Between 2024 and 2026, the VR workspace market did not disappear. It changed hands. The platform giants that treated working in VR as a feature stepped back, while the dedicated apps that treated it as a product kept shipping. OVERAY DESK, a cross-platform VR workspace app for Meta Quest, PICO, and Galaxy XR, is one of those apps. Here is what moved.
The platform giants pulled back
Meta discontinued Horizon Workrooms in February 2026, four and a half years after launching it on Quest 2 in 2021. In the same window it stopped selling Horizon managed services and commercial Quest headsets, and Reality Labs laid off a reported 10% of staff. The retreat followed years of heavy spending: Reality Labs had run up roughly $83.6 billion in cumulative operating losses through 2025. Workrooms was Meta’s flagship answer to remote work in VR, and Meta walked away from it.
Apple took a quieter version of the same path. Vision Pro launched in February 2024 at $3,499 and held around 5% of the VR/MR market. By 2026, after a modest M5 refresh, sales stayed slow and Apple shifted attention toward smart glasses. Its main workspace feature, Mac Virtual Display, extends one Mac rather than building independent virtual monitors.
The companies with the largest VR platforms decided workspace was not where they wanted to compete.
The dedicated apps kept building
The demand did not leave with them. It moved to apps built around the workspace itself.
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Immersed kept its multi-screen app running and continued developing Visor, its own work-focused headset.
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Virtual Desktop added multi-monitor support, streaming up to three monitors on Quest 3, on top of its PC streaming.
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OVERAY DESK supports up to five freely adjustable virtual monitors, and sells Tune, an open Quest 3 head strap built for view of your surroundings.
These apps share one trait the platforms never committed to: multi-monitor layout is the product, not a side feature.
The hardware consolidated and got cheaper
The hardware underneath got cheaper and more varied. Meta launched the Quest 3S in 2024 at $299 and cut the Quest 3 to $499, putting capable mixed-reality hardware within reach of mainstream buyers. In October 2025, Samsung shipped the Galaxy XR at $1,799 as the first Android XR device, built with Google and Qualcomm, opening a new platform alongside Quest and PICO.
Headset shipments told a mixed story. VR and mixed-reality units fell through 2025 as smart glasses surged, but the category stayed concentrated: Meta shipped roughly three of every four headsets, with Apple, Sony, and PICO maker ByteDance splitting most of the rest. For a workspace app, that means one dominant platform to support and several smaller ones worth covering.
Where OVERAY DESK fits
OVERAY DESK was built for the market that emerged from this shift: many headsets, no dominant workspace platform, and users who want a layout they control. When the big platforms are not building this for you, three things matter: support across the headset you actually own, real multi-monitor layout instead of a single mirrored screen, and comfort hardware for long sessions. OVERAY DESK covers all three. If you came to VR for work after the giants stepped back, that is the gap it fills.
