announced the Qwen N1 series in Hangzhou. The base N1 drops the display and competes with Ray-Ban Meta on camera and battery: 50 MP stills, 4K video, nine hours of music streaming, plus deep hooks into Alipay and Taobao. The N1 Pro adds the part worth watching, a 1.7 mm camera per eye for eye tracking with a claimed error under one degree.

That changes what the glasses can know. Head pose tells an assistant where you are facing; gaze tells it what you mean, so a question about “this” resolves to the thing you are actually looking at. Alibaba also uses iris recognition to authorize Alipay payments, and a sensor in the nose bridge measures temperature and heart rate.

The Pro costs 3,499 yuan (about $490), discounted to 2,600 yuan (about $390) at launch. The catch is twofold. There is no third-party developer access yet, which caps this at whatever Alibaba ships, and gaze is the least fakeable interest signal a person emits. For how the same sensing works in headsets, see how VR eye tracking works.

→ The Ghost Howls

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Tiling Noise, and Why Seamless Textures Matter

Catlike Coding published the ninth entry in its procedural GPU patterns series, on tiling, using Godot 4.7. The setup is value noise with derivatives, and the problem is a torus: UV coordinates run 0 to 1, so the pattern tears at the seam where they meet.

The writeup explains why value noise is harder to tile than hash noise. Hash noise can wrap for free by taking the fractional part of the UV, because its seams are part of the look. Value noise interpolates between lattice points, so tiling means wrapping the lattice itself. At frequency 4 the coordinate sequence is 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and the block pairs are (0,1), (1,2), (2,3), (3,4); the last pair has to become (3,0), which means adjusting both lattice coordinates. The result tiles across a 3 x 3 region, breaks at 5 x 5, and needs a whole number frequency.

Why care? Procedural patterns trade ALU for memory, and memory bandwidth is the resource XR headsets are shortest on, as covered in why next-gen headsets render at a quarter of their resolution. Knowing where the tiling trick stops working is what lets you choose between the two.

→ Catlike Coding

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Bluey’s 2D Look Is a Rendering Problem

Gameloft Brisbane explained how Bluey’s Happy Snaps recreates a hand-drawn show inside a free-roaming 3D game, and the answer is not a toon shader. The characters are layered, camera-facing 2D planes rigged across eight viewing angles, so animators can pose one angle and copy it to the rest. Modeling and skeletons happen in Maya, rigging in Unreal Engine 5’s Control Rig.

The texture work is the clever part. The team used signed distance fields for the flat vector look while saving a large amount of texture memory, with geometry and SDF flipbooks for hands, feet and mouths shared across characters. Eyes are pure shader, SDF bezier curves borrowing from Inigo Quilez, with blinks and eye darts driven procedurally or hand-authored. Outlines needed a custom shading model that simulates inverse hulls in real time at constant thickness regardless of distance, since the show’s outlines never thin out. The game is unlit, so value and color had to be hand-painted to stay readable.

A billboard that must look correct from any angle, in a world the player can walk around, is the same constraint stylized avatars face in social VR, and SDF texturing matters more on standalone hardware.

→ 80 Level

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HézFX Rebuilds Muscle Simulation After Ziva

Shirzad Bahrami, a senior technical animator at Activision Blizzard, showed HézFX, a muscle simulation plug-in for Maya and 3ds Max, and opened a limited Maya beta. The demo puts it beside Ziva VFX on the same skeleton, which is a pointed comparison: Unity canceled Ziva, DNEG now holds an exclusive license, and most studios lost an obvious path for tissue simulation.

HézFX includes density painting for areas that need more deformation resolution, proximity painting, and automatic endpoint finding for muscle fiber directions. The detail that matters is contraction. A muscle does not fire all at once; it activates along its fibers and in the belly, and the clip Bahrami shared focuses on exactly that. The 3ds Max build already has more than ten active testers.

For XR the relevance is avatars. Shoulders, necks and faces are where rigid skinning falls apart, and social VR still ships mostly rigid characters. No release date yet, and the Maya test is invite-only.

→ 80 Level

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Quick Bites

• FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR leaves early access at $29.99, adding first-person ejections, bHaptics support and a rebuilt multiplayer lobby. → UploadVR
• A free Blender add-on thins hair meshes at the tips, which is the difference between a broom and a strand. → 80 Level
• Fading Light VR brings zombie hordes to Quest next month. → UploadVR
• Sol Protocol, a co-op space adventure, hits PC VR in November with a demo available now. → UploadVR
• Orisuji is a maze you solve by physically folding your phone, which turns the device into the controller. → App Store