The Fortnite-ification of Blizzard’s hero shooter just hit a new low

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This PC lets you multitask like a pro, plus offers expandable storage that can grow as your needs do.

The post Forget Mac Mini, Amazon Returns 4.8-Star Ryzen 9 Mini PC (32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) to a Record Low for Another Holiday Clearance Round appeared first on Kotaku.

The pink puffball’s frenzied racer wears its shallowness on its sleeve

The post <i>Kirby Air Riders</i>: The <i>Kotaku</i> Review appeared first on Kotaku.

If you’re a creative or a gamer looking to upgrade your setup, now is the time to act.

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Treat yourself to a stunning new console for below $60.

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Save $120 on the Bose SoundLink Max Bluetooth portable speaker in several choices of color.

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It pulls you in the game, making it feel you’re part of the action.

The post Sony Clears Out PlayStation VR2 at Its Lowest Price as Holiday Stock Dump Begins, While Meta Quest Stays Full Price appeared first on Kotaku.

Amazon’s hit TV series ‘The Boys’ is coming to VR for the first time next year in an immersive adventure called The Boys: Trigger Warning.

Slated to land on Quest and PSVR 2 sometime in Spring 2026, The Boys: Trigger Warning lets you ‘juice some Temp V’ and become a Supe, as you take on Vought alongside Butcher, Mother’s Milk, and the gang.

As a non-Supe, the story puts you in the shoes of Lucas, whose life has crumbled around him after his family is killed by the Armstrongs, a group of Vought Superheroes. Led by Butcher and Mother’s Milk, you get thrown headfirst into an underground battle against Vought, as you go on a no-mercy hunt to end the Armstrongs for good.

Although the trailer features a sort of on-rails ride, the game’s description maintains that users will be able to “reach, grab, break, pull, crush and fling enemies using telekinesis,” in addition to “break out hand blades, vanish in heavy-duty camouflage, or go full Homelander with laser eyes” as you can take on levels either with stealth or full-force.

The Boys: Trigger Warning is currently being developed by XR veteran studio ARVORE, known for the Pixel Ripped series and interactive experience The Line, and is being published by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality (SPVR).

The series’ cast are also lending their voices to the game,  including Laz Alonso (Mother’s Milk), Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy), Colby Minifie (Ashley Barrett), and P.J. Byrne (Adam Bourke).

You can pre-order The Boys: Trigger Warning on the Horizon Store for Quest, priced at $24, and wishlist the game on the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2.

The post ‘The Boys’ is Coming to Quest & PSVR 2 in Spring 2026, Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

ARVORE revealed an adaptation of The Boys is coming to VR with cast members from the TV show lending their voices.

Brazil-based ARVORE is the studio behind the Pixel Ripped series and they’ve teamed with Sony Pictures Virtual Reality as publisher on a “stealth-action” VR game coming in 2026. The Boys is about to enter its final season on Amazon next year, though Amazon’s association with the VR project appears to be simply as a producer for the show.

I’m getting a Five Nights At Freddy’s meets BioShock vibe from the reveal trailer, which shows a theme park ride setting for its pre-rendered sections before meeting Homelander. Developers say the game “introduces an original character who accidentally uncovers a grotesque Vought secret that turns a family outing into carnage. Forced to become a Supe, the player joins The Boys to infiltrate Vought and take revenge in the most chaotic way possible. Blending stealth and combat with the franchise’s signature dark humor, the VR title delivers a new story rooted in the world fans love.”

The full announcement trailer is embedded below and I’ve cut what looks like the available gameplay video above. Actors including Laz Alonso (Mother’s Milk), Colby Minifie (Ashley Barrett) and P.J. Byrne (Adam Bourke) reprise their roles with a “twisted interpretation” of Soldier Boy from Jensen Ackles.

We’ll be curious to go hands-on with Trigger Warning as soon as we can. With Stranger Things VR out now, Deadpool VR available now and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the way, there’s a wide range tonally to adapt TV and movies to VR and we’ll be curious where ARVORE lands when it comes to representing The Boys.

Wishlists and pre-ordering are available on the PlayStation Store and Quest.

Google’s Android XR is getting an AI feature that can turn any 2D content, including games streamed from your PC, into 3D.

Called System Autospatialization, Google formally announced the feature during The Android Show: XR Edition today, saying that it will arrive in 2026.

“Just imagine if every game was immersive, every YouTube video was immersive, if the entire web was immersive,” Google teased.

Other platforms like visionOS and Pico OS let you easily turn 2D photos 3D, but Google’s Android XR is currently the only that lets you do the same for video (out of the box). The move to real-time spatialization will be an even greater leap, and it’s surprising that it’s possible at all on the XR2+ Gen 2 chipset.

Google says it will work for “pretty much any” app, and in multiple apps at once. The company’s presentation depicted it being used for playing Cities: Skylines streamed from a PC, with the AI system being able to tell the difference between the foreground UI and background game world.

We’ll be sure to test the feature out when it launches on Android XR for Samsung Galaxy XR next year.

Analogue responds to the M64 with its own colorful variants

The post The Battle Of The Translucent N64s Has Arrived appeared first on Kotaku.

It’s unclear if the remake of Obsidian’s Knights of the Old Republic 2 is still in development or not

The post <i>Star Wars KOTOR 2</i> Remake Revealed In Court Docs appeared first on Kotaku.

The horror game was banned from Steam and Epic, and the resulting furor feels needlessly intense after playing it

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The meme stock store stunt led to all sorts of weird donations

The post Dildos, Dogs, And Lint: GameStop’s ‘Trade Anything Day’ Ranges From Chaos To Nightmare appeared first on Kotaku.

Remember what Halo Infinite was supposed to be? I do

The post <i>Halo Infinite</i> Is Four Years Old Today And It’s Bumming Me Out appeared first on Kotaku.

We have some advice to help you and Samus survive your time on Viewros

The post 7 Things To Know Before Playing <i>Metroid Prime 4: Beyond</i> appeared first on Kotaku.

The first real image and clip of Xreal’s Project Aura have been revealed.

A concept render was shown at Google I/O earlier this year when Project Aura was first announced as the second Android XR device, set to launch next year.

It’s a birdbath-style see-through device in a form factor that tries to imitate the basic appearance of sunglasses, as with Xreal’s existing products. But while Xreal’s current products primarily act as a virtual monitor for your existing devices, via the included cable, Project Aura will come with a tethered compute puck running Google’s Android XR on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset.

Xreal says Project Aura will have a field of view of 70 degrees diagonal, its widest yet, and have built-in head and hand tracking.

Most features and apps available on Galaxy XR will also run on Project Aura’s puck, with some notable exceptions such as the face-tracked Likeness realistic avatars, as Aura doesn’t have face tracking.

Today, during The Android Show: XR Edition, Google and Xreal showed off the device in images and a short clip. They also confirmed that it’s still on track to launch in 2026 – just days after internal Meta memos leaked revealing that its headset with a tethered puck is delayed to 2027.

Note that while Xreal devices are designed to look like sunglasses, they sit much further out from your eyes than real glasses, and thus are a markedly different device category than the AR glasses in development at Meta and Apple. Those future AR glasses use a display technology called waveguides to sit as close to your eyes as regular glasses, while Xreal uses a far cheaper but also far bulkier optical approach. They also block out most light, so can’t be used as regular indoor prescription glasses.

Essentially, you can think of Project Aura as a lightweight alternative to Samsung Galaxy XR that trades off field of view and opacity for sleekness, rather than competition for future outdoor AR glasses.

The confirmation that Project Aura is still set to ship in 2026 comes one month after Lynx revealed that Google terminated its Android XR deal. After Samsung, Lynx, Xreal, and Sony were the three companies Google had earlier confirmed were working on Android XR products. While declining to comment on the Lynx situation, Google confirmed that it’s still working with Sony, though we’ve yet to see even a tease of a Sony Android XR device, and its SRH-S1 headset runs Sony’s own fork of Android.

Lynx’s New Headset Won’t Run Android XR, But Will Have Widest Standalone FOV

Lynx says its new headset won’t run Android XR, as Google “terminated” its agreement, but will have by far the widest field of view of any standalone.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The first major update for Google’s Android XR on Samsung Galaxy XR is rolling out now.

The update brings a beta release of Google’s Persona-like realistic avatar system for video calls, called Likeness, a Travel Mode, and a beta for a built-in PC remote desktop feature for Windows called PC Connect.

Samsung Galaxy XR First Impressions: What You Need To Know

I briefly tried Samsung Galaxy XR at its launch event in New York last week, and I have mixed initial thoughts about the first Android XR headset.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Likeness (Beta)

Likeness is Google’s realistic avatar system for video calls in Android XR, an equivalent to the original non-spatial mode of Apple Vision Pro’s Personas.

Your Likeness replaces the video feed that apps would normally get from a phone’s selfie camera, providing a virtual equivalent, and should thus work for any video calling platform without developer implementation.

Unlike with Vision Pro, you scan your face for Likeness by holding up your phone, not the headset itself. From here, the data is transferred to and securely stored on the headset. The Likeness app is currently only available on “select Android device models”.

In video calls on Android XR, your Likeness is driven by Galaxy XR’s eye tracking and face tracking capabilities in real-time, and the feed shows a virtual representation of your hands when you hold them up too.

Travel Mode

Android XR now has a Travel Mode, which when enabled, makes the positional tracking work properly on moving vehicles, such as planes and trains.

Apple was the first to launch this feature, alongside Vision Pro, and since then Meta, Pico, and Snap have followed.

Without a Travel Mode, the accelerometer and gyroscope in the headset’s IMU will interpret the acceleration, orientation changes, and vibrations of the vehicle as your head movement, causing virtual objects and windows to drift off in the opposite direction.

Travel Mode works by having the headset rely more on computer vision from the cameras, typically incurring a small loss in tracking quality.

PC Connect (Beta)

PC Connect (beta) is a feature that lets you connect to and control your Windows PC as a virtual screen in Android XR.

After installing the streamer app on your PC, you can mirror your entire desktop or one window.

There are already many third-party apps on the Google Play Store that can do this, including Guy Godin’s Virtual Desktop, but PC Connect offers a built-in option.

Quest 3’s Windows 11 Remote Desktop Gets Aspect Ratio Setting & Ultrawide Mode

The official Windows 11 Remote Desktop of Horizon OS now has 21:9 and 3:4 aspect ratio options, as well as an enveloping visionOS-like Ultrawide Mode.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Meta has a partnership with Microsoft for an officially supported Windows 11 remote desktop system, leveraging the operating system’s RDP system, with support for virtual extra monitors and multiple aspect ratios. Android XR’s PC Connect doesn’t seem to have Microsoft’s involvement, and seems more basic for now, at least in beta, lacking these more advanced options.

We’ll keep a close eye on Google through 2026 for further Android XR updates, such as whether a spatial version of Likeness arrives or advanced virtual monitor options for PC Connect.

Set to launch in 2026, XREAL Aura is the first pair of see-through AR glasses to run Android XR. Here are the impressions from my first hands-on.

During a recent meeting with Google, the company shared with me a range of updates relating to Android XR, including the first look at XREAL Aura. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to take any photos or videos during the demo.

XREAL Aura will be the first pair of see-through glasses running the full-blown immersive version of Android XR. Considering the immersion they offer, the glasses are impressively compact. Much of this is thanks to offloading weight, battery, and compute onto a tethered puck which can slip into your pocket. Interestingly, the puck looks like the size and shape of a typical smartphone, but instead, the entire screen area is a giant trackpad which can be used for mouse-like input (in addition to hand-tracking).

Compared to prior models of XREAL glasses with bird-bath style optics, the optics in the XREAL Aura are a bit more compact, allowing you to bring your eyes closer to the lens. XREAL is finally getting close to AR glasses which actually look like glasses without the lenses being so far from your eyes that it looks goofy. They’re still look a little funky because of the distance, but we’re getting there.

Putting on the glasses, I was presented with the same Android XR experience I’m used to from Galaxy XR, except this time the background I was seeing was the real world (albeit, a fairly dim version of the real world due to the light loss through the lenses). Unfortunately, Aura doesn’t include eye-tracking, which means I couldn’t use my preferred look+pinch method of input (which is supported on Galaxy XR); I had to use the default laser-pointer input style which feels more cumbersome.

The quoted 70-degree field-of-view (I assume diagonal, but they didn’t specify) felt usable, but seems like the bare minimum field-of-view needed to get real value out of an immersive operating system like Android XR. If Google hasn’t already specified that any immersive Android XR device needs at least this wide of an FoV, they absolutely should.

I was impressed with the sharpness and brightness of the Aura’s display. It looked pretty good for virtual screen usage (ie: viewing websites, videos, photos, etc). But I also saw obvious pupil swim (which looks like warping as you move your head around). This will be more noticeable in fully immersive experiences or multi-tasking where there’s lots of head movement. For some people, pupil swim is just a visual annoyance, but for others it can be dizzying over time. It’s unclear if this can be improved before launch, especially without any on-board eye-tracking hardware.

One particularly cool feature of Aura is the electronically-controlled dimming lenses. A button on the stem of the glasses allows you to dim the real world from 0% to nearly 100%, blocking out almost all light.

This isn’t the first pair of AR glasses to include electronic lens dimming, but the way it’s integrated into Android XR is a clever value-add. If you launch a fully immersive application (like a VR game), the software can automatically switch the dimming to 100% so the virtual content doesn’t conflict with your real-world background. Or, in applications that would like to dim the user’s background (like a media app), it can set the dimming to 50%. With a passthrough headset like Galaxy XR, this dimming would normally be done digitally, but with the Aura glasses it’s done physically. And Google says developers don’t need to worry about the distinction; if their app asks Android XR to dim the background, it’ll automatically do so through whatever means are available to the device.

Of course, Aura is a ‘glasses-style’ device, so even when dimming is set to 100%, you’ll still see lots of the real-world in your peripheral vision. But still, having the feature makes fully immersive applications usable in a way they wouldn’t on a see-through AR device.

Considering its capabilities, Aura looks strikingly close to a normal enough pair of sunglasses that you might not get a double take by people passing by, though anyone talking to you face-to-face would surely know there is something strange going on behind the lenses.

Even with dimming set to 0%, the real world is still made fairly dim; like wearing sunglasses inside. Whether by design (to account for not enough display brightness) or happenstance (as a result of light loss from the optics), it still feels like you’re wearing sunglasses inside, which limits some of the indoor use-cases you might want to do with a pair of AR glasses. For instance, I’d like to have AR glasses which work as a cooking companion in the kitchen so I can reference recipes while preparing food. But like a regular pair of sunglasses, Aura dims the world too much that I wouldn’t want to use them in the kitchen.

I look forward to trying the finished version. In my brief hands-on, I came away feeling like Aura is the first clear look at the eventual convergence of AR and VR headsets. It feels like a full-fledged Android XR headset but in a much more compact package that will be way more portable and less conspicuous. I could actually see myself using Aura on a plane or in a coffee shop without feeling like everyone would be staring at me.

Indeed, Google is thinking the same. Alongside my look at Aura, the company also announced that it’s rolling out a first-party PC Connect application for Android XR to make it easy to stream your Windows desktop to the glasses for productivity, media, or gaming.

There’s still some key things we don’t know about Aura. The company hasn’t revealed a full set of specifications yet, and we don’t know if there will be any controller support (which would mean incompatibility with many immersive VR games). We also don’t have a price or specific release date, but XREAL has confirmed that Aura will launch in 2026.

The post Hands-on: XREAL Aura AR Glasses with Android XR and a 70-degree Field-of-view, Launching Next Year appeared first on Road to VR.

Death Battle is back with a video pitting Ash Ketchum and Yugi Moto against one another

The post Watch <em>Pokémon</em> And <em>Yu-Gi-Oh’s</em> Heroes Duke It Out In A Pure ’90s Nostalgia Bomb appeared first on Kotaku.