Walkabout Mini Golf's latest course takes players to a Mars Garden.
The four level structure is built into the side of a crater with a course laid down for players moving up through 18 holes to a vista with a stunning overlook across the martian landscape.
The paid DLC course features an optional gravity simulation mode to make your ball fly around more playfully, as if you were actually mini golfing on Mars. Walkabout creator Lucas Martell offered UploadVR a pre-launch design tour, explaining how the martian colonists have a ton of automation and their fresh foods grow big on the red planet.
Martell's development team at Mighty Coconut is nearly ready to release the iPhone version of the game with tap-to-putt and swing-to-putt offering a slice of VR anywhere. The game is in open testing now on iOS devices, with a cross-play beta test underway between VR and iPhones. Found balls and other progress from the testing release won't carry over to the full release on iOS.
Check back with us in the days ahead – we'll have the link to the iOS version of the game on the App Store as soon as Walkabout makes it public.
The creepy atmosphere of POOLS will see official VR support later this year on Steam.
The project from Tensori carries "overwhelmingly positive" recent reviews and the game's publisher reached out to UploadVR with news of the release window for the VR version on PC. The team revealed today with UploadVR that POOLS VR is coming later this year. We premiered a trailer on the UploadVR YouTube channel and asked the developers for a statement about their overall intent.
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On Steam, POOLS is described as "an art gallery where you look around and listen to the sounds. There are very few things to solve, practically a few mazes. Sometimes the game can challenge your navigation skills. But mostly you're just... there."
While visiting POOLS might create a feeling of unease in players, the developers are careful to note there are no monsters or jump scares in the project, though "the game can feel oppressive."
"POOLS plays on fears of getting lost, the dark, and tight spaces."
POOLS released widely on Steam in April this year and was followed by a Steam Deck update in June, along with a collaboration with indie game label UNIKAT.
I asked POOLS' developers what it was like to actually go 'there' for the first time in a VR headset. Here's the statement from three of the creators sent to us over email:
Antti: I personally consider POOLS largely an exercise in atmosphere. Since there are almost no traditional gameplay elements, we could focus almost exclusively on the atmosphere itself = producing a very immersive experience, filled with detail and contrast. And the sound design; the amount of effort we spent on footstep sounds alone is a lot, I mean different feet, different surfaces, stairs, different depths of water, room size and so on produce slightly different sounds, and in addition there's subtle randomness to it too. When keep thinking in the same direction - what could we possibly do to push this immersion / atmosphere even further? VR seems like a logical conclusion.
Sami: During the initial VR tests for this game, I was most impressed by how VR enhances the scale of the environments. VR felt like an obvious and a natural extension of the game and for the feeling of being present. As to why bring the game to VR? For me personally, one of my goals in game development is to build and release a VR game. I’m a fan of VR gaming. Bringing POOLS to VR was a great opportunity to accumulate new skills and experiences. Our game also felt like a perfect fit for VR - both as a game and as our first test case of VR development. Also, our players have been asking for VR ever since we release our demo before the game has come out.
Joni: When I first time hopped in the VR mode, Sami had already been working with it for a little while so I got to try the almost fully functional version. I remember just thinking that the VR mode really is its own complete experience and I genuinely want to play it even after all the hours spent playing and testing POOLS. It gives the game an all new feel.
Apple Immersive Video takes Apple Vision Pro owners on the field for Super Bowl LVIII highlights.
A new 4-minute video from Apple features highlights from Super Bowl LVIII with the Kansas City Chiefs vs. San Francisco 49ers. Clips take you into the locker room, along the sidelines and even onto the field for practice and celebrations.
What Is Apple Immersive Video?
The Apple Immersive Video format is 180-degree video with 8K resolution, stereoscopic 3D, and spatial audio. It's served from the Apple TV+ subscription service with much higher bitrate than many other immersive video platforms.
We highly praised Apple Immersive Video in our Vision Pro review. It's not possible to cast or record Apple Immersive Video though, so you'll have to take our word for it unless you have access to a Vision Pro.
Unlike traditional broadcast media, Apple delivers these to Apple Vision Pro from intimate angles with the same sort of wide field of view high resolution stereoscopic 3D that startup NextVR was known for before it was quietly acquired by Apple in 2020.
The result is a jaw-dropping demonstration of the power of VR for anyone who might need to have their eyes opened to the potential of the medium as a vehicle to some of the world's biggest sporting events.
Are you ready to go to the Super Bowl in VR?
Super Bowl LIX?
Over the weekend, Kendrick Lamar announced he would deliver the "Apple Music" Halftime Show for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans on February 9, 2025. Usher delivered the Apple Music Halftime Show for LVIII.
The Halftime Show is notably absent from the 4-minute Apple Immersive Video clip Apple just released, and the company hasn't announced anything for Vision Pro in connection with the musical portion of the Super Bowl. We'll have the latest if that changes, for now though, this view into the main event of Super Bowl LVIII offers a tantalizing tease of what could be in store for the future.
Broadcast rights for major sporting events are complicated and expensive, with access and costs negotiated on a per-region basis. NextVR was a pioneer here during VR's first consumer wave from about 2015 to 2019, with high quality streams made for VR featuring major sporting events, like weekly NBA games live as they happened.
Now backed by Apple's budget for the broadcast rights to major events and camera systems purpose-built for Apple Immersive Video, NextVR's technology could conceivably take you closer to a performance like Lamar's than anyone else can get, even from a $10K seat in the stadium.
As Apple likely readies a lower cost (and hopefully lower weight) follow-up headset to Vision Pro, its library of 3D movies as well as Apple's own high-quality Immersive Video format could emerge as a major system seller.
If you've got an Apple Vision Pro, the 4-minute video is worth your time to take a quick trip to the Super Bowl.
Puzzle Sculpt from Schell Games leaves the minesweeping of Windows desktops behind and exchanges the idea for spatial puzzling on Apple Vision Pro.
The object of Puzzle Sculpt is to carve out a shape from a floating block using logic and maybe a bit of luck. The app is accessible only with passthrough views on and it doesn't allow multitasking, at least not at the time of writing, so Puzzle Sculpt expects your focus here and there's a quick tutorial to walk you through the game's mechanics.
In short, the number on the face of any block indicates how many of the blocks in the row behind it remain in the final sculpture. You can immediately clear any row of blocks with 0 on the face, for instance, because there's nothing to keep in the whole row. You just pinch your fingers together and then move your hand in the direction of the row of blocks to wash them away from existence. The interaction is incredibly satisfying, like clearing a line of Tetris by physically wiping it off the tower.
The clearing interaction even works when the entire row is occluded at the back of the object, adding a subtle but important sense of presence to the sculpture itself as an object inside your space. You can also pinch inside the object anywhere to grab it and move it around to get a look at it from all angles.
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The idea is to whittle away a sculpture by clearing blocks you can deduce don't belong while marking off ones you're sure will be. If there are three blocks total in a row that has a number three on the front of it, for example, you can mark those off as you know they're all part of the final shape.
We've barely scratched the surface of the title, with Schell Games saying there's over 50 puzzles in total to solve. I've lost hours to Minesweeper on plenty of old PCs from the 1990s, and I've solved my share of sudoku puzzles on paper, and Puzzle Sculpt fits right into those experiences. This is perhaps the first game I've played on Apple Vision Pro that's been both good enough, and original enough, to suggest folks with the headset consider trying out an Apple Arcade subscription to feel that satisfying mechanic of clearing a line.
Puzzle Sculpt is available now on Apple Arcade from Schell Games.
Lucas Martell is nearly ready to release his iPhone app.
Mini golfers in headsets from Meta, Sony, Valve, and Pico, will soon be joined in VR by iPhone players logging in from Martell's Walkabout Mini Golf - Pocket Edition.
The fully featured Walkabout iPhone app is completing a second round of open testing this month as it moves close to full release. Pocket Edition has been in development for around five years now, all the way back before the pandemic in 2019, and long before Walkabout became one of the best places you can go from a VR headset anywhere.
In the time between, Martell built a creative VR powerhouse at Mighty Coconut hiring from their fanbase a former Disney imagineer while steadily growing the talented animating, modeling and programming team already on board for their existing gaming and animation projects. Mighty Coconut's creators start with hand-drawn concept art and then move immediately into VR world-building with Gravity Sketch, iterating creatively in VR with one another as they space out holes for gameplay and eyeball sight lines with real-time tweaks. Economically and creatively, it would be as if, instead of a cigarette in his hand pointing to his project leads while surveying the place that would become Disneyland, Walt Disney had a magic wand to place and size structures to his exact specifications.
This creative engine set against the backdrop of mini golf helped Mighty Coconut curate an impressive list of partners, some of which have sought out the studio over their shared love of their time in Walkabout itself as well as the fantasy of designing one's own theme park. So far, Martell's team partnered with Wallace & Gromit, Myst, Jim Henson Company and Meow Wolf for mini golf theme parks, and they've got a release schedule that charts into 2026 already. Technically speaking, they've quietly slipped new features into their locations over time that significantly expand the gameplay possibilities and storytelling potential.
iPhones and Androids meet players in different places than VR headsets, and phones in general are used in different ways. Martell and Mighty Coconut have been working on an approach with Walkabout's Pocket Edition that may bridge VR to flat-screen gamers in ways other titles haven't quite achieved. With Walkabout, you might legitimately see a family playing mini golf together on their phones with the most energetic and active of the bunch playing the round in the family's VR headset.
"We're already seeing that with our open beta," Walkabout's head of communications David Wyatt said. "They're already doing that. That's the whole reason we did it. We need to give players more ways to play with people they care about."
Walkabout Mini Golf - Pocket Edition Immersive Controls
Mighty Coconut's five year journey in VR, with consideration for iPhones and Androids in the background the whole time, has given the studio's creators a lot of time to re-consider the assumptions made by the likes of general purpose social playgrounds like Minecraft, Roblox, Horizon, Rec Room and VRChat.
The result is a Pocket Edition that makes bold choices for immersion and control for mini golf specifically.
There are two main modes of input for Walkabout Mini Golf - Pocket Edition.
Martell's team chose to start with the Walkabout path they've developed directly in VR rather than emulating analog stick input and movement systems. In VR, the default movement system through courses is a comfortable teleport. On iPhone, they've chosen tap-to-go.
From there, the phone in your hand might as well be a handheld window into the space. You can have a look around at any time by waving your iPhone, or simply drag along the glass screen to move across the surface of the virtual world. Tap on the screen's icon to go to your ball, or tap anywhere on the virtual world's ground to go there.
Putting offers two choices for control. The easiest and most laid back approach is touch-to-putt. Swing-to-putt, meanwhile, offers a slice of what it's like to play the game in VR.
I recently played swing-to-putt from an unusual location – the UploadVR Studios – to show how the system seamlessly switches from looking around a virtual world to taking your shot. The video gives a sense of the gestural "tap" movement that's almost the same as it is with any other tracked controller in your hand wearing a headset like Quest 2, PSVR 2, or Valve Index. The video filmed inside Quest shows iPhone as a controller for Walkabout Pocket Edition, routed through Quest HDMI Link.
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Slipping Into VR From Your Pocket
Pocket Edition players will tap where they want to go or slide their finger along the surface of the phone rather than using emulated analog sticks to get around. And in beautiful places like Quixote Valley or 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, some of the best moments in this game are still looking around. For these moments, the iPhone becomes an AR camera viewfinder into VR allowing you take in the landscape through its tiny window.
From there, Walkabout as a destination and activity for families and friends can extend from phones to players who enjoy playing the game with a deeper sense of immersion. You can swing-to-putt your iPhone, as I've shown above, or for full immersion just put on the VR headset and pick up a club.
"The phone can even be used as a selfie cam for the group," Wyatt said. "It was harder than we thought it was gonna be, but there's a lot of stuff we want to be possible on the phone version as well."
We'll have the link to the official Walkabout Mini Golf for iOS store page as soon as Mighty Coconut makes it available. For now, there is a TestFlight open beta testing release you can join, but found balls and other progress won't carry over to release if you play it now.
Meta is rolling out tools designed for parents to manage preteen access to specific experiences and people on its Horizon Worlds social networking playground.
The tools follow last year's policy change which lowered the minimum age for Quest headset use from 13 to 10 years old, accompanied by the launch of parent-managed Meta accounts.
According to Meta, the tools are designed to allow parents to "individually add approved contacts that a 10- to 12-year-old can then chat with, call, and send or accept invites to join them in MR or VR experiences." In 2022, Meta added a tag to fence off worlds intended for only those who are age 18 and older and, earlier this year, asked Meta account holders to enter their age.
"Once a preteen requests access to Horizon Worlds, a parent will approve and specify the worlds their preteen can access," a Meta post explains. "Worlds can offer preteens access to a variety of fun, engaging and age-appropriate places to hang out with friends and family—no matter where they happen to be, both in-headset and on mobile. And as we open up preteen access to worlds (with parental permission, of course), we’ll encourage creators to build even more age-appropriate and enriching experiences."
Meta's Connect event in late September is expected to showcase the latest headsets and glasses, as well as preview features and long-term plans for Horizon-based headsets with access to services like Worlds tied to a Meta account with the company alongside access to store purchases. With the expected debut of the higher powered and lower cost Quest 3S, Meta may be poised to encourage VR adoption by a new generation of children using Horizon as their first online experiences.
A PC built into a keyboard without a display, like the Raspberry Pi 400, starts making a lot of sense with Meta Quest HDMI Link running on the most popular standalone VR headsets.
The Raspberry Pi 400 is a roughly $70-$100 keyboard with a Raspberry Pi 4 PC inside. The keyboard PC features a pair of Micro HDMI ports for display, a USB-C port for power in and three USB-A ports for attached devices.
Paired with a VR headset like Quest 3, I've used retractable USB-C cables to make the connections more manageable between keyboard, power, and headset. The setup is completed with a mess of USB hubs, micro HDMI to HDMI adapter and a Shadowcast 2 capture card.
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Modularity Is Back On The Menu
My particular system also features a 1 terabyte MicroSD card powering a standard Raspberry Pi Linux distribution. I could simply swap out the memory card, though, to put away my desktop with its draft written-in-VR stories, and replace it with a Retropie gaming system running backups of my vintage cartridge collection. Or I could put in a different card tailored to be a theater powered by Kodi.
You could, of course, do this all with a Steam Deck and more with the decktop keyboard I wrote about last week. You can enjoy all those great Steam Deck-verified titles on the big screen there, and the Discover app on Steam Deck's desktop is an easy-to-use pathway to many abilities the open source community adds on an ongoing basis.
If you were born after the year 2000, there's a chance you've only ever known the kind of file management allowed in wiggling apps on an iPhone, or in the automatically tracked changes of Google Docs, or in the reminders to delete photos or videos from a device with limited storage.
Raspberry Pi used like this offers an introductory course to the basics of personal computing starting from an open source Linux operating system you put on a microSD card in a keyboard PC, and sees you extending the desktop it shows to a 1080p display that just happens to be a VR headset.
Keyboard PCs For VR Headsets & AR Glasses
An optimized keyboard PC with integrated capture cards would be a pretty amazing addition to a standalone VR headset. It could have at least one HDMI output and one HDMI input to pass up through a USB-C cable to any connected display device, including Quest 3 with Meta Quest HDMI Link.
An integrated trackpad would be a great addition to such a headless portable computer, as would optional bluetooth control of other nearby devices, or optional wireless casting and AirPlay. Switching between command of the keyboard PC's desktop, the VR headset, and a captured HDMI device, like a Steam Deck on a charging dock, should be as easy as the press of a button. It's already that easy on some Logitech keyboards, some of which are also trackable objects for Quest headsets.
An additional USB input or two for connecting more storage, a mouse or other devices would be incredibly useful as well. The Raspberry Pi 400, which is as old as the Quest 2, offers three usable USB-A ports and 4 gigabytes of RAM.
A hypothetical Raspberry Pi 500 built on the newer model computer could superpower this whole idea with an integrated slot for high-speed NVMe storage.
HTC has accepted HDMI in with some of its headsets for quite some time, but with recent updates to Meta's Horizon OS and apps like Quest HDMI Link and Steam Link, Quest standalone VR headsets are now properly becoming general purpose portable personal computers. Users are already using the integrated display system to control drones, RC cars, as well as other computers in the immediate vicinity, while never leaving their VR experience.
Keyboard PCs show a lot of potential when combined with the expected lower prices on a forthcoming Quest 3S, as well as the prospect of more software updates planned by Meta to keep pace with Apple and others. Keyboard PCs can bring your files to any display device you want. If you combine that idea with general purpose standalone VR headsets, it becomes much easier to imagine people using headsets in places like cafes or libraries.
A 40-minute interactive documentary arrives on Quest headsets in September to explore ADHD as part of the impactful Playing With Reality collection.
Impulse: Playing With Reality follows 2021 release Goliath in the collection from studio Anagram exploring different perspectives. Goliath offered an "effective, innovative account of psychosis" when it was released, and directors Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla follow the effort with a new trailer premiere for Impulse in connection with it competing in 2024's Venice Immersive.
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Here's the official director's statement explaining the effort:
"Social media would have us believe that we are all on a path of self discovery. Within the piles of information shared, a growing heap is dedicated to ADHD. Some celebrate the creative galaxy brain, but for those without support or easily dismissed as delinquent, lazy, and, to be truthful ‘unproductive’, ADHD can lead to a life of misery. 1 in 4 prisoners in the UK are likely to have ADHD. For many a diagnosis is an epiphany that reveals the invisible barriers they had been fighting. Working with neuroscientists and psychologists we gathered 100+ hours of interviews with people on the severe end of the spectrum. We looked for poetic connections to translate into a rich embodied story. Adrenalin-packed gameplay spoke to the needy dopamine-depleted brain. Mixed reality plays with your own relationship with the familiar and new. Through insight into what might drive these actions we hope to foster a deeper understanding of the lived experience of ADHD."
The story is told with mixed reality as the background to the stories of four people "whose intense emotions lead them to a life at the edge."
The work is narrated by actress Tilda Swinton and co-produced by Floréal & France Télévisions. Support for the project came from "Meta VR for Good, France Télévisions, CNC, Agog, City of Paris, and Unity Charitable Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation."
Impulse: Playing With Reality releases for Quest headsets in September with pre-orders available at the time of writing offering a discount under the expected launch price.
Devin Reimer's AstroBeam is picking up where he left off at Owlchemy Labs as he works toward more impactful VR characters powered by large language models.
Reimer was co-founder and technical lead at Owlchemy Labs where he made Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator. The games, acquired by Google along with the studio back in 2017, feature simple JobBots who give players their tasks and seem startled if you toss an object at them. Otherwise, they’re largely non-responsive by design. The approach to VR software has proved endlessly replayable, keeping the two games among the highest selling and most downloaded in VR headsets many years after release.
"Non-playable characters in VR have been very important to me," Reimer wrote over direct message. "The bots in those games were designed to maximize expressiveness and fit within the world given the constraints and limitations on input. NPCs have all had a fundamental limitation on input. The biggest missing one being voice."
In a new video from AstroBeam, Reimer shows an attempt to grow far beyond a jobbot or chatbot with three people co-located by headset into the same virtual space together and a fourth avatar in the space representing an embodied agent who can carry on a conversation with the humans in the room.
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"A problem with multiplayer virtual worlds is that they fall into one of two camps," Reimer wrote. "First they are public, so you are tossed into a mosh pit of humans. Most people hate this and rightfully so this isn’t how the real world works. Or they are private, but then those feel really empty because people don’t have a lot of VR friends and they aren’t online all the time."
Reimer frames the agents that AstroBeam is building now, driven by large language models, as providing "the perfect middle ground."
"The NPC can set the tone for the voice experience," Reimer wrote. "There's also variety of personality. You and your friends being able to join in a conversation or task with a variety of different personalities is fun and engaging."
AstroBeam has big ambitions, then, with agents in VR spaces who have memory and feel like "part of the world" rather than just being "a thing in it."
"Turns out having only a chat bot isn’t that interesting," Reimer wrote. "One that understands the world, can react, and have emotion is where your brain really buys in."
We've written some of our articles from VR. Not a lot, mind you, but it is not something unusual for UploadVR writers to attempt it.
David Heaney wrote his review of the Apple Vision Pro from inside the headset. This article, too, was written inside a VR headset – the much more affordable Meta Quest 3. More precisely, this article was written on a Steam decktop from inside the Quest 3.
Apple iPad AV Adapter with HDMI out and USB-A port
Anker 6-in-1 Hub with HDMI out, USB-C power delivery in and USB-A ports
Long USB-A to USB-C cord capture card video/audio transmission
Long USB-C cords for power delivery
Steam Deck is wired to Quest 3 and the Deck's display is turned off for private viewing inside VR. Quest 3, instead, shows a large compressed 1080p virtual display wherever I want to put it. I'm typing on the Decktop keyboard, connected via Bluetooth to the Steam Deck.
Steam Desktop window management on Steam Deck showing Chrome, Steam and physical cartridges running on hardware connected through a USB hub to the Deck.
We've already covered how to output HDMI devices to Quest with a capture card, though HDCP copyright protections will block some uses. In the case of this Steam desktop floating inside the Quest home space, typing on a giant display can be easier than squinting at the tiny screen and craning your neck down for hours. The decktop can make up for its tiny physical screen with a much larger virtual one when docked into VR mode via the tiny Shadowcast 2 capture card.
To any onlookers, it looks like the Steam Deck is off.
You can easily pair a mouse, keyboard or gamepad with the Steam Deck as well for more input options beyond these, and a mouse may be necessary here as the trackpad on this decktop isn't ideal in many scenarios.
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Steam Deck supports setting Steam's desktop to render at up to 4096x2160 at 30 Hz, even though the Shadowcast 2 signal received by the Quest is 1920x1080 at 50-60 Hz. I've tried a couple different render resolutions and am typing this at 2560x1440 rendering at 60 Hz. There's a loss in quality in the compression pathway, but the path offers a nice amount of space for multiple windows with text size in Google Chrome increased to 200 percent for this writing.
For a game like Stardew Valley – a game with very little action to be impacted by input or display lag– the 4K canvas (compressed down here multiple times before it hits your eyeballs) still lets you see much of your farm at one time. It's a trade-off that a gamer won't make if they've just bought a recent generation console or NVIDIA graphics card to drive cars or planes on true 3K or 4K displays with high frame rates.
It is, however, a very cool option to play some games in bed without disturbing your partner in the slightest. Have a cat or dog? Let 'em climb on your chest because they won't block your screen.
I've used Steam Deck and Quest 3 in an assortment of scenarios that previously only Apple Vision Pro has been interesting enough to use in.
I could leave the Steam Deck handheld PC on my bedside table, or in the living room, with its screen off while I surfed the web, watched movies, and played games projected from it to a surface in VR. The video and audio from HDMI comes via the USB cord running up to my headset. You could pack the handheld and its USB hubs into a bag with a big battery pack and head out into the world with a headless Deck accessible inside Quest at any time.
If Apple can use a cord like that to power headset, Meta is starting to show how it can use USB to pipe around Steam in its rawest form yet as an incredibly potent complement to the games on Meta’s Horizon store. You could grab a Resident Evil home space from SideQuest for ambiance, boot up Resident Evil 4 for Quest and keep Resident Evil 4's remake playable as a floating screen from Steam.
When I travel next, I'm taking Steam Deck with Meta glasses, Meta headset, and the decktop with VR powering my personal computing.
My other option is to take a $3,500 Apple Vision Pro and Macbook Air. That setup should be able to get a game like Stardew Valley running at a higher resolution for a cross country play session on a flight, and wirelessly on Vision Pro to boot! I can also get my iPhone mirroring in VR wirelessly with minimal effort too.
Steam Deck has more games I want to play, though, with handheld mode available in addition to decktop mode and deck-in-bag mode. And when I want to write an article for UploadVR, I can put on the VR headset for focus and privacy on a single task with a portable computer at the core of my experience that's fundamentally more open than an iPad. iPad, of course, is the nearest competitor here with Apple's magnetic docking keyboards offering a smooth handoff from tablet mode to laptop mode. Steam Deck isn't there yet from a software perspective, but the Steam Decktop with Quest can still win over users even with the clumsier dock attachment and web of USB hubs. If you've ever felt a little too tethered to Google, Apple, or Microsoft, you've got an unexpected team-up to think about here.
Meta and Valve offer a fascinating path forward — the decktop. Consider the prospect of back-to-school shopping. If you know a young person with computing needs, would you get them a Chromebook, Macbook, iPad, Microsoft Surface or splurge for a gaming laptop or desktop?
I propose the Steam decktop is easy to use, fun, and if the recipient opens desktop mode even once they're going to learn more about the role of open source in modern life than via an iPad with screen time or a Chromebook with services tethered to the network. I found myself pretty surprised how enjoyable and easy it is to customize the Linux desktop exactly to my liking. Then take SteamOS from Steam Deck and plug it into a Quest 3's Horizon OS to superpower your experience. To be clear, you won't get SteamVR games this way from a Steam Deck but you will get its flatscreen content in some places where wireless Steam Link may not be possible or convenient.
The kids can wave goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft from their VR headsets. This is the way. I'll also note that some headsets, notably early HTC standalones and AR glasses, function in similar ways with video in – but the combination of Steam Deck with Quest 3 standalone VR is a potent approach to the idea of a VR laptop.
I'll have a follow-up article covering a separate set of tests considering latency and compression for casual gaming with a short-range wireless HDMI transmitter and receiver added to the mix to bring in games from PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
