XR Daily: Ultrasound to Fight VR Motion Sickness

Arm Patents Ultrasound to Fight XR Motion Sickness

Arm, the semiconductor design company behind the CPU architecture in most smartphones and XR headsets, has been granted a patent for a head-mounted system that uses low-intensity focused ultrasound to reduce motion sickness. The patent, “Method for minimising motion sickness for head-mountable extended reality,” was filed on July 24, 2023 and granted on June 16, 2026.

The system watches the visual motion in the images heading to the display. When that motion crosses a threshold that suggests a conflict with what the wearer’s balance system feels, it fires ultrasonic transducers to stimulate the vestibular system, the machinery of the inner ear that governs balance. A small visual movement to the left maps to a corresponding physical sense of leftward motion, and larger visual motion uses more acoustic radiation force. The filing also describes arrays with one or more transducers per ear and beamforming to target specific parts of the inner ear.

Why it matters: motion sickness is one of the biggest comfort barriers in XR, and today’s solutions are almost all software-side, like vignettes and fades. Arm’s approach attacks the underlying sensory mismatch directly. The catch is that this is a patent, not a product, and the filing even lists fallbacks like dimming or vignetting. There is no timeline for shipping hardware. Still, it is a clear signal of where a major silicon player thinks the comfort problem gets solved.

→ Road to VR

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Meta’s Phoenix Headset: Ultralight, Tethered, and Coming in 2027

Meta’s next high-end headset is coming into focus. Project Phoenix, first reported by The Information back in 2024, is a premium ultralight headset with an open periphery and a tethered compute and battery puck. An earlier prototype, codenamed Puffin, was described as a bulky pair of glasses weighing less than 110 grams, an opaque VR-style headset with pancake lenses and passthrough cameras.

The weight savings come from offloading both the battery and the compute to an external puck, a step beyond Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR, which only offload the battery. Phoenix drops controllers entirely in favor of eye and hand tracking with a gaze-and-pinch scheme, the input model Vision Pro introduced and that Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype later adopted. Meta reportedly targets a 2027 launch.

The strategy here is worth noting. Meta canceled La Jolla, a more direct Quest Pro successor and Vision Pro competitor, over component costs. CTO Andrew Bosworth has been explicit about the new philosophy, calling lightness premium and quoting John Carmack’s “simplicate and add lightness.” This is Meta betting on comfort over raw specs for its next flagship.

→ UploadVR

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Blender’s Cycles Gets Native Dispersion in the Principled BSDF

Blender 5.3 is turning into a strong release for both photorealism and stylized work. On the realism side, the Principled BSDF in Cycles now supports dispersion natively, so diamonds, gemstones, and prisms split light into rainbows without the custom glass shader setups artists have had to build by hand.

It is an RGB-based implementation rather than a true spectral renderer, but the results are already convincing, and Weizhen Huang’s work has been merged into the Blender 5.3 alpha builds. For non-photorealistic artists, the same release is also getting a Light Accumulation node for building custom stylized lighting.

Blender 5.3 is in alpha until September 30, with the final release expected November 17. If you work with gems, glass, or stylized lighting, this is one to grab early and test.

→ 80 Level

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Pngine: Declarative WebGPU Using S-Expressions

Hugo Daniel has spent two and a half years on pngine, a declarative format and runtime for WebGPU that describes pipelines, buffers, passes, and WGSL shaders as S-expressions mapping one to one with the WebGPU spec. The idea is a single file that captures all your WebGPU plumbing, shaders included, and that you can ship and share.

Pngine validates your configuration through WGSL reflection and spec checks, and it ships an LSP so errors and warnings surface while you type without needing a live WebGPU context. It exports to a single HTML file, a ZIP, or a PNG: the S-expressions compile to bytecode stored in a PNG chunk, with the PNG itself doubling as the preview image for what you ship. It is cross-platform, working with Rust’s wgpu and with players for Android and iOS, and the code is CC0.

For graphics programmers who want to hand someone a WebGPU experiment as a single artifact, this is a genuinely novel take on the “file that runs itself” idea.

→ Hugo Daniel

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The Witcher 4 Targets 2028

CD Projekt RED has put an approximate date on The Witcher 4. Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski announced the game is targeting 2028, describing it as the company’s “biggest, boldest, and most ambitious game.” This installment stars Ciri as the protagonist.

In the meantime, a Witcher 3: Wild Hunt expansion called Songs of the Past arrives in 2027, and CDPR has said it wants to ship the entire next trilogy within six years, an aggressive cadence given how long Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 each took. Gamescom is expected to bring more news on one of the Witcher projects.

→ 80 Level

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Godot Fixes High Polling Rate Mice on Windows

Godot has fixed a long-running performance issue with high polling rate mice on Windows, landing in the recently released Godot 4.7.2. Hugo Locurcio’s progress report explains why it matters now: high polling rate here means 2 kHz and up, and 4 kHz and 8 kHz mice have become common and affordable since the early 2020s.

The problem is input latency and consistency. The USB standard’s default 125 Hz polling updates mouse position 125 times per second, every 8 milliseconds, which is too slow for 144 Hz and higher displays. Higher polling rates reduce both latency and jitter, but Godot’s Windows handling wasn’t keeping up. The article is a clear read on why a premium gaming mouse was stuttering in Godot and what the fix changes under the hood.

→ Godot Engine

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Quick Bites

• Sol Protocol sets a September release on Quest 3: the co-op space roguelike gets a date on Meta’s headset. → UploadVR
• Indie fishing sim sells 1 million copies in 2 days: a small fishing game just became a breakout hit. → 80 Level
• Marvelous Designer’s new update: artists can rip, pinch, and shape fabric like never before. → 80 Level
• Godot 3.6.3 maintenance release: a small stability release for the 3.x branch. → Godot Engine