Orcs Must Die! By The Blade, the VR reimagining of the long-running tower-defense series, is available now on Quest 3 and 3S.

Developed by Teravision Games, makers of the tower-defense shooter Captain Toonhead vs. The Punks from Outer Space, Orcs Must Die! By The Blade is the first VR release in the Orcs Must Die series. By the Blade builds on the long-running franchise’s core gameplay loop for VR. Beyond setting up traps and auto-battling as you try to survive waves of orcs, as in traditional tower-defense, the VR version of Orcs Must Die! will have you physically wielding weapons to defend your base in first person.

In addition to the game’s standard solo mode, a two-player co-op mode is also included.

The game’s main campaign features 12 missions across three chapters. These task the player with placing traps on a map before physically battling oncoming orcs with weapons like axes and swords. By The Blade uses free locomotion for movement and combat, and you’ll need to balance blocking and countering along with offensive attacks. As you progress through the campaign, you’ll upgrade your weapons and traps to become a more formidable anti-orc force.

In a recent interview, Teravision Games’ Co-Founder and Creative Director Luis Daniel Zambrano spoke about bringing Orcs Must Die! to VR for the first time. “We dialed up the importance of combat vs. the traps, and we made the enemies focus more on the players than the Rifts. Bold ideas that aimed at making the player feel more present, and the game more immersive overall. […] Once we did that, it started to feel more excitingly VR than ever.”

Originally announced to release on January 22nd, Orcs Must Die! By the Blade was delayed due to an unexpected performance issue found in the Quest 2 build. That version is still under construction and will release at a later date.

Orcs Must Die! By The Blade is available now on Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

Though no release date has been announced, the multi-player FPS will be storming onto PS VR2 later this year.

Triangle Factory has announced that its Battlefield-like FPS, Forefront, is coming to PS VR2 in 2026. The visceral and tactile FPS dumps players onto large-scale battlefields where up to 32 players fight for control of territory using handheld weapons, Humvees, tanks, helicopters, and other war machines of the air, land, and sea.

I previewed Forefront when it launched in Early Access on Meta Quest and found it to be a solid take on the Battlefield formula. Combat is exciting and tense, its VR gunplay is tactile and satisfying, and its environments are dynamic and engaging. While some small problems did exist in that EA build, mostly due to weapon balance issues, on the whole, Forefront stands as the strongest large-scale shooter I’ve played in VR.

Forefront Hands-On: The Battlefield Multiplayer Experience In VR

Forefront in early access brings excitingly tense, large-scale multiplayer warfare reminiscent of Battlefield to VR.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Forefront is available now on Quest, Steam, and Pico, and you can now wishlist it on PS VR2 from the PlayStation Store.

Both games are currently 10 percent off if you buy them together

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Vision Pro users have been waiting over two years for a native YouTube app. Now, it’s finally here—thankfully also including support for immersive videos.

The News

Google first announced that a YouTube app was “on the road map” shortly after Vision Pro’s February 2024 launch, although it never gave a specific release window, leaving users searching for alternatives beyond simply opening YouTube in Safari, which notably didn’t include native support for spatial video.

The official YouTube app, which is now available on the App Store, now gives Vision Pro users access to every YouTube video and Short, which includes access to all of the regular YouTube features, such as subscriptions, playlists, and watch history.

What’s more, the official YouTube app also comes with support for viewing spatial videos, which including all 3D, VR180, and 360 videos on the platform. Vision Pro users can find them by navigating to the app’s dedicated ‘Spatial’ tab.

Additionally, Google maintains YouTube for Vision Pro also includes video playback up to 8K for the M5 version, which was released last October.

My Take

There’s no official explanation out there (yet), although there are probably a few reasons why YouTube didn’t come to Vision Pro up until now.

The most obvious to me: Apple’s $3,500 XR headset likely presented a limited return on investment for Google, which may or may not have been influenced by the companies’ historical platform rivalry. Notably, there is still no Gmail, Chrome, Docs, Drive, Photos, Maps—no Google-owned app on Vision Pro except YouTube right now.

That said, YouTube did make a spatial version of its app for Android XR, which was released with Samsung Galaxy XR last October. The relative timing makes me think the release on Vision Pro was more of a knock-on effect of having already built than leadership at YouTube specifically determining that now would finally be profitable, as I don’t suspect the M5 hardware refresh has significantly driven additional consumer interest.

Whatever the case, YouTube has now found itself on the hook for maintaining the app across three distinct XR platforms: Android XR, visionOS and Horizon OS.

The post Vision Pro Finally Gets Native ‘YouTube’ App with Full Immersive Video Library appeared first on Road to VR.

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Google’s YouTube has launched an official visionOS app.

While it was already possible to access YouTube on Apple Vision Pro headsets through the Safari web browser, the new official app offers a streamlined native-feeling interface, support for watching 180° and 360° immersive video (including 3D), and, for YouTube Premium subscribers, the ability to download videos for offline viewing.

The player also adapts to the varying aspect ratios of videos on YouTube, avoiding the black-bars problem and revealing more of your real or virtual environment.

On the M5 Apple Vision Pro, the app supports up to 8K, while the original M2 Vision Pro is limited to 4K.

YouTube first announced that it planned to build a visionOS app just days after the original headset’s launch.

In the two years since, multiple third-party apps have emerged to fill the gap, including firstly and most prominently the $5 app Juno, built by the same developer as the Apollo phone app for Reddit. But in late 2024 YouTube forced Juno off the visionOS App Store.

Other third-party offerings include Tubular Pro, which has advanced features including SponsorBlock integration and its own theater environments.

The official YouTube app for Apple Vision Pro is available for free on the visionOS App Store, with offline downloads enabled by a YouTube Premium subscription.

While its arrival on visionOS could be considered surprising by some because of Google’s competing Android XR, YouTube operates somewhat independently from Google, and Google has offered iOS versions of its most popular services for almost two decades now.

YouTube is also available on Meta’s Horizon OS, including with co-watching support, but the app on Quest is visually less polished compared to visionOS and Android XR.

Official YouTube Co-Watching On Quest Finally Arrives In Beta

Official YouTube co-watching in the Horizon OS home space has finally arrived as a beta.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million smart glasses in 2025, and they were the “dominant driver” of the Ray-Ban owner’s wholesale growth in H2.

Exactly one year ago, EssilorLuxottica told its investors that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had sold 2 million units so far, a period spanning from the launch in October 2023 until February 2025.

Now, during its Q4 2025 earnings report, the company announced that it sold 7 million units of Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses in 2025 alone – meaning more than triple that of 2024. This suggests that around 9 million have been sold to date since the launch of Ray-Ban Meta two and a half years ago.

For comparison, Quest 2 sold an estimated 20 million units in two and a half years, while Steam Deck sold around 4 million units over the same timespan.

EssilorLuxottica says smart glasses drove significant growth for both its wholesale and retail business, describing the former in North America as “exponential”.

The sales figure comes one month after Bloomberg reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica were discussing doubling or even tripling smart glasses production capacity.

When announcing the 2 million sales mark a year ago, EssilorLuxottica told investors that it planned to increase annual production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026, citing the “great success” of the product. Bloomberg’s report suggests that target is being increased to 20 or 30 million.

It’s undeniable at this point that smart glasses are an appealing consumer product. The question now is whether Meta will maintain its lead once serious competition from Apple and Google arrives.

Google has repeatedly teased smart glasses with a HUD at events like TED and I/O, and announced last year that it’s working with the eyewear companies Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on Gemini smart glasses, and will work with Kering Eyewear in the future. Multiple South Korean news outlets have reported that Samsung plans to launch a Meta Ray-Ban Display competitor this year, powered by Google software, a similar strategy to the Galaxy XR headset.

Meanwhile, in October Bloomberg reported that Apple moved staff off the cheaper and lighter Vision headset project to prioritize shipping smart glasses sooner. Apple’s first glasses could be revealed as soon as this year ahead of a release in 2027, the report claimed.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says that, as with all new headsets, the company will “learn from” Steam Frame if it’s successful.

During an “ask my anything” session on his Instagram page, when asked whether Meta will be in competition with Steam Frame or “support” it, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth replied by saying that it’s “a little bit of both”.

“It is a little bit of both. I have said this before—and I will say it again, because it is really true—every time there is a new headset, we learn from it. We learn how consumers respond to the decisions made regarding architecture, resolution, and cameras. For example, with the Steam Frame, it looks like they included a wireless dongle. We experimented with a dongle many times to make a wireless link work, but we decided it was just too much hassle. They chose to go that route. If consumers love it, maybe there is a bigger market there than we realized.

Every time someone launches something new, it is an experiment that costs me nothing, which is great. Obviously, we do compete with them. Quite a few people use Quest specifically because it is not just standalone, but also capable of PC gaming. I think that is a strong value proposition: being able to use the device both with a PC and without one. However, Steam is trying to build an entire ecosystem, including portable PCs. So, ultimately, it is a little bit of both.”

Bosworth has given a relatively similar answer for past VR headsets and accessories, suggesting that Meta will assess it based on how consumers respond, i.e. how well it sells. For example, he once claimed that if the Pico Trackers sold exceptionally well, Meta would “have to” make an equivalent.

“Every time someone launches something new, it is an experiment that costs me nothing, which is great”, Bosworth quips in the Steam Frame response.

D-Link VR Air Bridge No Longer Works In Windows 11 24H2

D-Link’s VR Air Bridge wireless PC VR dongle, made in partnership with Meta, no longer works after Windows 11’s 24H2 update, the same update that made Windows MR headsets no longer function.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The Meta CTO specifically points out Steam Frame’s included wireless dongle as something his company tried in the past but “decided it was just too much hassle”.

In late 2022, Meta partnered with D-Link to ship VR Air Bridge, a $100 official accessory for gaming PCs to directly connect to Quest 2 for Air Link, a somewhat similar concept. But whereas Steam Frame itself creates the hotspot that its dongle seamlessly connects to, and the headset has a dedicated 6 GHz radio for this, VR Air Bridge was a decidedly lower-effort approach, a traditional 5 GHz hotspot with a somewhat clunky setup process.

Is Bosworth right that a dongle is “too much hassle”, or as with Quest Pro, is this another example of Meta deciding that a general idea is bad because its specific implementation was poor?

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Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth claims that even after the cuts, the company is still investing more in VR content than anyone else, and more than it was 4 years ago.

If you somehow missed it: last month Meta shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering. These actions came a month after the company officially confirmed “shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables”.

Despite this, when asked to provide “the truth” about “doom and gloom” for Quest, Bosworth responded by claiming that Meta is still investing more in VR content than any other company – and more than it was in 2022, at the height of the Quest 2 era.

“There is a lot of doom and gloom about it—mostly overwrought, but I understand why it exists. Emotionally, we have to navigate two realities. First, there is a real cause for sadness. We had people doing work we were excited about, whether at the OS layer or great studios delivering great titles. Ultimately, we realized that the integrated vision we were pursuing with Horizon and VR was overwrought, and the investment we put in was larger than the growth of the ecosystem allowed. That is a real loss, and we are allowed to feel sad about those things.

On the other side, Meta remains extremely bullish on VR. Adjusting our investment profile was done specifically so that we could continue to invest. We are still investing more in content than anyone else, and more than we were four years ago. While we have receded from the “high water mark,” we are still very much a net positive investor in the ecosystem. Furthermore, these internal changes unblock roadmaps for us on hardware; the next two devices we are looking at are very exciting.

I don’t want to take away from the sadness regarding cancelled projects like another Arkham, though I wish there was more appreciation for the fact that we got the first one. Regarding community accountability and my December AMA comments about wearables versus VR: I noted then that these areas are separate and we can do both. That remains true. If VR were growing at the rate we wished, we likely wouldn’t have made these changes, but we cannot invest infinitely. Our investment must match the size of the growth. The ecosystem is growing—just more slowly than we hoped—and we are still investing. That is the story.”

Meta CTO Explains Layoffs & Strategy Shift: “VR Is Growing Less Quickly Than We Hoped”

In a series of interviews at Davos, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explained why the company is reducing its investment in VR.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey made a similar claim last month, but Bosworth saying it serves as an official proclamation from Meta itself.

Still, with most of its acquired VR gaming studios now closed, that “content” investment will not be arriving in the form of first-party blockbusters. Instead, Bosworth is likely referring to investment in third-party VR content.

In an interview with Axios last month, Bosworth said that Meta will now
“focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that’s developed there”.

Whether or not Meta will follow through on this suggestion of continuing to fund third-party VR content remains to be seen.

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