This Week in VR: XREAL and Pimax Name Prices, and the Waitlist-Only Steam Frame Hits 1 in 244 VR Headsets on Steam

$1,279. $1,399. $2,899. Three devices picked up price tags this week. The tags add up to $5,577, and you cannot hold a single one of the three yet.

The glasses

XREAL went first. Jordan had the numbers on Wednesday: AURA starts at $1,279 with 12GB of memory and 256GB of storage, $1,499 buys 16GB and 512GB, and the glasses weigh 95 grams with their own X1S coprocessor in the frame. If you live in the US, Canada, Japan or South Korea and already paid a reservation deposit, you can finish buying now. Everybody else gets "in the coming weeks," and the only ship date XREAL has put in writing is "before the holidays."

The comparison everybody ran is Meta VR Glasses at $1,299.99, which is $20.99 more and not on sale until spring. Jordan called that gap the least interesting number in the story. Fair. The number I care about is 95. My Quest 3 starts to bother me inside an hour, Elite Strap and all, and for a movie or anything casual I will take the thing I forget I am wearing.

The headset with three ship dates

Pimax announced Crystal Pro on Tuesday at $1,399. Alex went looking for when it ships and found three answers in three Pimax documents: the press release says a date comes later, the FAQ says spring 2027, the store listing says 2027. Only the listing mentions that the $1 reservation is non-refundable. The 60G AirLink kit, the foveated streaming feature Pimax built the whole launch around, is another $599, which is the price of a Quest 3. And there is no battery in the headset. It runs off a 16,000mAh pack in your pocket.

A dollar is not much to lose. I would still like the refund terms printed on the same page as the price.

The third tag is the odd one. Pico has not priced Space Pro, and its last word on timing was the fourth quarter of this year. Alex found a US reseller, Knoxlabs, taking backorders on a 16GB enterprise model at $2,899 and telling buyers the first week of February 2027. The listing has no photo. Just a grey outline where a headset should be.

One in 244, in thirteen days

Once a month Valve asks Steam users, anonymously and only if they opt in, what hardware they have connected, and it publishes the results, VR headsets included. September's table went up without a Steam Frame row, and then it changed. Alex caught the revision: of all the VR headsets the survey counted, 0.41 percent were Steam Frames. That is about one in every 244.

Read that number for what it is. Valve is selling the Frame through a reservation queue. The first purchase emails went out on September 18, in shuffled order, and that left thirteen days of the month for a headset to be bought, delivered, plugged in and counted. So this is not a sales figure, and lining it up against headsets that have been on shelves for years tells you nothing yet. What it does show is speed: Alex found that only Quest 3 gained more share in September. Nearly every Frame in that count got there in under two weeks. Mine is not one of them. I am still waiting on the email.

Whose patents those were

The headline that traveled was Push Square's: "Sony Seemingly Ends VR Ambitions by Selling Patents to Meta." Sam pulled the five assignments from the patent office and read the cover sheets. Every one of them names Sony Group Corporation, the parent company, as the seller. Sony Interactive Entertainment, the part of Sony that makes PS VR2, appears on none. The schedule behind the deal lists 419 patents, the last of which expires in 2041, and the paperwork was signed in April. It is a big sale, and it is still not the same thing as PlayStation quitting VR, a distinction that was sitting in a public database for anyone who opened it.

His other piece this week is the same kind of reading. Schneider Electric is buying PTC for $22.6 billion, and Vuforia is not named anywhere in the paperwork. Not in the announcement. Not in PTC's latest quarterly report. PTC still sells four Vuforia products and nobody has said they are going anywhere. If a factory floor near you runs on one, Sam's advice is to get the renewal terms in writing before the deal closes.

Glasses, and where you can wear them

On Monday, Norway's government said it will propose a temporary ban on using AI glasses in parks, schools, gyms and clinics. Jordan read the ministry's release and found the list of places settled and the definition of the device wide open, with three candidates that would make three different laws. In the Netherlands, Wehkamp and Hans Anders stopped selling Meta's glasses with no law telling them to.

Things to actually play

Escape from Planet Xylodon landed in Walkabout Mini Golf on Thursday, and the update underneath it brought two things the game has never had: mulligans the host sets per room, and experimental hand tracking on Quest. I have been asking for a hand-tracked putter. Now there is one and I have not tried it. That is my weekend.

Two free projects, both on GitHub, both stranger than they sound. Nina explained AstroQuest, which plays Astro Bot Rescue Mission on a Quest 3 by emulating a PS4, a PS VR and its camera, at about 30 frames a second in levels, and only from your own dump of your own copy. And I wrote up D2R VR, a mod that puts Diablo II: Resurrected in a PC VR headset four different ways. The first-person view is the clip that got passed around, and the mod's own README calls it a preview. The stranger option lays the whole game on your floor as a diorama, anywhere from tabletop size to life size.

Horizon OS v2.9 is out on Meta's Public Test Channel, the opt-in beta track. Nina went through it: windows stay where you drop them in the room, a Window Manager lists everything you have open, and the Desert Terrace and Space Station homes are back.

Halloween

Phasmophobia's Crimson Eye event started Thursday and runs to November 1. Nina put the whole month on one calendar, ten dates from Gorilla Tag's Halloween update through the end of Steam Scream V on November 2, each one checked at its source. The date I would circle is October 16. That is when VRChat's Spookality winners go on show: twelve worlds built around an 80s summer camp horror theme, every one of them required to run on Android, which is what a standalone Quest uses.

One thing that will not make it. Sega's VR House of the Dead cabinet, the one with the 85-inch front door, has its reported debut at a trade show in Orlando in the middle of November.

Next week has a Real VR Fishing Halloween update on Tuesday. After five days of price tags, I would settle for one ship date that every page agrees on.