XR Daily: Pico Space Pro Clears FCC

Pico Space Pro Appears to Clear FCC, Nearing Its Delayed Launch

ByteDance’s next headset has taken a concrete step toward shipping in the US. A new Pico device, almost certainly the upcoming Space Pro, has received FCC certification, the wireless-frequency approval required to sell anything with a radio in the American market. The listing carries label IDs 2A5NV-AA1Z0 and 2A5NV-B3110, and it lands after Pico quietly pushed the launch window back to Q4.

The specs Pico teased back in March are the kind that move the whole category forward: micro-OLED panels at 4,000 pixels per inch, a dual-chip architecture with a self-developed coprocessor for computer vision and image processing, and a main processor Pico claims delivers twice the CPU and GPU performance of the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 inside today’s Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra. It is also meant to ship with Pico OS 6 and the RealityKit-like Pico Spatial Engine, both heavy on visionOS-inspired windowing. Design details leaked in June via a public SDK, showing a headset that splits the difference between Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR, external tethered puck included. FCC certification is not a launch announcement, but it is the last big regulatory hurdle before retail.

→ UploadVR

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An LLM Reads 68000 Assembly to Port a 1993 Amiga Game to Godot

The most upvoted game-dev story on Hacker News this week is a porting story, and it is a genuinely new use of LLMs. Rabah Shihab wrote Babylonian Twins in 1993 on an Amiga 500 in Baghdad: 512KB of RAM, no hard drive, pure 68000 assembly, every sprite and scanline by hand, programmed directly against the hardware under sanctions with no internet and a few hours of electricity a day. It is believed to be the first commercial game made in Iraq, and for years almost nobody got to play it.

Three decades later the game has been rebuilt as a Definitive Edition, and this time the port was not done by hand. The 2010 iPhone port took months of nights and weekends and roughly 34,000 lines of C++. For the new version, an LLM read the original 68000 assembly and the game’s file formats, with Shihab playing the result each night and flagging what felt wrong. The original 1993 disks are free on itch.io, the Definitive Edition is on iOS and Android now, and it comes to Steam this fall. It is a concrete look at how LLMs can crack legacy code that would otherwise need a specialist and a lot of patience.

→ Babylonian Twins

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In-Browser LLM Inference Gets Faster on WebGPU

Two projects this week put the spotlight on running language models directly in the browser over WebGPU. MLC AI’s WebLLM, a high-performance in-browser inference engine that needs no server, hit the Hacker News front page with the reminder that everything runs locally with hardware acceleration. It is fully compatible with the OpenAI API, so the same open models can stream, do structured JSON generation, and call functions without a line of server code. A smaller companion project, Three-LLM, wraps the same idea in Three.js, putting a familiar rendering framework around the inference loop.

The throughline for this audience is the hardware story. Both engines lean on WebGPU to reach the GPU from JavaScript, which is exactly the API path that increasingly powers in-browser rendering and compute at once. As browsers get better at shader-driven compute, the line between a graphics engine and an inference engine blurs. These projects are early evidence of that convergence, even if the models they run are still far smaller than what a desktop GPU can hold.

→ WebLLM · Three-LLM

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The Unity Cube Now Runs at 207Hz on Quest 3

The worst game on the Horizon Store has become the first published Quest title to actually hit 207Hz. The Unity Cube, a deliberately terrible experiment by Tony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo that exists to test what Meta will allow in its store, now ships an update that taps Quest 3’s newly unlocked refresh rate. With Horizon OS 2.7, you can see a single cube render at nearly three times the 72Hz that most Quest games run at, and up to 240Hz with developer access.

Vitillo documented the update process and what the jump feels like: the virtual world reads as more reactive and smoother. The catch is why this is a novelty for now. Matching a full game’s framerate to 207Hz on a standalone headset is brutally hard given the thermal and compute budgets, which is exactly why a game rendering three assets can do it while a real title cannot. It is a useful stress test for what the hardware can technically do versus what shipped software can realistically sustain.

→ Road to VR

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Red Matter 2’s Grabber Tools, a Masterclass in Cheap Immersion

Road to VR’s Inside XR Design series resurfaced a genuinely instructive episode this week: how Red Matter 2’s grabber tools do more for immersion than their simplicity suggests. The game, four years old this month and still one of the best-looking titles on Quest, uses a pair of hand-held grabber tools that let the player reach for and manipulate distant objects rather than teleporting or leaning.

The insight is that the tool does several jobs at once. It extends the player’s reach without breaking presence, gives every interaction a physical, embodied quality, and turns a mundane act into something tactile. For developers, it is a reminder that the cheapest immersion wins often come from a single well-designed affordance, not a mountain of physics or fidelity. The full video and adapted text walk through the specifics.

→ Road to VR

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Project Hail Mary Gets a First Proper Gameplay Trailer

Maze Theory dropped the first extended gameplay look at Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars, the mixed reality game built with Andy Weir, author of The Martian and the novel it is based on. You play Ryland Grace during a critical failure aboard the Hail Mary, working with Rocky, the alien intelligence at the heart of the story, to diagnose the ship and keep its world-saving cargo on course.

It is a new chapter rather than an adaptation, and it launches this fall on Meta Quest, Pico, and Android XR. The trailer is short, but the pitch is clear: a story-driven MR experience that leans on the same emotional core as the book and the recent film, which put Ryan Gosling in the lead role. Weir’s involvement is the thing to watch, since licensed VR tie-ins rarely come with the original author’s actual participation.

→ UploadVR

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Quick Bites

• Loony Laps brings tiny cars and big chaos to Quest 3 in 2027. → UploadVR
• Finding Frida uses VR to rediscover a forgotten textile artist. → UploadVR
• Galápagos: The Last Eden is an Android XR interactive wildlife experience. → UploadVR
• Drifters: Blackout Crew is free to play this weekend on Quest. → UploadVR
• War for Westeros turns Game of Thrones into an epic RTS, per a new 80 Level interview. → 80 Level