XR Daily: Pico's Vision Pro Rival Delayed

Pico Pushes Its Vision Pro Rival to Q4

Pico’s next flagship, the Apple Vision Pro competitor formerly known as Project Swan, has slipped. The ByteDance subsidiary was set to reveal the newly named Pico Space Pro in Beijing on September 2, but it has now pushed both the reveal and the release to Q4 2026.

The official reason, translated from the original Chinese, is a “major upgrade to the software experience.” Pico says the hardware and software had reached a high level of completion, but that during final experience verification the team saw an opportunity worth delaying for. In the meantime, it is expanding the Global Early Access Program and sending pre-production units to external testers.

The spec sheet we expected to see finalized at the event remains tantalizing: microOLED displays at 4,000 pixels per inch and an average of roughly 40 pixels per degree. A slip is rarely good news, but a software-driven delay on a premium headset reads as Pico trying to dodge the “great hardware, thin software” criticism that has followed high-end headsets.

→ Road to VR

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Into the Radius 2 Hits PSVR 2 on September 24

CM Games’ survival shooter Into the Radius 2 arrives on PSVR 2 on September 24, hot on the heels of the full version’s Quest launch on August 27.

The PSVR 2 release ships with the complete single-player campaign: a fully voiced story with 10 main quests, 178 side missions, and five Security Levels across three main locations and two sub-locations. The arsenal spans over 50 firearms across 25 weapon types, and like the original you maintain your guns in the field with cleaning and servicing so the front end keeps going bang.

Two-player co-op is slated for Q4 2026. CM Games also adapted the game for PSVR 2 Sense controller haptics, so weapon handling, reloads, and even misfires carry tactile feedback. If you skipped the original, this is the most complete entry point yet for one of VR’s tensest shooters.

→ Road to VR

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The Witcher 3 Gets a Full Remaster, Free for Owners

CD Projekt Red announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered at Gamescom Opening Night Live. It launches September 29 as a free upgrade for existing owners on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and it marks the game’s debut on Nintendo Switch 2.

This is more than a texture pass. CDPR is reworking combat with a new camera, targeting system, and animations, and it is revisiting character progression, movement, and equipment customization. The visual upgrades include new textures and improved rendering, with denser foliage and lighting throughout.

It is a big commitment coming just four years after the last next-gen update. Reworking core systems in a 2015 game signals more than a resolution bump, and it sets up the Witcher 3 audience nicely ahead of The Witcher 4’s 2028 window.

→ 80 Level

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Softie Collision System Brings Squishy Physics to Geometry Nodes

Gurgen Aloian’s Softie Collision System brings real-time, simulation-free collision to Blender through Geometry Nodes. First featured back in June, it is now a purchasable product with an accompanying tutorial.

The system fakes collisions using Geometry Nodes rather than running a simulation, so you get squishy deformations like spheres bumping into objects or a hand grabbing a soft prop without lattices, shape keys, or sim baking. An Object Hardness slider controls how soft or stiff the contact feels, and it supports multiple collision objects plus self-collisions.

Performance is the headline. Simple multi-object setups calculate in under 10ms on an i7-14700F, which keeps the viewport responsive. It needs Blender 5.1 or newer and works best with simple manifold objects. Deep penetrations can break the raycast vectors, so it is built for surface deformations rather than full destruction.

→ 80 Level

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Free Patterned Glass Compositor for Blender

3D artist Bao-Thinh Dinh released the Patterned Glass Compositor, a free Blender tool for glass distortion and refraction that skips heavy glass geometry and long render times entirely.

It ships with a Patterned Glass Node Group and five sample patterns (vertical, horizontal, square, circular wave, and dot), and you can plug in any grayscale texture to define custom glass shapes. An interactive Circle Mask node ties a mask to a 3D Empty, so you can position and scale it directly in the viewport.

The tool works in both Eevee and Cycles on Blender 5.2 and later, and it can be applied in post-production to pre-rendered images or video. For stylized glass, refraction effects, and motion graphics, it is a quick win that costs nothing.

→ 80 Level

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Metro 2039 Goes Darker, and the Protagonist Finally Speaks

4A Games showed a new gameplay trailer for Metro 2039 at Gamescom, and it leans harder into the series’ claustrophobic dread. The Renegade trailer follows “The Stranger,” a fully voiced protagonist replacing Artyom, as he infiltrates a Moscow controlled by the authoritarian Novoreich regime.

The footage moves between the crowded Sevastopolskaya station, cramped underground facilities, and the deadly irradiated surface. The Stranger is a former Spartan haunted by violent waking nightmares, and the game is set four years after Metro Exodus and roughly 25 years after the nuclear war.

The trailer also showcases the latest evolution of 4A’s proprietary engine. For a series defined by its rendering of light, dust, and decay, the engine work is as much the story as the plot.

→ 80 Level

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Quick Bites

• Real VR Fishing “US South” DLC launches on Quest and Steam with 7 new locations, new species, and a sharper image-upscaling pipeline. → UploadVR
• Payday: Aces High for VR ships with six heists and five difficulty levels, playable stealth or loud, per CCO Erik Odeldahl. → UploadVR
• Alien Shaman CG character breakdown walks through a full pipeline in ZBrush, Mari, and Maya. → 80 Level
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 2 gets an inside look at its VFX work. → 80 Level