This Week in VR: Samsung Gets a Month, Felix & Paul's Court File Opens, and the Steam Frame Gains 12 Percent

I am still waiting on an email from Valve. The headset I do not own yet got better this week anyway. Valve's notes for the latest SteamOS update on the Steam Frame list "Improved power efficiency and battery lifetime during both streaming and local gameplay, with gains of up to 12%," with a caveat that results vary by framerate and content. PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley reproduced the notes and did the arithmetic: on a headset that streams for about two hours, that is another fifteen minutes or so. The same update adds a setting that limits eye tracking to your dominant eye and takes another swing at the "Error 17" streaming failure.

Fifteen minutes. On a two-hour battery, I will take it.

Nina had the stranger Frame story. Two hobby projects got the headset's SteamOS booting on Snapdragon handhelds like the AYN Odin 2, the first of them five days after launch, and the list of services they had to switch off works as a map of which parts of that image only make sense strapped to a face.

Samsung has a month

The Korea Herald reported a Samsung official confirming a November launch for the company's Android XR glasses, and the paperwork agrees with him. Alex read the FCC grants issued September 27: eleven frame models under two FCC IDs, Wi-Fi 6E with a very low power 6 GHz mode, and "Made in Vietnam" engraved on the left temple. Eleven. For a first product, with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster as the frame partners.

They will go on sale in a California with no law about recording lights. Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1130 on September 30, and Jordan walked through what died with it: a January 1, 2028 deadline for an indicator "sufficiently prominent so that a reasonable person in the vicinity would be alerted to the capturing activity." I do not love being filmed by a stranger's sunglasses. I also have no idea how a hardware team builds to "sufficiently prominent," and now nobody has to find out.

Two studios, two sets of numbers

Mighty Coconut is cutting ten more people, its second round this year. I wrote that one Tuesday and did not enjoy it, because Walkabout Mini Golf is the VR game I have put hundreds of hours into. Lucas Martell's explanation was the plainest sentence anybody in this business wrote all week: "without a steady stream of new players coming into VR and Walkabout, the scale at which we've been operating is no longer sustainable." The next course, Escape from Planet Xylodon, still opens October 8. I will be on it that week.

Then Felix & Paul. Back in August I would not call the studio dead off a handful of LinkedIn posts. Sam went and read the court file today, and on paper it is over: bankrupt September 10, $34.5 million in liabilities, 76 buyers approached, zero binding offers. Space Explorers and a camera system built for the Moon went for $350,000 to a company formed by former executives. The part I did not see coming sits near the bottom of his piece. AREA15 is selling Interstellar Arc tickets again, every day through the end of October, and nothing in the filings says who is running it.

Muse wants your card

Meta says its Muse agent is coming to the AI glasses to buy the things you look at. Sam read the terms, which is more than most buyers will. Under the Muse Supplemental Terms of Service, a user who lets the agent pay will "bear all risk of financial loss arising from such actions," and Meta's own liability stops at $250 or whatever you paid Meta in the previous twelve months, whichever is greater. An assistant that shops for me and a contract that says the mistakes are mine. Hard pass, for now.

Two more from the glasses beat. Nina explained how Meta's Hologram avatars will animate your face from your voice alone on Ray-Ban Display, since those glasses have no camera pointed at you. Jordan sorted the fall's platforms into stores without hardware and hardware without a store. And on Sunday, Sam took apart Mark Gurman's latest on Apple: a headset codenamed N224, about four concepts under study, one of them a Meta-style compute puck, and nothing likely before late 2028.

Titanfall 2, in a headset, for free

A modder who goes by CircuitLord released a full VR conversion of Titanfall 2's campaign, and Road to VR's Scott Hayden has the rundown: head tracking, weapon aiming, Titan controls, manual reloads. Campaign only for now. It costs nothing, but you need your own copy of the game on Steam, the EA app or Xbox, and you have to be signed into the EA app. CircuitLord's installer on GitHub finds the game, sets up Northstar and the mod in a separate profile, and leaves the regular install alone. One warning before you jump in. This is a wall-running, grappling movement shooter, and if smooth locomotion has ever turned your stomach, start with short sessions.

October

On Thursday I checked our ten scariest VR games against Valve's certified list for a Frame with no PC attached, and none of the ten made it. Phasmophobia is rated Unsupported, on a build that no longer ships. If you just want something to play with the lights off, the new horror guide sorts fourteen games by headset.

Next Thursday is crowded. October 8 brings Shil, a two-tone horror puzzler, to Quest at $14.99 per its developer, and Into the Radius 2 to PS VR2 after its certification delay, on the same day as that Walkabout course. Dark Trip, an escape room set in an abandoned laboratory, follows on October 29, playable flat or in a headset. The release calendar has the rest.

Last week was keynotes. This week was paperwork: an FCC grant, a veto, a set of terms nobody reads, a trustee's report out of a Montreal court file. The paperwork told me more.