Pico announced that it’s showcasing the core OS and platform capabilities of its upcoming XR headset ‘Project Swan’ at next month’s Game Developers Conference (GDC).

The News

Project Swan is going to be Pico’s next flagship XR headset, the company says in its GDC session description, which is also slated to run PICO OS 6, the next version of the company’s Android-based operating system.

While the company hasn’t expressly said it will also reveal Project Swan’s hardware at GDC in March, Pico says it will provide “an overview of Project Swan’s graphics performance, multimodal interaction system, and developer toolchain, as well as practical guidance on bringing existing apps or games into spatial computing workflows,” which is set to include “concrete examples and live demos.”

“This session introduces the core OS and platform capabilities that enable developers—from XR specialists to non-XR app, web, and game creators—to build or adapt content for this emerging medium,” Pico says. “It presents a new paradigm for spatial experiences in which games and apps coexist, allowing a primary experience to run alongside companion applications in a shared environment.”

The Information initially reported last summer that Project Swan is set to be a slim and light headset weighing in at around 100 grams, which allegedly features a hybrid design that offloads processing to a tethered compute puck. Other reported features include hand and eye-tracking for input.

Then, in November 2025, Zhenyuan Yang, Vice President of Technology at Pico parent company ByteDance, revealed the headset will house a self-developed chip with a custom microOLED display, the latter of which is said to approach 4,000 PPI—slightly higher than that of Apple Vision Pro’s 3,386 PPI.

Furthermore, Yang said Pico’s microOLED displays reach an average 40 PPD (over 45 at center), and addresses brightness limitations by incorporating microlens (MLA) technology and optical compensation for uniform color and luminance.

We expect to learn more at GDC next month, which takes place March 9th – 13th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

My Take

Project Swan is slated to mark a significant next step for the company. Pico’s parent company ByteDance ostensibly isn’t throwing money at its XR division like it was before though, so it’s a new game.

Battle lines have shifted since Pico first launched its Pico 4 series headsets in 2022 though. Back then, Pico was nipping at Meta at its peripheral territories in East Asia and Europe, relying on its unique access to the Chinese market, and leaning heavily into enterprise. It also released Pico 4 Ultra in 2024, a direct competitor to Quest 3.

That same year, Apple released Vision Pro, priced at $3,500. A year later, it followed up with an M5-based hardware refresh at the same price point, while Google formally launched Android XR alongside Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset, priced at $1,800—moves that effectively reframed the competitive landscape.

Rather than racing to the bottom, companies are increasingly targeting the high end, as early expectations around mass-market consumer adoption seemed to have faltered, with Meta’s recent pullback from funding first-party Quest content possibly signaling a broader shift in how the industry approaches the consumer XR segment.

That said, I’d expect Project Swan to straddle the prosumer-enterprise segment, as the company’s next flagship probably won’t be cheap enough to make any grand overtures to consumers while simultaneously offering the very same consumer-oriented platform Pico built up over the years, which hosts a wide array of XR games and apps.

To me, this increasingly puts Pico more in competition with visionOS and Android XR, rather than as a direct competitor to Horizon OS. That said, Meta’s upcoming headset could possibly arrive next year, which is reportedly also a slim and light headset tethered to a compute puck, which may put all four—Apple, Google, Meta and Pico—in the same boat.

The post Pico to Showcase VisionOS and Android XR Competitor at GDC Next Month appeared first on Road to VR.

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Apple Vision Pro is officially getting PC VR foveated streaming, and Samsung Galaxy XR now has the feature via Guy Godin’s Virtual Desktop.

Before you continue reading, note that foveated streaming is not the same as foveated rendering, though the two techniques can be used alongside each other. As the names suggest, while foveated rendering involves the host device actually rendering the area of each frame you’re currently looking at with higher resolution, foveated streaming refers to sending that area to the headset with higher image quality than the rest of the frame.

It’s a term you may have heard in the context of Valve’s Steam Frame, where it’s a fundamental always-on feature of its PC VR streaming offering, delivered via the USB PC wireless adapter by default.

Given that the video decoders in headsets have a limited maximum resolution and bitrate, foveated streaming helps prioritize resolution and compression quality where you’re currently looking.

Apple Vision Pro: visionOS 26.4

visionOS 26.4 will bring foveated streaming to Apple Vision Pro, enabling higher-quality wireless VR remote rendering from a local or cloud PC.

Unlike the macOS Spatial Rendering introduced in the main visionOS 26 release last year, which is a relatively high-level system that only supports a local Mac as a host, Apple’s developer documentation describes the new Foveated Streaming as a low-level host-agnostic framework.

The documentation highlights Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK as an example host, while noting that it should also work with local PCs. Apple even has a Windows OpenXR sample available on GitHub, which to our knowledge is the first and only time the company has even mentioned the industry-standard XR API, never mind actually using it.

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The lead developer of the visionOS port of the PC VR streaming app ALVR, Max Thomas, tells UploadVR that he’s currently looking into adding support for foveated streaming, but that it will likely be “a lot of work”.

Because of how the feature works, Apple’s foveated streaming might even enable foveated rendering for tools like ALVR.

Normally, visionOS does not provide developers with any information about where the user is looking – Apple says this is in order to preserve privacy. Instead, developers only receive events, such as which element the user was looking at as they performed the pinch gesture. But crucial to foveated streaming working, the API tells the developer the “rough” region of the frame the user is looking at.

This should allow the host to render at higher resolution in this region too, not just stream it in higher resolution. As always, this will require the specific VR game to support foveated rendering, or to support tools that inject foveated rendering.

Interestingly, Apple’s documentation also states that visionOS supports displaying both rendered-on-device and remote content simultaneously. The company gives the example of rendering the interior of a car or aircraft on the headset while streaming the highly detailed external world on a powerful cloud PC, which would be preferable from a perceived latency and stability perspective to rendering everything in the cloud.

We’ll keep an eye on the visionOS developer community in the coming months, especially the enterprise space, for any interesting uses of Apple’s foveated streaming framework in practice.

Samsung Galaxy XR: Virtual Desktop

Meanwhile, Samsung Galaxy XR is getting foveated streaming via Guy Godin’s Virtual Desktop, a $25 third-party app available on Google Play.

Virtual Desktop’s latest update also brings foveated streaming to Meta Quest Pro and Play For Dream MR, though this is less notable as those headsets could already achieve foveated streaming through Valve’s Steam Link.

The feature should also work on any future eye-tracked headset where Virtual Desktop is available, Guy Godin tells UploadVR.

Here’s the full changelog for Virtual Desktop 1.34.16:

• Added Foveated streaming with eye tracked headsets (Quest Pro, PFD & Galaxy XR)
• This uses eye tracking to improve the quality of the image where you are looking.

• Improved color gradients and color accuracy with all codecs by using the full RGB color range instead of limited range (for desktop and PCVR)

• Added 96 fps and 100 fps support on Quest 2, 3/3S (only available on Quest v85 PTC)

• Added Gamepad vibration support (also for controllers when emulating gamepad)

• Added adaptive quantization support with AMD GPUs using H.264/H.264+

• Improved initial connection reliability (for real this time)

• Added 21:9 resolutions for virtual monitor on macOS

• Improved thumbstick scroll on macOS and now it respects the natural scrolling option

• Fixed distorted image with some laptop monitor resolutions
• Fixed rare black flash issue when playing some PCVR games
• Fixed hand joints offsets and interference with other drivers in SteamVR
• Fixed compatibility with Roblox anti-cheat
• Fixed more issues with AndroidXR invalid controller poses
• Fixed button support for some recent UE5 games
• Fixed reprojection stutters with some Unity (OVRPlugin) games

visionOS 26.4 will bring foveated streaming to Apple Vision Pro, enabling higher-quality wireless VR remote rendering from a local or cloud PC.

Before you continue reading, note that foveated streaming is not the same as foveated rendering, though the two techniques can be used alongside each other. As the names suggest, while foveated rendering involves the host device actually rendering the area of each frame you’re currently looking at with higher resolution, foveated streaming refers to actually sending that area to the headset with higher resolution.

It’s a term you may have heard in the context of Valve’s Steam Frame, where it’s a fundamental always-on feature of its PC VR streaming offering, delivered via the USB PC wireless adapter.

Given that the video decoders in headsets have a limited maximum resolution and bitrate, foveated streaming

Unlike the macOS Spatial Rendering introduced in the main visionOS 26 release last year, which is a relatively high-level system that only supports a local Mac as a host, Apple’s developer documentation describes the new Foveated Streaming as a low-level host-agnostic framework.

The documentation highlights Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK as an example host, while noting that it should also work with local PCs. Apple even has a Windows OpenXR sample available on GitHub, which to our knowledge is the first and only time the company has even mentioned the industry-standard XR API, never mind actually using it.

ALVR For Apple Vision Pro Brings PS VR2 Controllers To SteamVR

ALVR for Apple Vision Pro, the open-source wireless SteamVR tool, now supports the PS VR2 Sense controllers in its TestFlight build for visionOS 26.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The lead developer of the visionOS port of the PC VR streaming app ALVR, Max Thomas, tells UploadVR that he’s currently looking into adding support for foveated streaming, but that it will likely be “a lot of work”.

Because of how the feature works, Apple’s foveated streaming might even enable foveated rendering for tools like ALVR.

Normally, visionOS does not provide developers with any information about where the user is looking – Apple says this is in order to preserve privacy. Instead, developers only receive events, such as which element the user was looking at as they performed the pinch gesture. But crucial to foveated streaming working, the API tells the developer the “rough” region of the frame the user is looking at.

This should allow the host to render at higher resolution in this region too, not just stream it in higher resolution. As always, this will require the specific VR game to support foveated rendering, or to support tools that inject foveated rendering.

Interestingly, Apple’s documentation also states that visionOS supports displaying both rendered-on-device and remote content simultaneously. The company gives the example of rendering the interior of a car or aircraft on the headset while streaming the highly detailed external world on a powerful cloud PC, which would be preferable from a perceived latency and stability perspective to rendering everything in the cloud.

We’ll keep an eye on the visionOS developer community in the coming months, especially the enterprise space, for any interesting uses of Apple’s foveated streaming framework in practice.

Co-op parcel delivery horror game Deadly Delivery adds a new ‘Mystery Room’, door microphone, and other new mechanics.

We previously reviewed Flat Head Studio’s Deadly Delivery, finding it to be a “clever, effective, and genuinely funny VR co-op that nails the feel of physical play in a spooky, comic world.” Flat Head has already updated the game with new content several times since its December launch, adding a new Ice Caves location and several quality of life features.

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Deadly Delivery is a fun and funny horror co-op game that makes the most of VR.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

The Mystery Room adds a new room to the Bloodmoon and Ice Cave levels with more doors for players to explore. Some doors now have a microphone where players have to declare themselves before proceeding with the drop-off. A new item called the Door Reuser is available to purchase from the in-game shop as well, allowing players to deliver an extra package to a door.

The update also includes general bug fixes, an ammo increase for the Roulette Gun, and wider passages in certain areas to allow multiple players to move around easier.

Deadly Delivery is available on Meta Quest and Steam for $9.99.

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Apple’s smart glasses will have two cameras, one for capture and the other for computer vision, and launch in early 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.

Gurman, who has a strong track record of reporting on Apple products in advance of an official reveal, has been tracking the company’s plans to launch a Ray-Ban Meta competitor for well over a year now.

His previous reports described the company’s first glasses as lacking a display, having cameras, microphones and speakers, and being powered by a new Apple-designed chipset, based on the highly efficient S-series chips used in Apple Watch. The product would be used for phone calls, music playback, live translations, turn-by-turn directions, and multimodal AI, which Apple calls Visual Intelligence.

His new report explains how Apple plans to distinguish its hardware from Meta’s: “build quality and camera technology”.

According to Gurman, the device will use “high-end materials” including acrylic elements and have two cameras, one for high-quality image and video capture, and the other for computer vision.

UploadVR’s take on that is that a dedicated computer vision sensor could draw significantly less power than a sensor designed for imaging, and thus be sampled continually for advanced use cases like spatially-aware pedestrian navigation. “Turn left just past that red Honda”, instead of “In 200 meters, turn left”. It might also enable hand gestures without the need for a wristband – though you would need to raise your arm.

Apple is targeting December for mass production of the glasses, Gurman writes, for a launch in early 2027.

Unlike Meta and Google, which are working with established fashionable glasses brands, Apple will be designing its own frames, Gurman claims, with a variety of colors and sizes set to be offered.

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Next-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses set for 2026 could recognize faces and run continuous AI sessions for “hours”, The Information reports.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The competition won’t be standing still, though. Last year The Information reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica plan to launch next-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses with a facial recognition feature and the ability to run continuous AI sessions for “hours”.

Meanwhile, Google is set to launch its Gemini-powered smart glasses platform this year, partnering with eyewear companies Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, as well as Samsung, to bring it to market.

The industry is set to see a fierce three-way battle between Meta, Apple, and Google to own the software platform on the glasses the companies hope you’ll wear all day. Is there room for three players, or will it narrow to a two-horse race over time?

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