Orbit
Orbit Roundup · 16 Mar – 22 Mar

Week 12in XR, AI, 3D & creative tech

29 stories · 11 min · out 23 Mar 2026. Picked by Tom Martin-Davies.

What's in the week

What happened this week:

  • GPT-5.4 lands, agents get personal. OpenAI shipped GPT-5.4 as Perplexity pitched a personal computer agent and open-source coding agents kept pace.
  • DLSS 5 splits the room. Nvidia's neural rendering is a leap in fidelity, or the moment the GPU starts deciding what your game looks like.
  • Meta steps back from VR worlds. Horizon Worlds dropped VR support while others pushed an open metaverse browser and quieter, useful headset apps.
  • Stop-motion and handmade at the Oscars. KPop Demon Hunters won, LAIKA marked 20 years, and studios shared how hand-made animation still gets made.
01What happened this week
2D, 3D & Design

DLSS 5 splits the room

Nvidia's neural rendering is a leap in fidelity, or the moment the GPU starts deciding what your game looks like.

Fxguide ↗Creativebloq ↗

02

Inspiration

12 projects · tap to watch
tools3dart
1/12
80 Lv

Godot Parallax Effect by Binbun

Binbun, known for Godot shaders, created a fascinating parallax effect. This visually appealing work uses textures to map parallax layers and create depth. The setup is available on itch.io.

2dtrends
2/12
Creativebloq

KPop Demon Hunters Oscar Win

KPop Demon Hunters won Best Animated Feature at the Oscar. The award has significant implications for the animation industry.

3dvfx
3/12
Creativebloq

Nvidia DLSS 5: Graphics Leap or Control End?

Nvidia's DLSS 5 is its boldest graphics leap, but also its most controversial. The article questions whether this new technology represents the future of game graphics or if it marks the end of artistic control.

designart3d
4/12
Designboom

David Hockney's Immersive Opera Stage Designs

David Hockney's immersive opera stage designs offer a fantastical world. These sets use the same colors and perspectives as his paintings, allowing actors to perform within his art.

artdesign2d
5/12
Thisiscolossal

NeSpoon's Lace Murals in Urban Spaces

NeSpoon's patterned murals proliferate across urban spaces with white lace. Scaled-up needlework installations give new meaning to 'craft corner,' showcasing intricate urban art.

2dvfx3d
6/12
Itsnicethat

Small Prophets Animated Alchemy Breakdown

Mackenzie Crook’s Small Prophets animation involved animators Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson. They brought the uncanny homunculi to life using stop motion, live action puppets, and CG, blending imagination with craft.

art3d
7/12
Thisiscolossal

Ekow Nimako's Afrofuturistic LEGO Sculptures

Ekow Nimako's elaborate Afrofuturistic sculptures transform thousands of black LEGO bricks. This work, inspired by myth and masks, showcases unique material experimentation in art, creating fantastical forms.

designapple3d
8/12
Designboom

Space-Inspired Mini Apple Workstation

A space-inspired mini Apple workstation pays homage to classic LEGO computers. This device includes studs that function as a media control knob and a wireless charger for Apple Watch or AirPods.

vfx3d
9/12
Fxguide

NVIDIA's New DLSS 5 Neural Rendering

NVIDIA's new real-time neural rendering with DLSS 5 redefines how final pixels are made. This technology combines conventional rendering with learned inference, changing the underlying process of visual creation.

artdesign
10/12
Thisiscolossal

Pejac's Trompe-L'œil Graph Paper Art

Pejac transforms basic graph paper into detailed, trompe-l'œil tableaux. Pejac challenges perceptions of space and the 'blank slate' by creating intricate graphite drawings on graph paper.

2dart
11/12
Itsnicethat

Nippets Hand-Drawn Hidden-Object Game

Nippets is a hand-drawn, hidden-object game from Blinkink, designed to make you slow down and relax. This independently developed video game, produced by Blink Industries, functions as an interactive picture book.

2dvfxart
12/12
Itsnicethat

Laika's 20 Years of Stop-Motion

Laika's 20 years of stop-motion animation offer lessons in craft and storytelling. The studio celebrates its anniversary with a new feature, Wildwood, and a book reflecting on two decades of moviemaking, showcasing authentic craft

03

Your feed

All the week's news
Follow topics to build your feed
AIr/creativecoding

Audioreactive MRIs

u/uisato's Audioreactive MRIs likely showcases a creative coding project. It probably features a visual effect responding to audio.

AIr/creativecoding

EverGreen Landscapes

u/Qotonana's EverGreen Landscapes is a creative coding piece. It offers visual inspiration from generative art, showcasing digital art.

AIJustainews

OpenAI Releases ChatGPT 5.4

OpenAI released ChatGPT 5.4, more capable and efficient for daily tasks. It shows a response plan before generating longer answers, helping guide the AI. GPT-5.2 retires on June 5, 2026.

Design80 Lv

Unity Adds Steam & Linux Support

Unity now officially supports Steam, SteamOS, and Linux. This means a native solution for bringing games to Steam and enhanced Linux runtime, making game development easier.

AIDesignweek

AI in Branding: Clicks vs. Meaning

AI is good for clicks, humans for meaning, and brands need both. The article argues against a simple AI vs. human framing, urging an understanding of AI's strengths in specific contexts for marketing.

AIThe Decoder

Perplexity's 'Personal Computer' AI Agent

Perplexity AI's 'Personal Computer' offers a tireless AI assistant for $200 a month. It works 24/7, handling emails, presentations, and app control from a dedicated Mac Mini, controllable remotely.

Designr/blender

Human Loop Blender Animation

Human Loop is a Blender animation piece by u/morelebaks. The artist shares their work, providing links to their Instagram and YouTube for more details.

XRUploadVR

Spacious Places VR Meditation App

Spacious Places is a VR health and wellness app for musical meditation. It allows users to relax, breathe, and play virtual musical instruments in calming natural environments.

AIThe Decoder

OpenAI's Enterprise AI Adoption Challenge

OpenAI faces a problem getting companies to use its AI beyond ChatGPT. It pushes to integrate its AI into large companies through sales, partnerships, and a new deployment arm, but demand for its enterprise AI agent platform, Fron

XRr/WebXR

Open Metaverse Browser Initiative Launched

Open Metaverse Browser Initiative launched as an open-source project to build a native metaverse browser. It is built on OpenXR, glTF, and new NSO protocols, directly relevant to WebXR builders.

XRUploadVR

Horizon Worlds Drops VR Support

Horizon Worlds is dropping VR support, going flatscreen-only. Meta's platform will only be available as a flatscreen experience for the web and smartphones from June, indicating a strategic shift away from VR.

AINxcode

GPT-5.4 vs GPT-5.2: Upgrade Guide

GPT-5.4 is a significant upgrade from GPT-5.2, offering native Computer Use and expanding context to 1M tokens. GPT-5.2 retires June 5, 2026, making an upgrade essential, especially for production code.

AIr/comfyui

LTX-2.3 4x Keyframes (8GB VRAM) ComfyUI

LTX-2.3 4x Keyframes (8GB VRAM) is a ComfyUI workflow. This offers a solution for video generation using LTX 2.3 with limited VRAM, a useful creative AI workflow.

XRr/augmentedreality

Smart Glasses Help Dementia Patients

Smart Glasses are changing lives for dementia patients through a new AI platform, CrossSense. This platform won a £1m prize for using smart glasses with an AI assistant, Wispy, to guide wearers through daily life and enhance indep

Designr/blender

3D Pixel Art of Childhood Building

3D Pixel, The old building where I lived in my childhood, is an animated 3D art piece created in Blender. This work embraces a realistic visual language with refined model details and handcrafted pixel-based textures.

AIMarktechpost

Google Colab Open-Source MCP Server

Google Colab now has an open-source MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server. This enables AI agents to interact directly with the Google Colab environment, providing programmatic access to create, modify, and utilize Colab runtimes wi

AIOpencode

OpenCode - Open Source AI Coding Agent

OpenCode is a new open-source AI coding agent. It helps write code in the terminal, IDE, or desktop, offering features like LSP support, multi-session capabilities, and integration with various LLMs and editors.

04

Back in time

4 issues