Valve's Steam Frame launched Sept 14 at $1,059 (256GB) and $1,299 (1TB). Early reviews are unusually consistent: excellent comfort and eye-tracked foveated streaming, painful price, short battery life, and monochrome passthrough unless you pay about $150 more for a color camera.
Editor's selection
Uncanny Alley: A New Day, a live immersive theatre piece staged inside VRChat by Ferryman Collective and Cape Town's Virtual Worlds Company, won the Emmy for Outstanding Emerging Media Program, beating Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout.
Joe Landers' gearmulator-md-mm fork emulates the Motorola DSP56303 chips inside Elektron's Machinedrum and Monomachine, running them as free, GPL-3.0 standalone apps and VST3 plugins. It's alpha (v0.1.0-alpha.11, Sept 11), CPU-hungry, and requires ROMs from your own hardware.
YICCA 26/27, the International Contest of Contemporary Art run by Association Moho, accepts work in any medium, including video, installation and performance, from individuals and groups worldwide. Deadline Oct 8, 2026; €50 entry fee; prizes of €3,000 / €1,000 / €500 plus a €1,000 student prize; 18 finalists exhibit in Venice Nov 14–28.
Today in Creative Technology
Most read
Spotlight
Most art about quantum computing is art about the idea of quantum computing. Libby Heaney is the exception: she holds a PhD in quantum information science and executes work on actual quantum processors, across video, sculpture, watercolor, AR, and sound. Her 'Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within)' is showing at the Shenzhen Art and Technology Biennale through April 2027.
Read the story →The inaugural Shenzhen Art and Technology Biennale opened at the Shenzhen International Museum of Art under the title 'A Glimpse of the Infinite,' running through April 30, 2027. Co-curated by Naiyi Wang and Mónica Bello — formerly of CERN's Arts programme — it puts Semiconductor, Libby Heaney, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and Qiu Zhijie alongside Victor Vasarely.
Developer brenpoly's PolyMO is a physical virtual pet — an ESP32-S3 board with a 368×448 AMOLED face — that gets sick and eventually dies if you spend too long on your phone, tracked over Bluetooth with no cloud dependency at all. On-device language models (llama.cpp, Whisper, Piper) let it talk back and read notifications aloud instead of showing them to you.
Research Made Simple
Released September 4, Viggle-Animate is Viggle Research's first open-weight model: a 33.1B full finetune of MiniMax-H3's ref2va transformer, distilled to three forward passes. It needs no pose skeleton, mask, or prompt at inference — only a driving video and one of its own frames, repainted. 124 frames render in 26 seconds on a B200.
Read the translation →Just published
What to install this week
Creative Coding
Browser-based livecoding video synth, now with WebGPU-backed rendering. Watch: Olivia Jack (Hydra’s creator) on live coding visuals.
AI & Creative Tools
Community node graphs for chained image-to-video generation workflows. Watch: a step-by-step ComfyUI walkthrough for beginners.
Creative Coding
Friendly machine-learning library for p5.js sketches, rebuilt on TensorFlow.js. Watch: The Coding Train’s beginner’s guide to ml5.js.
XR / Spatial Computing
Latest build adds native spatial output for Vision Pro and Quest. Watch: TouchDesigner for beginners in one hour.
Music Technology
Esoteric livecoding sequencer for procedural sequencers and mangled MIDI. Watch: a guided tour of ORCA’s rhythm and math.
Interactive Art
VJ and projection-mapping software for real-time visual performance. Watch: a beginner’s quick-start guide to VJing with Resolume.
From the editorial team
Testing MediaPipe hand tracking against an old webcam to drive a Hydra patch — more jank than expected.
Related coverage → Just startedFine-tuning a small diffusion model on a week of studio photos to see what it learns about our own mess.
Related coverage → Wrapping upAn ESP32 + contact mic rig that pauses a plotter drawing whenever the room gets noisy.
Related coverage →Festivals, calls, conferences