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Norman Chan, better known as Norm from Tested, is perhaps the most trusted expert with his videos covering modern consumer hardware. He’s also among a handful of journalists who believed in VR before Mark Zuckerberg showed up to buy Oculus.

On Tuesday, we connected from my Steam Frame in New York to his in California using Riverside for a conversation about the latest in virtual reality.

Norm has had the Steam Frame since late August while mine arrived on Friday and we’ve each dropped our initial thoughts out onto our respective audiences with Tested’s one-hour-plus video being the most thorough breakdown of the hardware available right now. As Valve readies to ship out the Frame to buyers and Arcturus Industries prepares to give it color passthrough, Meta is preparing what should be the announcement of its next-generation VR glasses. It’s a big time for technological change with some folks likely to experience whiplash as they realize VR is rising from the ashes of 2026 like a phoenix with more comfortable eyewear than ever before transporting people into simulated spaces.

Listen now to the conversation with Norm as we cover his first VR experience, his favorite moment of presence, and the persistent belief in this medium.

“It still feels like such a frontier,” he said. “But there’s so much technology and so much research and so much effort that’s put into even the experiences that we have that make what we see possible, and feel comfortable and natural. And we take some of that for granted … we’re just discovering these formats and … these trillion-dollar companies are still putting money into it.”

September is turning into an incredibly busy month for VR & AR, but I’ve extended an open invitation to Norm as well as CNET’s Scott Stein for a conversation after Meta Connect as we try to digest everything that’s changing in technology.

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One of the first articles on Good Virtual Reality checked in with Owlchemy Labs head Andrew Eiche about the path to 1 billion people in VR headsets.

VR glasses are incoming from Meta and the most comfortable VR headset I’ve ever worn is shipping from Valve, but prices are increasing for headsets from hundreds to thousands of dollars. It’s looking increasingly like VR’s path to sitting on 1 billion heads might happen sometime in the 2030s.

Owlchemy made Job Simulator and its most recent project Dimensional Double Shift launched in early access in 2024 with a bold statement about the importance of both multiplayer and hand tracking to spending extended time in virtual reality. On both Android XR and Meta Quest devices, the game could only be played with other people and your hands in the open air. From today, though, controller support is being added to coincide with the launch of Steam Frame from Valve and minutes before connecting with Eiche for our podcast I tested out an intriguing demo of multiplayer without the other human players.

“The goal was to create an uncompromising version of multiplayer where you as the single player-player feel very similar to the way that you felt when you were playing multiplayer in, like, a safe synthetic environment,” Eiche said. “A lot of this came from thinking back to playing Unreal Tournament back in the day and being able to set up bot matches with whatever rules I wanted and not having to worry about other people complaining. And then you get to go in the multiplayer match and really test your skills or really like flex that muscle. And so I wanted a similar thing for VR and, especially with VR still in the earlier days, getting people’s schedules together, getting people to play at the same time and getting everybody in that environment can be difficult and playing with randos can be scary. So single player stands as like a third pillar.”

Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review

To fulfill customer orders, I was able to ask the bots for ingredients using my voice and they’d hand them over to me. The feature was far from perfect but there’s still a long way to go in the development of this single-player mode, which is planned for release sometime next year as Owlchemy works to “tame this thing.”

I encourage you to listen to my earlier conversation with Devin Reimer at AstroBeam who licensed some of the tech he built from when he was at Owlchemy to make Stellar Cafe. That game has some similarities to Dimensional Double Shift — both are now working at the cutting edge of voice interaction with bots - but the two titles also play very differently.

With the context that the founding of Good Virtual Reality has some relationship to a disagreement over the use of A.I. and with accelerating experimental modding of classic games into VR with assistance from agents, my conversation with Eiche ends up revealing an incredibly nuanced take from him over the value of game designers and the future of game development.

“AI is never going to be able to tune a game without a human in the loop because games are built for humans,” Eiche said. “You’ll even hear like the super prompter people … eventually just stop telling the machine to adjust it and tell it to give you a bunch of knobs. So you can adjust it and get the game feel. So my recommendation is two things that are gonna win the day. It’s knowing game design and it’s building things that are fundamentally very difficult to write up in a single prompt.”

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You can easily find Tipatat Chennavasin at events where new VR technology is being featured because he’s usually wearing a bright Pokémon shirt that makes him easy to spot in the crowd.

As co-founder and general partner at The Venture Reality Fund he invests in technologies he believes may become key pieces of the slowly maturing virtual reality industry, like Gracia’s volumetric captures. Across a 35-minute conversation recorded from Steam Frame at my home in New York connected to Chennavasin’s place in California we discussed the path to 1 billion people in headsets and the value of both teleportation and virtual assistants.

“Once we have the experiences that can live up to the hype, then I think we’ll get to the billion people,” Chennavasin said. “And given what we’re seeing with the technology and where AI is headed — I think at least with the super assistant — probably within you know three-ish years, maybe sooner. And I think for the holodeck for it to run real time, not just be something that’s a proof of concept in a lab, but something that that actually like you know people could have access to at a relatively affordable price. I think that’s probably maybe five to eight years.”

The conversation touched on similar discussions covered with Andrew Eiche at Owlchemy Labs and Devin Reimer at AstroBeam, two conversations I encourage you to pair with this one. I also brought up the words of Meta top researcher Michael Abrash as we face the era of VR glasses beginning in 2027.

Notably, my conversation with Chennavasin was the very first thing I tested in the standalone Steam Frame headset from Valve. I recorded it using Riverside connecting our video call in the Chrome browser which I downloaded in Linux. I used an external microphone connected to the headset through a USB hub; there was no separate PC involved. The setup allowed me to put the microphone closer to my face because I was able to position the virtual window for managing settings in a spot behind the microphone that would have been impossible if I was trying to keep an eye on a physical monitor. I also edited the recording to 30 minutes using the Steam Frame controller as a mouse and working standalone in Chrome.

This podcast was exclusively published first to paid Good Virtual Reality subscribers during a huge day of VR news coinciding with the official launch of Valve’s Steam Frame. Thank you tremendously for your support as we enter a new era.

This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access.

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Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review

Steam Frame passthrough quality can be dramatically upgraded with an accessory from Arcturus built over the course of a lengthy partnership with Valve. The add-on also captures higher quality spatial video than Apple Vision Pro.

The Arcturus Vision Camera sells for $149 and snaps into the port in the nose area of Steam Frame to immediately upgrade the headset’s passthrough with high-resolution stereo color. Good Virtual Reality spoke with Arcturus CEO Jeffrey Powers for a 21-minute podcast covering the launch features and long-term potential for the device.

Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review

Spatial Video Capture & 3D Gaussian Splatting From Steam Frame

The company offers companion software on PCs for processing captured content into 3D Gaussian Splatting, effectively pulling reconstructions from recorded video. A pair of apps in Steam Frame enable spatial capture as well as viewing the Gaussian splats. Arcturus Vision Camera can also record pose information as a kind of stabilization system during playback for more comfortable viewing of spatial captures.

Powers talks about how increasingly efficient on-device algorithms can do depth estimation, leading us to discuss whether there’s value in headsets including an additional depth sensor. The conversation ends up being a valuable introduction to the state of the art in spatial video and computer vision. Apple Vision Pro, for instance, captures spatial video at just 30 frames per second while the Arcturus add-on can record stereo video to internal storage or the removable microSD card at 60 frames per second in 5K resolution as well as even higher frame rates at reduced resolutions.

The accessory’s debut alongside Steam Frame suggests Valve made a shrewd design decision to reduce cost and weight in the headset by including camera sensors tuned specifically for positional tracking. Simultaneously, Valve partnered with Arcturus to extend the headset’s capabilities substantially for the subset of buyers interested in these features. The Arcturus Vision Camera weighs under 10 grams.

“It should be one of the best devices in the world for recording spatial memories,” Powers says on the Good VR Podcast. “We just went through a house remodel and it took a really long time and one of the things that I was luckily able to do with early versions of our camera was shoot footage and stills of the interior just by walking around. I just walked around and I’m just recording all these frames and then processing that into a 3D reconstruction…I now have these 3D replicas of my house while it was under construction. And so I can go back and see what was in the walls.”

I viewed and captured some stereo video with the Arcturus Vision Camera in headset and I was very impressed by the scale of arms in the scene matching my own arms held out in front of me. The stabilized viewing mode that moves stereo video around you using the pose information during capture is also extremely impressive and now my preferred way to view this type of media. The IPD of the camera’s lenses is very near the average distance between the eyes of adult humans.

Below is video from Cubism, a game that utilizes passthrough on Steam Frame and also shows how the add-on switches from monochrome to color on the fly.

You can watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube with some clips provided by Arcturus showing the passthrough quality and video player.

Below is a 60 FPS test video I shot in Central Park at dusk my first day with Steam Frame. I converted it on Mac using Arcturus’ Vision Sync into various formats for playback.

* Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Quest Format

* Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Vision Pro Format

* Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Side By Side Format

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Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review

Theatre and architecture share a lot in common and Alex Coulombe can be found wherever they intersect.

Coulombe is the head of New York-based team Agile Lens and he recently joined the Good VR Podcast for a discussion about the space. After discussions with groups Ferryman Collective and Tender Claws, each of which has done some pioneering work in VR theatre, it was time to check in with Coulombe to understand the things holding back these kinds of experiences as well as the path ahead.

“I’d like to imagine you could have a show, let’s say kind of like in a black box theater style — something a little bit more minimal — that is happening on a stage. And if you don’t want to put on any devices, that’s fine. You’re gonna watch some very talented performers tell you a good story,” Coulombe explains. “Now, on site, if you put on a device, whether they’re glasses or a full mixed reality headset, you then get this extra world, this extra spectacle, these extra characters that can show up.”

A previous episode of the podcast with Coulombe joined by Steve Lukas covered the fundamental problem of colocating media with people in VR headsets. Agile Lens software Floor Tour and Stage Presence include solutions so that people can walk around a blueprint on the floor or host a performance. Coulombe encourages people interested in exploring these apps to email info@agilelens.com.

“I still find it incredibly fun and nothing brings me more pleasure than getting access to some new VR hardware or software and just getting to play in that sandbox and figure out what are the new affordances that we can do,” Coulombe says. “What are some of the improvements that have been made, what are the new capabilities that are possible to further immerse myself in a world that doesn’t actually exist?”

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The most impressive demo I tried at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach earlier this year was a set of scenes captured by Gracia.

The scenes use Gaussian splatting to deliver volumetric video that far surpasses anything else I’ve seen in the space. The scenes ran on Apple Vision Pro in passthrough mode so I was looking around at the bustling convention center show floor with a musical performer inserted at 1:1 scale anchored to the floor. Vision Pro’s leading display resolution combined with Gracia’s impressive representation made it hard for my brain to discern who in front of me was physically present and who was being teleported in as the moving Gaussian splat.

Lead Gracia researcher Kazii Botashev joined from Kazakhstan with the U.S.-based head of partnerships Logan Lemmon in Venice to speak on the Good VR Podcast covering the rise of Gaussian splatting. It’s currently the leading technology for representing a scene volumetrically and our conversation covers their popularization from around 2023 to the question of how they might reduce the technical overhead of using a hundred or more cameras in making these scenes.

“The main rule is that [the] bigger [the] number of cameras is, [the] better quality that you can achieve,” Botashev said. “So the general direction that all the research currently working on is decreasing number of cameras.”

Lemmon suggested that the first impacts of 4DGS, the shorthand term for Gaussian splats that move over time, are likely to be felt across visual effects. Gracia recently worked with Muse and lead singer Matt Bellamy to capture him and represent him using the tech for a music video.

“The VFX world is just now starting to understand Gaussian splatting,” Lemmon said. “You can capture a 4D sequence and you can process it with us, and then you can slice that sequence into PLYs, which are very, very large point cloud files that you can have interpreted by Nuke or Maya or any sort of 3D software. We just recently worked with the band Muse and the lead singer Matt Bellamy… our partners over at Radiant Images and us, we produced this music video alongside some really wonderful people out of Kazakhstan. The result was a 2D render of Matt Bellamy in a music video, but creators had full three-dimensional control over where the camera was placed, the animation of each of the points of his point cloud. They could explode him, they could zoom into his head, they could place him anywhere in the scene at a very high quality in this very stylized look. So we’re seeing more and more use cases for VFX, and we’re going to start seeing virtual production as well become a major vertical for 4DGS utilization.”

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Supernatural’s original head of fitness Leanne Pedante is one of VR’s first stars.

Her face greets athletes who find themselves in virtual reality and her voice accompanies them on a fitness journey through the sweaty ups and downs of rigorous movement. Many members of the Supernatural service credit her and fellow coaches with helping them make behavioral and even identity shifts leading to dramatically different lives. Their hearts broke in January this year when Meta laid her off along with most of the staff at Supernatural, a studio it acquired just a few years earlier, causing a reset of the VR industry from pioneers in video like Felix & Paul to game studios like Schell Games.

Supernatural Health launches this fall on the Quest store as an independent entity again and Pedante, her fellow coaches, and the original founders of the company are set to restart anew their path into VR fitness. While technically they compete with the likes of Sam Cole at FitXR, the two services along with other fitness-focused experiences offered in VR see more ground to gain together reaching people worldwide who aren’t going to the physical gym anytime soon.

“When I initially beta tested it, I was like, my god, this is amazing. But I really didn’t predict that it was gonna reach the demographics of the people that it reached,” Pedante said on the Good VR Podcast. “I didn’t think that it would kind of have this incredible [adoption] by older folks which was a total shock to me.”

As January 1 approaches, another year over, a whole wave of people will be donning new VR headsets with resolutions in mind to start the year building new habits. It’s a bit of a mantra at Supernatural, Pedante explained, that the aim of their service is to make something that “tastes like ice cream and works like broccoli.”

“We wanna be the best at delivering this distinct thing that we have had person after person after person tell us for the past six years, which is I have never enjoyed working out as much as I do doing this thing,” Pedante explained. “When we talk about building a fitness habit, it’s easy to diminish it to be like any other habit. But the reality is like if I get myself to floss my teeth every day, which I’m still working on, but like if I’ve managed to master the habit of flossing every day, it doesn’t really change my self-perception. I don’t have some like revelatory identity experience of like ‘I’m now a person who flosses their teeth.’ But when you go from feeling like someone who has never been able to exercise, never enjoyed movement, never felt your body as the source of power, and then you shift into being a person who looks forward to the movement, who doesn’t cower from a physical challenge. That is a major identity shift. And Supernatural consistently delivers that to people.”

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The latest VR Games Showcase came and went with a series of announcements including two big projects from Flat2VR Studios, System Shock 2 and High On Life, alongside other eye-catching work like Spirit Ritual.

The show was put together by Jamie Feltham and Zeena Al-Obaidi, the latest in a series they put together spotlighting immersive VR gaming in the style of Nintendo Direct.

I’ve worked with both of them in the past and catching up with Jamie gave us a space to talk about the path from the DK1 in 2013 to Quest 3 in 2023 and now to Steam Frame in 2026 and next to VR glasses and the potential of a Quest 4, perhaps, in 2028.

“My major hope would be that Meta compares notes with Valve…and then when we’re finally talking, hopefully, about the Quest 4, likely 2028,” Feltham said. “It all comes down to platform holders continuing to show the faith and keep producing hardware and keep supporting, to some degree, content. I think we’re gonna end up with something, hopefully in the early 2030s, where we’re all looking at something that is like a healthy ecosystem.”

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A skateboarder who suffered a painful injury found a new activity to keep himself active — roller skating through VRChat.

During a year of layoffs or closure for many of the content companies that provided many their first VR experiences, VRChat is seeing record numbers and people like MuhMow are discovering its vibe. He converted a second floor office into a mini roller rink he glides around wearing a Meta Quest Pro and Vive Ultimate Trackers. Years after he forced himself to stop skateboarding he’s recaptured the feeling of being out at the skate park and doing tricks in front of a small crowd.

“If you set your mind to something you can do it,” he says on the Good VR Podcast. “One thing that people are afraid of is failing. And with skateboarding or roller skating, part of the sport is you need to fall to progress. What matters is getting back up and trying again…. You just gotta keep progressing. People are scared of dancing because you might look dumb. Everyone’s gonna look dumb, you’re just starting out. It took me forever to make myself look cool in my videos.”

He’s found an avatar he feels at home inside and he works with collaborators to add roller skates to the feet. He moved everything he could out of the office to avoid collisions and wears battery packs to go the distance. His longest session in VR lasted around eight hours.

“If I’m in a lobby and I have below 20 FPS, I cannot skate because I’m moving too much,” he says. “I think the most I get is 40-50.”

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Meta finds itself in its latest media firestorm with reports of people harassing others while capturing videos with AI glasses. In response, Meta says it’ll effectively de-platform its own hardware product from people tampering with the device to remove the white recording notification light. Reportedly, the company sent out cease-and-desist letters to groups offering that modification as a service.

The founder of Be My Eyes, Hans Jørgen Wiberg, expresses both anger and sadness about people using the glasses this way because he’s a member of a group with a very different use for Meta’s glasses. Tens of thousands of people who are blind or have low vision use the Meta glasses to make video calls to sighted volunteers around the world. The volunteers look through the camera on the glasses and answer questions about what they see.

“Even my wife said, don’t wear those glasses if you don’t use them. And I was like, ‘Okay.’ Two weeks ago I would never think about not wearing them,” Wiberg said. “Now I put them in my pocket and then when I need them, I take them out and put them on…I should not have to do that. That is simply wrong.”

I connected with Wiberg in Denmark using the podcasting platform Riverside to record a conversation about Be My Eyes. I recommend pairing this conversation with the recent one talking with CNET gadget expert Scott Stein in which he advised not accusing strangers of being perverts for simply wearing the glasses. The two conversations make for a deep dive into the way social norms are being changed by Meta’s glasses.

I personally stopped wearing Meta glasses in public due to their ability to make others uncomfortable. During the conversation with Wiberg I shared the fact that, when I did wear them, I very quickly started practicing a new bit of social etiquette by placing them on the top of my head when entering a public restroom. Wiberg suggests similar etiquette would apply to blind people facing the need for a public restroom. Simply asking someone there for assistance or feeling the way around the room should be the standard, he says.

The example highlights a difficult reality about computerized glasses. There’s a future where a locally running AI assistant can successfully answer the request “help me find the restroom” with zero Internet access. In such a scenario would a white light be needed at all when locally analyzing what’s seen by the glasses’ sensors against the device’s training, successfully directing a person step by step to a urinal or toilet without the Internet? Such an automated use would be very similar to the simple sensors already present in the bathroom for identifying when someone puts their hands under a faucet or automatically flushing a toilet when they leave the stall.

What I’m highlighting here is one of the reasons I lost interest in Meta’s glasses. Meta changed the entire product category from being centered on the cameras to being centered on artificial intelligence. Instead of personally taking photos and videos of my walks through Central Park, I had the feeling of capturing imagery to train Meta’s AI. Once AI is trained properly, there may be a future where these kinds of camera glasses don’t allow users to capture videos and photos at all to avoid any misuse by individuals, while simultaneously allowing uses like the path to the bathroom provided through offline automation.

In this hypothetical future, when automation takes the place of an interaction between two people grounded in empathy, what do humans lose?

“I have never done anything wrong and I have no intentions of doing something wrong. Of course, also blind people can do stupid stuff,” Wiberg says. “That’s not what I’m saying. But at least we have a very good reason to use those glasses to understand our surroundings and we should never think twice about putting those glasses on. But I totally understand why people don’t want to be approached by people who maybe don’t even know what a white cane is, or anything like that, and just see the glasses and say, hey, ‘what are you doing?’”

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The head of SideQuest is looking to resurrect AltSpace again.

The well-loved social platform Altspace closed down twice before. First, the startup behind the service was to close in 2017 during the start of modern VR’s first winter. It was rescued, however, in a last-minute buyout from Microsoft. Then Microsoft pulled the plug in 2023 in a sign of what was yet to come for Horizon Worlds and Rec Room.

Now SideQuest CEO Shane Harris is looking to re-launch the service yet again.

“Altspace was kind of like a safe space,” Harris said on the Good VR Podcast. “It was a place where people and organizations, groups, even brands could associate with it because they were, a lot more careful about how they presented it, how the avatars were presented, how the worlds, how their policies and how they worked with the community was always different in there.”

One of the core questions I had for Harris is whether his approach will be built in such a way that users might have some protection for the permanence of their worlds if SideQuest should be unable to continue it sometime in the future. It’s still early days, so there’s no clear answer to that question, but Harris did make it clear he’s thinking about it.

“We are building services behind the scenes to power this new AltSpace that will also be services that we offer out generally to other developers, like live networking, voice and data services, other parts of the platform,” Harris said. “We’ve built browser integrations, we’ve got creation tools and SDKs, we’ve got character systems and avatar systems. And actually what we’ve done is to build all of these out as modular pieces so that we can make those available to other developers as well.”

Harris connected to me from Dubai using the podcast recording platform Riverside and I edited the conversation down to around 45 minutes.

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I grabbed my Super Mario 64 cartridge off the shelf, backed up the game to my Mac and stuck the file in a folder on Meta Quest 3. Then I opened the APK sent to me by Lucas Martinic of studio Present Futures.

Voila. Mario was controllable by the analog stick on my right controller and, with my left hand, I could reach into the virtual world I first visited around 30 years ago. Mario could stand on my hand, I could lift him up by raising my arm, and I could even pinch him by the hat and pull him forward into the physical room with me. Essentially, the Master Hand from Super Smash Bros was now reality. There Mario was, for the first time in my life, standing there on my dining room table. I pushed the stick to the right and he fell off the edge of the table and started running around on my floor.

I put Mario back inside his virtual world and then used the stick to send him into the castle. That’s where the magic ended. I found the limit of Martinic’s work to bridge Super Mario 64 to physical reality. To understand how this remarkable interaction came to be, I invited Martinic on the Good VR Podcast.

“That’s the idea, to just inspire other developers and maybe non-XR developers to jump into XR,” Martinic said.

During the recording he shared that he worked with an AI agent to make Mario’s transition across mixed reality possible. He said he spends around $600 per month total for three Claude Max plans as part of his ongoing exploratory work with VR headsets. Another project Martinic is working on called Inkphony won $100,000 from a Meta hackathon. The app uses the Logitech MX Ink stylus to draw musical notes directly onto a physical surface and the app promises the ability to pluck sounds from objects in the environment.

“We are still…redesigning some stuff because the premise, or the vision, that we presented for that hackathon is not feasible to do,” Martinic explained during the podcast. “It’s possible, but it’s not sustainable. Because the way we set up the vision AI models that we use to manage to do this will surpass what people pay for the app.”

The podcast with Martinic is around 18 minutes long and covers the odd economies of eye-catching AI-driven development.

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A recent paper authored by Dr. Bobby Korn at the University of California, San Diego made some intriguing conclusions from 16 operations completed with physicians wearing Apple Vision Pro to view cameras inside the human body.

Here are the listed highlights from the paper, bolding added:

* Spatial computing improves ergonomic comfort in endoscopic surgery.

* Apple Vision Pro enables immersive, hands-free surgical visualization.

* Operative time shortened without increased cognitive workload.

* Low cost and small footprint make spatial computing feasible for operating room integration.

The paper suggests that, on average, operations could be performed over eight minutes faster because the doctors didn’t keep turning their heads to look at a physical monitor showing the live view from a camera inside the body.

“When you’re actually looking at a monitor, you’re actually oftentimes using one monitor that is shared by everyone in the entire room,” Dr. Korn said on the Good VR Podcast. “So it’s not naturally the most ergonomic thing that you’re using. So you’re turning your head, you’re turning your hips, and you’re doing this hundreds of times throughout the case. And that creates a significant amount of fatigue for the surgeon themselves. What ends up happening is that when I’m doing work in the nose, taking instruments in and out, I’m actually doing this hundreds of times during the case. And as I look down and I look up, my eyes are constantly looking for the image on the screen. With the Vision Pro, the image is always in front of us. We always see it.”

From the paper’s conclusion:

“…contemporary operating room costs approximate $51 per minute. Applying the observed 8.3 min reduction yields an estimated saving of roughly $420 per case, and for a practice performing 100 to 200 endoscopic DCR procedures annually this would correspond to an estimated $42,000 to $85,000 per year.”

I encourage you to pair this conversation with my earlier talk with Jamie Lockwood at HMDmd for an overview of the types of procedures that might feature paired cameras providing 3D stereoscopic imagery to doctors looking inside the body. In some situations, doctors might also want an open periphery from their head-mounted display to occasionally look down at their hands directly. Overall, the two conversations paint a picture of the research frontier at the very cutting edge of medical technology.

While the scale of the study is small, if its takeaways can be replicated elsewhere, there might be profound implications for healthcare savings provided by VR headsets.

“The things that really drew me to Apple’s device was that the resolution is just so high and so crisp,” Dr. Korn said. “The refresh rate is good. But in addition to that, though, is the pass through. So you mentioned that other system where you actually place it over your eye and you’re able to look in the periphery. Every time you do that, your eye has to undergo a process called accommodation where you actually change the shape of your eye…And that just adds to the fatigue and exhaustion to a surgeon if they’re, say, doing an operation for several hours at a time….You want a surgeon who’s comfortable, who can see exceedingly well with the images presented into them, really to give you the best outcome.”

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VR’s ability to instantly embody a person in simulated space turns out to be an incredible match for fitness. The idea that you can forget the pressure of the physical world and get into the rhythmic flow of a workout is one of the ways VR is transforming lives all over the world.

I captured some of those stories in a recent writeup about Supernatural’s return to independence, but now I’ve had the CEO of FitXR Sam Cole on the Good VR Podcast to discuss their 10-year story building active fitness applications for VR. If there are any FitXR fans reading this, or listening to the podcast, feel free to send an email to editor@goodvirtualreality.com to tell me about how the service has affected your life for potential coverage in a future article. Please include how you want to be identified in the article and as many details as you can about your fitness journey.

“Something like only 4% of Americans have a gym membership and actively use that gym membership. It just shows you that the vast majority of the population aren’t engaging regularly with exercise,” Cole says on the podcast. “The fitness industry looks at people who haven’t formed a habit with exercise — they won’t ever publicly say this — but they’ll generally feel like it’s a problem with the customer. And those customers are fickle and can’t form a habit and therefore [are] a low value to try and serve. But the opposite is true. It’s a problem with the product. The more that you’re able to build a product to serve this audience, the more that you’re able to serve a truly mass market audience.”

The conversation with Cole goes full circle from their initial interest in building for an augmented reality headset from Magic Leap to being encouraged to build for VR headsets and finally to the coming wave of glasses-sized VR eyewear that can transform people’s perception about what the devices are for.

“We will have headsets soon that feel a lot more like glasses in terms of form factor. That’s going to be really significant for overall adoption … we’ve done a bunch of things with Meta over the years where we’ve tried to sell headsets to our target demographic and really market headsets as pieces of fitness equipment rather than a gaming console. When we talk to customers in that kind of sales process, you really understand their skepticism,” Cole said. “Let’s just zero in on the Quest, for example, when they look at that device, they think gaming console for kids. They can’t envision themselves wearing that. For us it’s a piece of fitness equipment. They can’t see themselves wearing that to do fitness, but they also can’t see themselves wearing that to watch a movie. They can’t see themselves to do that to take a video call, for example. When you put the Quest 3 on them, none of them go, yeah, I mean it’s great, but if it was just a little bit less heavy, I would buy it. It’s all of this preconceived ideas about what it is and isn’t going to be. So I think it’s so much tied to how the device looks in marketing materials and therefore that driving the adoption … more people need to look at the device and answer yes to the question of ‘can I see myself wearing that?’ Even if wearing that only means wearing it in my own home. I’m very supportive of the approach the hardware manufacturers take here trying to drive more use cases of people wearing the devices out in public as well, watching movies on a plane or on a train … But also I get it from a productivity use case as well, whereas if you walked around more cafes, right, and you saw people working with these headsets on, I think that that would be beneficial as well. Those are all secondary to this fundamental question of can I see myself wearing that device? The new devices that are coming, the answer to that is gonna be yes for a lot more people than it has been for the historical devices.”

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A pair of newly announced VR games are scheduled for release in 2027 from Flat2VR Studios — System Shock and High On Life.

System Shock was the influential precursor to BioShock, first released in 1994 and re-released in 2023 by Nightdive. The remake is getting the full Flat2VR treatment alongside the VR version of humor-shooter High On Life from Squanch Games, where the gun you hold is a live alien commentating as you shoot your way through the world.

The two games were announced during the latest VR Games Showcase put together by Jamie Feltham, with a Trombone Champ DLC partnered with Disney joining the announcements from Flat2VR. I scheduled a call with Eric Masher, COO at Flat2VR, for a full rundown of the announcements and to get his view on the state of the VR market. He called in from the airport as he’s heading out to Gamescom where he’ll be taking meetings that might lead to VR games for release in 2029 and beyond.

“I tried a DK1,” Masher recalls of his introduction to the medium. “It literally changed things for me at that point. It rekindled what I think gaming could be as an immersive platform. I remember getting out of the headset and talking to my wife and I’m like, this is a life changing moment for me. And it sounds cliche, but I remember and she even remembers like me saying … I need to figure out how I do something in this medium.”

Be sure to pair the conversation with the previous episode chatting with Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza for a fuller picture of the efforts at the studio. The discussion with Masher covers the difficulty facing VR developers building for a niche within a niche as several manufacturers ship headsets tuned for hand tracking, often selling controllers as separate accessories. Flat2VR is focused on controllers and the studio’s latest announcements join a slowly growing list of gaming projects for VR headsets that require tracked controllers.

“Every game that we have focused on for 2027, 2028, and even beyond stuff that we’re preparing to get started for 2029 and beyond are going to be controller focused,” Masher said. “I would not be doing that if I didn’t believe that most of the gaming headsets would be in some way controller focused. The games that we make and what we focus on as Flat2VR Studios cannot be done hand-tracked.”

We spoke for just over 30 minutes on the podcast platform Riverside and I edited the conversation down to under 25 minutes.

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What does it mean to play in VR?

It seems a straightforward question. Meta, Valve, Sony, Google, and even Apple all sell games that substitute your reality for a simulated one with rules to learn governing your interactions. These storefronts, however, do little to sell the unique benefits VR offers in embodiment and transportation.

“We’re all given this kind of carnival license in this sort of anonymous space to play,” said Ferryman Collective co-founder Deirdre V. Lyons. “We often as adults forget how important it is. How it re-energizes our lives and how it informs our lives and how it allows us to create bonds and special moments that we often don’t allow ourselves time to do.”

The Ferryman Collective is a kind of theatre troupe that travels from place to place inside virtual reality to host intimate interactive performances. Most often they perform in VRChat and these days they’re hosting performances of their Emmy-nominated production Uncanny Alley: A New Day. At AWE in Long Beach, California earlier this year I attended one of their other productions alongside Scott Stein, working together with him to make music guided by a performer physically located in Utah.

Before the Ferryman Collective formed Lyons was one of the performers who breathed life into Tender Claws acting in The Under Presents and The Tempest. I find live theatre to be one of the most inspiring uses of VR technology, but from Tender Claws to VRChat the productions Ferryman undertakes strain the platforms that host them. And still, some of the most emotionally impactful experiences you might have in VR can happen during one of these performances.

“Our work in VR comes to life at the intersection of motion pictures, live theater, and interactive video games,” Ferryman co-founder Stephen Butchko said on the Good VR Podcast. “We pull from all three of those modalities to bring this work to life…this sense of play is for me a release. It is an expression of vulnerability and it’s a sharing of story and emotions with my fellow thespians and audience participants that join us in these performances.”

I spoke with Lyons and Butchko about VR theatre for around an hour and trimmed the conversation down to around 43 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside.

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Walkabout Mini Golf development studio Mighty Coconut is taking everything it learned from developing the best way to spend time with family and friends in VR and starting fresh with a new game.

Walkabout Dungeon Golfer is in active development as something of a spin-off or sequel to Walkabout Mini Golf and being developed alongside new courses for the original. The new game is still centered on golfing but the gameplay loop around that activity is completely different, Lucas Martell explains on the Good VR Podcast. He cautions that they’re still prototyping, so things can change, but he offered some details about how they’re approaching its design.

“What we have settled on is essentially that you’ve got sort of a small-ish dungeon that’s maybe like the size of three or four different holes kind of combined, but you’re able to freely kind of putt around it,” Martell explains. “And you do have enemies that have hit points and you do damage by putting into them. There’s an exploration element where you’re trying to putt around, you actually get power-ups by putting into cups that give you … health or attack. So very, very basic stat points. But ultimately it’s kind of a roguelite where you are playing through each of these different runs. So a run is not unlike a course. It probably takes twenty to thirty minutes or so. The thing that we have loved the most is that even in the prototypes we started building in multiplayer. So where it really gets interesting is when you do have multiple people in there and you’re able to strategize, you putt into this area which will lure this enemy out, and then I will be able to hit him from the back and use various different power-ups and abilities and in a cool way.”

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The discussion with Martell is edited to just under 27 minutes with the podcasting platform Riverside and covers the full Walkabout path from inception to investment offers to layoffs earlier this year as well as the continuing independent spirit there grounded in creative artistry. It all started last decade with the founding of the studio on an island in Belize with artists gathered around the production of a short animated film called The OceanMaker. If you haven’t listened to the conversation with Shawn Whiting, who led community development at Rec Room for many years, the path that startup took over roughly the same period as Mighty Coconut makes for a useful companion conversation for understanding what it means to take outside investment in your company versus staying fully independent.

“I’ve also seen so many companies kind of get yanked around. And we’ve seen this with all of the different studio closures that have happened where a company gets bought, and even if they are profitable,” Martell said. “There is this push to make 10x what they’re spending on stuff. And it just seems like it’s a very unsustainable model. And it also means that there’s a lot of times where you could have a game that, yeah, sure, it is making a profit, but it’s not enough. And you still end up getting shut down or something happens at the larger owner level where there’s a restructuring. And all of a sudden your mandate changes. I’ve done that dance before, especially in the film industry, and I just don’t like it. Yes, the more money is nice, but the more money comes with so many strings and so many concessions that it means that you can’t run things the way that makes sense. And currently we’re entirely player supported, which just means that what people are spending on the DLCs and the base game, that’s what’s going into development. That’s what allows us to keep making courses. I won’t say that it’s easy and it’s definitely gotten a lot harder this last year or two, just with everything going on in the industry, but we’re still able to make it work.”

We also discuss the end of the Walkabout Mini Golf Pocket Edition’s development and how that relates to their strategy building a version of Walkabout Dungeon Golfer that runs on Steam and possibly for consoles with full cross-play to VR. Our conversation was recorded in August 2026 just before the release of the 1990s-inspired Gloop Lair, Walkabout Mini Golf’s 41st course and work is already underway on courses the studio is planning to release in 2028. You can watch the latest design tour with 3D artist Shane Rhodes the moment the course releases.

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XpertVR CEO Evan Sitler-Bates joined the Good VR Podcast to discuss work offering firefighters extra training in VR.

We spoke for just over 30 minutes and I cut it down to under 24 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside.

“This isn’t about…physical training and we’re not replacing live burns. We’re giving you the sets and reps that you can do on a daily or weekly basis between live burns and other live training,” Sitler-Bates said. “It very quickly changes people’s perception. I would say that going to fire departments and training with thousands or tens of thousands of firefighters at this point, by the time people get into headsets, it’s like a point zero zero one percent of people that are still pushing back on it. The vast, vast majority of people get into a headset and they’re like, okay, I see how realistic the visuals are, I see how the communication and tactics need to work, and I can see how this fits into training between our live training.”

VR could affect firefighting in a number of ways in the coming years as the same type of sensors that map your environment in a headset like Quest 3 or Vision Pro could potentially help emergency response personnel essentially see through smoke and flame in video passthrough. We discuss that possibility a little bit during the end of the podcast.

“When a firefighter’s putting on their gear, normally it’s about eighty pounds of gear with their turnout, jackets, pants, overalls, with their helmet, their SCBA (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus) tank, etc. So to add even more weight on top of that, and especially onto somebody’s head, is going to wear people down when they’re trying to fight a fire and run throughout a building and move with the hose,” he said. “It just obviously needs the hardware to get slimmer and [that] price come down.”

You can find more information about XpertVR on their website.

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During most episodes of the Good VR Podcast I ask guests the same question:

“What is your favorite moment of presence in a headset?”

The answers I’ve received cover a wide spectrum of available experiences in VR. To mark six months of Good Virtual Reality I’ve cut together answers to that question from guests Samantha Gorman, Sonya Haskins, Jasmine Uniza, Tomáš Mariančík, K. Guillory, Guy Godin, Anton Hand, Joseph Simpson, Jesse Schell, Avi Bar-Zeev, Ryan Engle, Ashley Pinnick, Daniel Sproll, Thomas Van Bouwel, Ashley Huffman, Yuewei Zhang, Justin Spice, and Shawn Whiting.

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CNET’s gadget expert Scott Stein joined the Good VR Podcast for an in-depth discussion about the social impact of computerized eyewear.

We talked for just over an hour and 10 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside and I cut it down to about 55 minutes.

“Our social contracts are gonna change. Design fiction — this is a wonderful time for design fiction…the idea of thinking about new interfaces,” Stein said. “I love thinking about stuff like that. This is full of all those questions. It’s a kind of a nightmare putting it in the real world and wrestling with it, but that’s why I like looking at new tech, is it’s full of those questions about how the interfaces and contracts and relationships change. What does it mean to have all this stuff?”

Stein wrote some thoughtful commentary for CNET about the lessons to be learned from VR headsets as Meta and others make an unrelenting push toward the use of camera-based glasses.

“Don’t call strangers perverts. Point your fingers at the tech companies, and hopefully, more thoughtful work on wearable tech will come,” Stein wrote. “The possibilities of assistive wearable tech — for vision impairment, hearing loss, cognitive decline and more — and its potential to collapse distances and connect people are fascinating. But right now, too few people have access to the technology, and too much about it remains unclear.”

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Space Pirate Trainer stands the test of time as one of the best projects ever developed for the medium.

In 2016 it whetted player appetites for what VR could do by immediately transporting people to a platform overlooking a sci-fi cityscape with fantastic music and a small arsenal unlocked for fighting off wave after wave of drones. When Space Pirate Trainer debuted alongside The Brookhaven Experiment near the launch of the Vive, the titles immediately became showpieces for VR parties. Neither wave shooter would make any players sick as you stood in place and fought off enemies with your guns. The Brookhaven Experiment, meanwhile, might see players so stricken with fear they run into a wall or tear off the headset.

Months passed and VR players looked for more content with copycats producing wave shooter after wave shooter. Players quickly began to critique the genre while Beat Saber took the note about not artificially moving the player to become the highest selling VR game in history. Meta scooped up Beat Games as developers explored every type of artificial locomotion possible to give players what they sought while balancing comfort as best they could manage. This is how Gorilla Tag was born, as it turned out moving like a monkey in a game where you play as a monkey is both relatively comfortable and added to the immersion. Then COVID-19 locked people indoors and Meta set out on the path to focus on its Horizon Worlds strategy.

“When they started pushing Horizon on the front page and that was kind of the most important thing of that platform instead of the devs, I think a whole bunch of devs felt that,” Van Welden said. “I felt it even in my sales. I think sales were halved or like thirty percent of my usual sales from that time.”

Van Welden and his colleagues at I-Illusions met in an empty hangar next to his home to play test something astonishing. Across the maximum play area supported by four SteamVR 2.0 laser base stations — 100 square meters with wireless transmitters from their HTC headsets to nearby PCs — the developers at I-Illusions roughed out the design for a game of tag set totally inside virtual reality.

All these years later very few people have been able to play Space Pirate Arena, which developers bundled up inside Space Pirate Trainer for free. Those that have played it, however, experienced something truly incredible. The reasons why people haven’t played it end up being a study in platform prioritization. Setup is tedious, there is no automatic detection of physical obstacles, and the hardware wasn’t made for tracking in outdoor sunlight. If a new VR headset was made with those conditions in mind, though, Space Pirate Arena is one of the first pieces of software I’d like to try.

I spoke with Van Welden for 52 minutes and cut the audio down to just under 35 minutes for the Good VR Podcast using the podcasting platform Riverside. Over its lifetime he sold roughly 1 million copies of Space Pirate Trainer and that helped fund the development of flatscreen snowboarding game Shredders with 14 people now working on it. Our conversation covers that whole journey starting from receiving a headset developer kit from Valve.

When Van Welden sent in one of his builds to Valve the email he received from Chet Faliszek just had two words in it.

“HOLY S**T”

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Raven Zachary’s story with VR and AR dates back to the 1990s and, in the years since, he’s become involved with a range of impactful projects at the cutting edge of technology.

As a guest for the Good VR Podcast he recaps the journey for the first 15 minutes and then we end up having a spirited discussion for the next hour about the current landscape for VR headsets and AR glasses as we cover everything from Steam Frame and Vision Pro to Xreal and Specs.

“I've had some very magical, perhaps even mystical experiences, in VR over the years. But when I think of that as a percentage of my time in headset, those types of experiences are a fraction of my desire to go out into the world and augment my life with things digitally in my physical world,” Zachary explains.

He’s got a strong point and makes the case for optical AR well throughout our discussion. The talk heats up as I respond with the idea of video AR passed through VR optics. I propose the steady application of mass market economics to increasingly high resolution headsets will win the day for VR. As an example, I discuss the moment when iPhone 4 surpassed so-called “retina” resolution around 2010. For those unfamiliar with the history here, iPhone’s breakthrough user interface debuted in 2007, apps followed in 2008, and in 2010 the iPhone 4 dramatically upgraded the resolution of the display past the point where you could discern detail at a regular viewing distance. This resolution bump essentially unlocked whole classes of use for phones, namely reading and other passive media consumption, that were previously constrained by the display limits.

“I certainly think it made media consumption more compelling,” Zachary replies. “How much did it affect the general app market? Web browsing, sure, fonts are more legible. I can use a Kindle app on my phone or the Books app from Apple on my phone and it looks much nicer. But I think probably media viewing had the most impact for increasing pixel density.”

Vision Pro’s displays are certainly the highest resolution in consumer-grade hardware right now but its pixels are spread over your field of vision. That means it’ll still be a long time before true retina resolutions are achieved in a consumer-grade head-mounted display. Until that time, experiences you have with your unaided eyes will be more compelling to look at than anything you might see through a VR headset.

“What you essentially just told me is in one generation reading wasn't really a thing you really wanted to do on an iPhone,” I said. “And then the next generation reading full length books became something that you could actually do on this device in your hand. The exact same thing is true of VR headsets and the exact same thing gets solved.”

The original recording of our conversation was an hour and 36 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside. I edited it down to 1 hour 20 minutes. My sincere thanks to Cameron Brown of Rec Room for giving me permission to use music from Rec Room for the intro and outro of the Good VR Podcast. Become a subscriber on Substack to support Good VR directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality.

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One of VR’s unique and delightfully meditative experiences started as an error on the PC when a 3D scan got shuffled into pieces.

Daniel Sproll joined the Good VR Podcast from Realities.io in Germany to discuss the development of Puzzling Places. The game released first on SideQuest and the creators slowly stacked up a passionate community who find a sense of quiet comfort in Puzzling Places as a kind of meditation piecing together 3D scans.

They rebuilt the game in Unity for Vision Pro and, on Steam, the title now runs both in VR and on flat screens. That makes the work a holistic study of the benefits of immersion, with Realities.io working from the early days of 3D scanning scenes with photogrammetry to developing an innovative well-loved VR game and finally to porting that experience back to flat screens.

“We did a classical engineering mistake,” Sproll said. “We were thinking a lot about, look, we can capture and we can bring it into VR and that has to be worth something — that’s just a cool thing to do. But it turns out a 3D capture is worth very little without a reason why people should look at it. We spent a lot of time finding what are reasons for people to look at this stuff, why would people want to have a 3D capture? What would they do with it?”

Before becoming a VR developer, Sproll was a cognitive scientist and a large chunk of our discussion centers on the idea of “cognitive load” and how that relates to the various modes of play available between total focus and multitasking. With Valve’s Steam Frame due this summer to change up the market, Puzzling Places may be one of the few games playable both in VR and on flat screens with significant resources spent on interaction design for both modes.

“It’s one of the most comfortable headsets I’ve ever worn,” Sproll said of Steam Frame. “I’m terribly excited that with Steam Frame I think for the first time we have a standalone headset that is only for games. It doesn’t try to do anything else. It’s only for games…. Valve makes their money selling games. It’s aligned in that sense with the developers who make the games. And with Meta over the years we had so many pushes to, maybe it’s more lifestyle, maybe it’s more media consumption, maybe it’s more productivity, maybe it can also do MR apps. It always tries to be many things at the same time. That makes it lose focus and Steam Frame is gonna be unapologetically a gaming device. And whether that works or not, we will see. But I’m really happy that someone is finally testing that hypothesis and making a device that is only that.”

The original recording of our conversation was around 50 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside. I edited it down to just under 33 minutes. My sincere thanks to Cameron Brown of Rec Room for giving me permission to use music from Rec Room for the intro and outro of my podcast. I added a track from Quest For The Golden Trophy to this week’s episode and plan to use it for the foreseeable future. Become a subscriber on Substack to support Good VR directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality.

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Justin Spice is on a mission to make something like MechWarrior in VR.

In the 1990s he set up a cardboard box around his PC’s monitor to simulate a cockpit for MechWarrior 2 running on Windows 95. Roughly 30 years later, Iron Rebellions’s very positive rating on Steam (and 4.6 on Quest) is a testament to his effort at Black Beach Studio to create a fully fledged VR mech game inspired by his experience back then.

“I took a cardboard box and I taped it to the CRT monitor and glued a bunch of buttons on the inside and I had this cheap flight joystick and I would just sit in there for hours,” Spice said. “I was really piloting and the soundtrack and the music and the mood, I was just like, this is it, dude.”

We spoke for around 54 minutes I cut down to just over 30 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside, discussing Steam Frame, Apple Vision Pro and the lure of developing a flatscreen version of the game.

“I genuinely believe that VR the concrete settled too soon for the possibilities of things that can be created,” Spice said. “I think in a lot of ways we got into this port mentality. Let’s port things that work on flat screen to VR, which works really well, but it’s literally an entirely new dimension. And you add spatial awareness and things like that and XR experiences where you can start geotagging and having connection to the outside world and things like that. I really think developers should take that 2016 fresh approach and start over again.”

Iron Rebellion is on sale through July 30, 2026 on Steam and Meta.

Head-mounted displays come in a lot of different configurations and not all of them deliver VR. Still, the elements that make VR experiences worth having can be better understood when looking at related technologies.

That’s how I ended up talking with Jamie Lockwood at HMDmd. The company makes head-mounted stereoscopic displays with high resolution microdisplays and open peripheries designed specifically for use in medical settings. The systems allow doctors to see with depth in detail inside the human body while still able to see the operating room through the periphery, and the low-weight balanced design aims to be wearable for a lengthy multi-hour procedure.

I spoke with Lockwood for for around 25 minutes and edited the conversation down with Riverside to under 20 minutes with focused questions around the value of stereoscopy — the key tech shared with VR headsets — and the overall trends he’s seeing in head-mounted displays.

“The trend that we’re really excited about is for years surgeons have used computer generated images for surgical navigation to put in instruments or to or to plan trajectories,” Lockwood said. “The future is the fusion…of surgical navigation guidance on top of real time 3D anatomical video….but nobody’s cracked the code on how to do this real time with zero latency on 3D video.”

A game like no other in virtual reality reached full release after 10 years of early access development.

Work is already deep into development on the sequel, but as of July 4, 2026 version 1.0 of RUST LTD’s Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades is available for download and the game’s early access label is gone.

On the Good VR Podcast Anton Hand and I discuss his favorite guns, modes of play, and the pieces of the game he spent too much time on as well as the unique relationship with his community. Each week on Friday he posts a video to his YouTube channel as a sort of character — “Devlog Anton” — conveying his energy and intent for the game.

"Devlog Anton has been one of the most incredibly important…stabilizing effects on my life,” Hand said of his weekly updates about the game for the last decade. “I shudder to imagine the past 10 years of what would have just been my rocky existence would have been like without that normalizing power of no matter what’s going on in me, I need to sit in this chair once a week on a Friday and bring all of my effusive joyful energy possible.”

Ahead of full release I reached out to the H3VR community on Reddit and Discord to collect their feelings about the game and incorporated their comments into its Good VR certification.

I encourage you to give that post a read to understand how this game — and Hand’s connection to his community — has persisted for over a decade. For the podcast, we spoke about the journey of development for one hour and 15 minutes using Riverside and I edited it down to just under 55 minutes.

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When you play a game like Eleven Table Tennis you should hold something paddle-like in one hand that vibrates believably when a simulated ball collides. An open palm with a simulated ball resting on it during a serve should also provide the subtle sensation of it leaving the surface of your skin.

Today, the best table tennis game in VR is played with two controllers, one in each hand. These objects feature an array of buttons with motors inside to provide haptic feedback, but as VR advances beyond the Meta Quest it’s possible ideas like a glove, watch or wristband can provide the missing part of the experience better than a second controller.

At AWE in Long Beach I tried new gloves from bHaptics that sell as a pair for $385 with 7 motors per hand — one each in the fingertips, two on the palm and one at the wrist. I spent most of my time during the demo petting a simulated cat. To better understand my experience in the weeks after my demo I joined Riverside for a conversation with the “Queen of Haptics” Ashley Huffman, who works at Titan Haptics and runs the All Things Haptics newsletter. Titan makes the wrist motor in the new bHaptics glove.

bHaptics gears its gloves toward industrial or military training and they’re able to bring the price down for this kind of equipment from many prior systems because they rely on Meta’s software-based tracking of the hands by the headset’s cameras for interaction.

Nearly $400 is still a big ask for a pair of gloves, but as we look to the future I wonder if we could one day go to an Apple Store with $50 or $100 and pick up a single glove that looks a lot like a Titleist golf glove.

Just three motors over the palm in a triangular formation could provide that Eleven Table Tennis serving sensation, allowing you to feel the ball move around the surface of your hand, and an Apple Watch at the wrist or perhaps a motor like the ones from Titan Haptics on the back of the hand could provide a satisfying ping sensation. That’s something I’d love to take into software like Golf+, Walkabout, and Eleven Table Tennis.

“As soon as you start trying to leverage a buzz or only a low rumble to mean something expressive, that’s where you’re hitting kind of issues,” Huffman says on the Good VR Podcast. “‘Cause you’re basically taking a dog whistle for humans and ‘let’s turn that into putting.’ No, that’s not the experience.”

Huffman and I talked for 46 minutes and I edited the discussion down to 32 minutes. Listen now for a solid introduction to haptics in VR.

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Tomáš Mariančík aka Frooxius is the singular mind behind Resonite — a PC-based VR service where people can create together in VR.

He started up Resonite upon exit from Neos, a virtual universe that “exploded” a few years ago when one of the other people involved in the organization focused on introducing crypto concepts to the service.

“It was hard,” Frooxius says on the Good VR Podcast. “One of the hardest things I ever did.”

The fresh start of Resonite has done wonders for Mariančík’s mental health.

“Being able to exist without a lot of the constant anxiety and fear and just kind of focus and be like, what I’m building is my own and nobody can take it from me,” Frooxius said. “It was hugely impactful on my mental health in general.”

The developer identifies himself as a furry and joined the Good VR Podcast from the freedom of PC VR wearing a Vive Pro Eye with Project Babble facial tracker attached as well as Index controllers for finger tracking. The course of our conversation covers what furries are, what Resonite is, how the service sets itself apart from VRChat, and the unique power of VR as a medium.

“Virtual reality is about putting people into your imagination and visiting imagination of other people,” Frooxius said. “To me VR is a medium that lets you take the imagination out of your head and make it into a world that you can share with others and where it can mingle with imagination of other people.”

We spoke for about 46 minutes which I edited down to 21 minutes for video and almost 16 minutes for audio. The video version takes a trip to the Shadowed Cove world by Team VibeZ in Resonite.

“The goal of Resonite is to give people as much control over the world they’re in as possible,” Frooxius said. “Let people shape the universe the virtual universe they inhabit. It’s almost like if you took VRChat and the Unity editor and smooshed them together into one thing….whatever you change you see the impact of it inside of VR instantly.”

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Welcome to Good Virtual Reality and I’m so glad you’re here.

My name is Ian Hamilton. I’m the owner of this website, goodvirtualreality.com, and I’m a journalist. My work here is driven by my human curiosity as well as the direct connections I make to people out there who believe in what they do with their whole heart.

Some weeks ago a subscriber sent me the following message using the chat features of Substack:

“You’ve interviewed so many developers, builders, journalists, and people working inside XR, but I realized I have not heard your own VR story in the same full way. As someone who loves VR, XR, and the whole emerging medium, I would love to hear an episode where the community gets to interview you.”

What followed from my reader Christopher were 10 extremely engaging questions I’ve had on the back-burner of my brain:

* What was the first VR experience that made you realize this medium was not just another gaming peripheral, but something larger?

* When you first became a VR journalist, what did you think VR was going to become — and how has reality surprised you?

* What was the biggest story you covered at UploadVR that changed how you understood the industry?

* What is one VR demo, headset reveal, developer interview, or convention moment that still lives in your memory because it felt like seeing the future early?

* What did working on VR Download teach you about explaining VR to people who are not inside the industry?

* Do you have any funny or human behind-the-scenes stories from VR Download — technical disasters, awkward live moments, accidental comedy, spilled drinks, broken headsets, anything listeners never got to hear?

* What are some of your favorite positive memories of working with David Heaney or the UploadVR team during the best years of the show?

* What is something people misunderstand about VR journalism from the outside?

* What technology, company, headset, game, or developer did you initially underestimate — and later realize was much more important than you thought?

* After everything you’ve seen, what do you now believe “good virtual reality” actually means?

I’ve answered these questions, plus one bonus question, over a podcast lasting 1 hour and 10 minutes. If you enjoy this podcast and have more questions that have been sparked by my answers, send me an email to editor@goodvirtualreality.com, and I’ll address them in a future episode.

Please consider becoming a subscriber on Substack to support my work directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work here at Good Virtual Reality.

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At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I tried the XREAL Aura glasses running Android XR.

The device brings into focus Google’s ambitions to power two completely different architectures for spatial computing eyewear using the same operating system. The two approaches are:

* VR headsets like Samsung Galaxy XR with wide field of view optics featuring opaque displays passing AR through from the external cameras.

* AR glasses like XREAL Aura with smaller field of view for directly optical see through and adjustable lenses that can darken for more immersive VR-like moments.

One of the top priorities for my time at AWE was identifying how VR-like Aura actually is and what the path might look like ahead for XREAL as it continues iterating quickly. I only used Aura for a few minutes and they are still months away from release. Aura features a split architecture which puts processing in a phone-like puck you wear on your side that can also take in a display and power from other devices. XREAL is shipping a lot in the optical see-through (OST) category, including a tier of lower-cost devices not running Android XR.

“We have a pretty robust roadmap that goes across a lot of things…I expect to use Android XR for future devices as well…we’re gonna keep going down the wearable display path, and we’ll also keep going down the spatial computing path,” XREAL General Manager of North America Ralph Jodice says on the Good VR Podcast. “The easier way to think of it is glasses with apps versus glasses that connect to your device that has apps.”

I enjoyed darkening the opacity of the display and seeing my hands reskinned for Demeo, for example, but I also didn’t spend enough time with Aura or interact with enough content to say anything definitive here. Still, I learned a lot from the experience and the conversation with Jodice helps frame how XREAL’s strategy positions the company.

“I don’t think people will stop buying TVs or stop buying laptops and start only buying AR glasses,” Jodice says. “But I do believe they will reach for their AR glasses when that other screen is not available.”

At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I met with Alvin Wang Graylin for an in-depth discussion looking back at the last decade of attempts to create a mass market for consumer VR headsets.

He left HTC in 2025 after joining the organization in 2016, a few months before the launch of the PC-based Vive headset powered by Valve’s SteamVR technology. That means he had a front row seat to the effect of Meta’s competitive strategies, from funding VR developers to acquiring them to undercutting HTC’s consumer headsets on price.

“These are things that are just not healthy for the industry, and nobody was really making money,” Graylin said.

If the VR market suffers from a “chicken and egg” problem in that consumers won’t buy headsets because developers won’t make content and developers won’t make content because there are no consumers to buy them, then Graylin’s perspective suggests Meta’s aggressive approach over this decade made it practically impossible for anyone else to help grow the ecosystem that would allow chickens and eggs to flourish.

“ I think everything about our product was better at the time,” he said of the HTC Vive. “We just didn't have the budgets there. They really underpriced us, that was their kind of key competitive advantage is that they were essentially losing money, and they were willing to lose a lot of money per device to sell. We were probably twice their price, we were still matching or in some cases selling more than they were into markets, and particularly for B2B markets. So after I think about a year, we started to ship more B2B because they started to price down lower than our cost.”

Our discussion covered the space between headsets and glasses as well as the differing benefits of see-through and opaque optics. I contend VR headsets slimming down into glasses sizes with lighter weights will help them replace laptops and desktops while progressively accessing larger markets with the added benefits of immersive content. Graylin, meanwhile, praises the architectural benefit of see-through optics allowing glasses to function as prescription eyewear if they run out of power.

We spoke for around 48 minutes by the pool at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach recorded on my iPhone. I passed the audio through Adobe Podcasts and edited it down in Descript to just over 30 minutes.

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A new free app called Pixi Garden available on iPhone brings eye contact and interaction to cat and robot characters sent through messages.

The co-founder and CEO behind the project, Mark Drummond, sat for a conversation on the Good VR Podcast to talk about his path to develop these bite-size interactions after working on the impactful Encounter Dinosaurs experience on the Apple Vision Pro as well as Siri before that.

“We created the character intelligence team and worked with a variety of Hollywood studios to do that,” Drummond said. “We worked with Disney and Marvel. We worked with Kevin Feige on the Marvel Universe, and we worked with John Favreau on a variety of things. The one that shipped there was the Encounter Dinosaurs app. So we learned a few, I think, interesting things in the character intelligence team working with these Hollywood studios. It’s pretty easy to do AR, but most AR is just sort of an animated idle position overlay on the real world. And one of the things that we learned is that if IP characters’ backstories come to life in such a way that the characters pay attention, then things feel present. It feels present. So it needs to react to sounds as you think would be appropriate, react to movement, the introduction of objects, the disappearance of objects. Like as a person, if there’s a cup on the table, and then you look away and you look back and the cup is gone. That empty table is really interesting to you because there was a cup there. But from a traditional sort of machine learning perspective, it’s just empty table. Why are you excited? Well, I’m excited because there was a cup that is no longer there. So that style of paying attention brings these characters to life, makes them feel present.”

Our conversation covers the Encounter Dinosaurs project and why he’s decided to start with these short-form interactions on iPhone. We spoke for around 40 minutes on the recording platform Riverside edited down to just under 25 minutes.

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My first time in Connectome I spent nearly an hour just calmly connecting the dots and making quiet discoveries to reveal hidden shapes in the space around me.

Developer Grant Hinkson describes the project as “an immersive art experience” rather than a game and I hosted him on the Good VR Podcast to discuss the unusually meditative work.

“I started with feeling words — discovery, joy, moments of awe. In the very beginning I wasn’t even sure what I was going to create,” Hinkson says. “I just knew those emotions that I wanted to elicit.”

First released as a hand tracking experience on Quest, Hinkson updated the project for the higher resolution Vision Pro as well as Apple’s gaze-pinch interface. The result is a completely laid back experience where you look around to slowly reveal the geometry of simple hidden objects.

“What if there were just floating points of hidden objects floating in space and the way you reveal them is by scanning the space with your hand or looking with your eye?” And then there’s some visual reaction that you found something, and then just by a simple pinch, you reveal it,” Hinkson said. “So like that’s the moment of discovery. And it it was anchored to this familiar childhood game of connect the dots. Everybody gets that idea. There are points and we connect them and something is then created.”

A 7-minute audio story covers Hinkson’s design and inspirations for Connectome available to free subscribers and syndicated out to all platforms while paid subscribers can access at 34-minute discussion on the Good Virtual Reality substack.

Connectome is available on the Quest Store for Quest 2 and 3 as well as the App Store for Vision Pro.

The team at Flat2VR Studios ask themselves “why is this in VR?”

When they are able to answer that question CEO Jasmine Uniza says they’ll often make a demo to show a prospective partner why their game should get the full Flat2VR treatment.

“Make great games and have fucking fun,” Uniza says is Flat2VR’s motto. “You have to tell me why this deserves a spot in VR and why I should pick it over any other experiences.”

She spoke about how Flat2VR started as a modding community and marketing effort to become a multi-faceted studio developing and publishing VR games over the course of about four years, with their most recent release FlatOut 4: Total Insanity carrying a mostly positive rating on Steam with support for racing wheels and pedals. She hints during the Good VR Podcast that more racing games are planned and they are already building games for VR that won’t release until 2028.

We spoke for just under an hour on the Riverside recording platform and I cut the conversation to around 40 minutes for audio platforms and 27 minutes for video.

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In PROJECT MIX the player embodies a bartender making drinks for patrons in an “alternate-history 90s Hong Kong” and after their workday they come home to their apartment, to a cat that can smoke cigarettes, as part of a story that takes place over 12 days.

The anime-inspired narrative adventure is made for mature audiences and scheduled for release on Steam in 2027. While many developers building for consumer VR markets are targeting kids on Quest headsets, PROJECT MIX has become the most wishlisted game in PC VR by targeting adults instead.

“There is strong sexual language, but any sexual content will be implied and not shown explicitly,” the mature content description for PROJECT MIX explains. “Expect lots of suggestive and risque fan service elements though. There is alcohol drinking and bartending in the game. There is also smoking, but that is optional.”

New Zealand-based developer Yuewei Zhang at PROJECT MIX studio PLECTRUM SOFT joined the Good VR Podcast for a conversation about the effort. He shared that, like Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin, he hasn’t received a Steam Frame developer kit despite more than 130,000 people putting the VR-only game on their Steam wishlists.

 “I'm just really drawn to the sort of the romance and the fantasy of the smokiness of going to, say, a late-night underground bar in, like, say, Hong Kong or Tokyo or Shanghai,” Zhang said. “In New Zealand, we're not exactly known for the city of great skylines and tall skyscrapers, but since I grew up in relatively more rural areas, my mind naturally romanticized the idea of these neon lights and these smoky underground bars, the metropolitan life. So I just wanted to put that all in a video game.”

We talked for roughly 45 minutes about his inspirations and independent approach on the recording platform Riverside and I cut the conversation to 31 minutes.

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The creator of Virtual Desktop recalls the Tuscany demo as his first VR experience and Senza Peso as his favorite moment of presence in a headset.

Guy Godin’s recollections are from a different time in the VR industry. Enthusiasts launched their VR experiences by clicking around with their mouse on a PC outside VR instead of selecting from a menu inside. Watching videos of people doing that led him to start work on Virtual Desktop.

His work in VR has both been sought by Facebook and also competed with the work Meta built, leading to some tense and frustrating interactions over the years.

“There are some good engineers at Meta that care,” Godin says on the Good VR Podcast. “What sucks for them is that they’re not incentivized to ship quality software and fix bugs. I wish they were, because some of them are really good and they’ve done some incredible things.”

I spoke with Godin using Riverside for just over 45 minutes and cut the conversation to about 38 minutes recounting his path through VR.

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An app called Let’s Go Fly is available free today as part of Cirrus Aircraft’s pitch to sell personal airplanes starting with Apple Vision Pro demos.

The sales team at Cirrus now carry Vision Pro headsets to show potential buyers the short immersive film made with Blackmagic immersive cameras, with the project representing a new sales tool to help in selling luxury personal aircraft.

Cirrus’ sales personnel are all pilots themselves and will fly to local airports to meet with potential buyers and show off planes, which can cost over a million dollars to buy. Potential customers and aviation fans can now wear the headset to get a good look at the aircraft in 3D as it appears on the ground, in the cockpit and in flight from the outside with views captured by the immersive cameras.

“If you can actually give somebody a real experience that creates an emotional impact, they start to understand…[this] is a thing that people do every single day,” said Cirrus Media Development Director Anthony Bottini on the Good VR Podcast. “We have this huge amount of people out there in the world that could afford to and do have the right mission to be able to do this, but they’ve just never been inspired. Or we’ve never contacted them the right way. And so where we’re coming from as an airplane sales organization, is we’re kind of limited to the airport, many times the first point of contact that a potential customer will have with our aircraft, or with our experience, is looking through a barbed wire fence on the edge of an airport, and that’s not a great way to start a conversation. And so what we’ve done here is we’ve deployed Vision Pros across our global sales team with this app that includes an immersive film and everything else. And we’re hoping what we’ve just given them is the ability to bring a strong, impactful, emotional flying experience outside of the airport for the first time ever.”

Bottini spoke with me for about 20 minutes for the podcast about their early attempts to move people to have that emotional experience. I’ve tried the Let’s Go Fly app and the immersive film delivers an experience reminiscent of Soarin’ Over California while conveying the vibe of flying a Cirrus plane.

AstroBeam’s Stellar Cafe is buried in Meta’s Quest ecosystem underneath the Horizon Worlds slop and a whole bunch of casual shooters, but it does something new and innovative with virtual reality that demands attention.

It’s a game that can be played entirely with voice input. Across three days of interactions with more than half a dozen robots, you’ll find yourself feeling a lot of emotions because, as AstroBeam founder Devin Reimer says on the Good VR Podcast, “it triggers different parts of your brain, the speech part of things that we just haven’t had a chance to experience in interactive media before.”

Reimer is one of the founders of Owlchemy Labs as well, so our discussion covers his path from being electrocuted by early wired Vive controllers to forgetting where he was physically located. He spent so much time developing a VR game in one spot before jumping on a plane and picking up the work elsewhere that he connected VR to the physical realm tethered to a specific locale.

From putting work up on Oculus Share and adding hand tracking to Job Simulator to back at the cutting edge of development with voice input, Reimer’s conversation with me was just over an hour recorded and edited to 54 minutes with Riverside for the Good VR Podcast.

“We built so many tools over like two plus years to actually allow you to make games with this because it is so difficult,” Reimer says. “We can’t be like, if the user says this, then do this….We can’t do that at all. So we have to think through what the character’s motivations are, what their goals are, all of that stuff, and then test a whole bunch. We learned all a whole bunch of stuff about how to build good characters….That very first character took us five months to build. It was like so hard to build. And then some of the ones in day three, I built one in four days because it was like, okay, I understand all the gotchas. We had built all the tech and stuff like that. And so with the next game, that we’re working on now, it’s like, okay, we have all that. Now, how do we bring this up and make this something bigger and more dynamic?”

The statuesque Weeping Angels of Doctor Who only move when they aren’t observed by a living being. When the episode Blink aired in 2007, the creatures became iconic lore and, roughly a decade later, three creators working with the HTC Vive pitched the BBC and Doctor Who rights holders with a demo they made centered on the terrifying creatures.

They formed the studio Maze Theory to build the project and now, nearly another decade later, they’ve adapted the Thief series to VR after tackling adaptations of Peaky Blinders and Doctor Who to immersive headsets. Maze Theory’s next project is slated for release in 2026 for the Quest headset — an adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.

Players are promised a personal connection with Rocky as they step into the virtual shoes of Ryland Grace across both mixed and virtual reality.

“One of the things we’re trying to get across is that feeling of one-to-one interaction and being able to problem solve and companionship with Rocky,” said Chief Creative Officer Russ Harding during the Good VR Podcast. “We really want to build on that feeling that you get from the film, that companionship that sits between Ryland Grace and Rocky.”

We talked for about an hour using Riverside and I cut down the conversation to 44 minutes as we covered the journey.

Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Access podcast episodes first as a paid subscriber at goodvirtualreality.com or donate to support our reporting.

From June 1, 2026 a place that’s been the foundation of VR for many ceases to be.

The end of Rec Room is still “surreal” for one of VR’s “OG” supporters and a core member of the team building the project for more than eight years.

“There can’t be a world without Rec Room,” Shawn Whiting said on the Good VR Podcast. “It doesn’t seem real.”

From his memories playing Dreadhalls to co-founding Convrge to the spike in Rec Room players seen through the COVID pandemic, Whiting talks through a journey more than a decade in the making.

“The mood in the community is super somber, it’s sad,” Whiting said. “You can go to rec.net and export all your photos and, of course, you start looking through all of them and you’re like, ‘man this photo was taken in 2016 or 17’ and you’re looking at all the early games in the first rooms people were creating and it gets very nostalgic. It’s definitely an emotional time and people are starting up archiving projects so people are going in and taking a bunch of video and downloading the rooms and scanning the rooms and turning them into gaussian splat things that can be revisited.”

The conversation between Whiting and I is one of the deepest I’ve been able to bring to the Good VR Podcast as he’s able to speak about his time at the company in a way founders and CEOs can’t. As an early member of the team managing the space between founders and a growing team of engineers and designers, his role saw him attempting to navigate decisions made at a level above his pay grade. Meaning that of all people I could speak with about the closure of Rec Room, Whiting worked there long enough and at a high enough level to both understand the community dynamics and forces affecting its failure, while also not operating in a position where he’d need to deflect or defend any of the chosen paths. Put another way, the discussion is about as candid as can possibly be.

“Imagine you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off Rec Room, like some people were, and then you get the news that the thing’s shutting down,” Whiting said. “That’s like world shattering for you, right? You’re like, ‘f**k, I have to pack all my rooms up and now bring them over to VRChat or some other platform and try to establish myself there.’ It’s never going to be the same.”

We spoke for 1 hour and 22 minutes on the podcasting platform Riverside and I edited the discussion down to 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Access podcast episodes first as a paid subscriber at goodvirtualreality.com or donate to support our reporting.

After his passion project unexpectedly went viral, developer Brandon Montell rushed to put together wishlist pages for Sock Puppet Superstar.

You can wishlist the game now on Steam and the Quest store.

“Anytime I do something that makes myself chuckle a little bit, I am just like, "Okay, that has to go in the game,” Montell says on the Good VR Podcast. “It was not a business market-driven decision to start working on it, and if it had been, I probably wouldn't have started working on it. But it was just starting as this passion project. I just felt really passionate about learning to make music in different ways in 3D space. So I was following the fun, and I feel like even though there might be some market headwind, I feel like it's no less fun to do stuff in VR and to tinker with it.”

Montell’s episode of the podcast lasts around 26 minutes edited with Riverside and he shows through his replies exactly how Good VR is discovered. Someone with a bit of passion for an idea follows the fun and then shares it with the world.

“This project is the fusion of three of my interests, because I've always loved coding, and that's why I majored in computer science. I also love graphics and animation, And I also have at times been a hobbyist animator. I collected instruments and would try to learn new instruments,” Montell said. “So in a lot of ways, a VR animated music game is the fusion of those three things, of being able to code it, do the art and animation, and figure out the music side of things. I think all of those things are definitely coalescing in this project…I'm having fun making it, so hopefully other people will have fun playing it.”

How would development studio Not Suspicious fulfill agreements to put mixed reality games Airspace Defender and Banners & Bastions on Pico headsets with developers in Iran during an Internet blackout and a war with the United States?

The answer is that they wouldn’t.

Iranian husand-and-wife developers Sahand Malaei and Pardis Mohtadi just arrived in Finland to continue that work after departing Iran, where they had watched strikes out their window and felt them shake the foundations of the building where they worked on mixed reality games.

The Good VR Podcast hosted Not Suspicious founder Rafael Brochado and Malaei for discussions about everything from their favorite experiences in VR headsets to the reality of attempting to work during a war.

You can find Airspace Defender and Banners & Bastions on the Quest store now.

Banners & Bastions arrives on the Pico Store May 21.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades development studio RUST LTD. revealed a sequel during the Creature Feature.

I’ve told people I’m not really into VR shooters, but the more nuanced truth is that nothing in the category interests me the way Pistol Whip grabbed me with its rhythm focus in about 30 seconds and then kept me playing there for years. Now, I’m anticipating Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 in a way I haven’t any other VR game.

H3VR2 has been in development for some time and it is funded in part by Meta, with the reveal made during Doug North Cook’s latest VR gaming showcase. Some of the most accomplished VR developers in the world have joined RUST LTD. to devote their time to the project including SUPERHOT VR for Quest developer Mark Schramm and Vertigo 1 & 2 creator Zach Tsiakalis-Brown.

“I see these people around me, many of whom are like my dear friends, who are capable of building some of the most incredible experiences that I think anyone has ever made,” North Cook said in February on the first episode of the Good VR Podcast. “And I am just desperate to ensure that they keep being able to build those things.”

In case you are unfamiliar with H3VR, the work from Anton Hand and his colleagues at RUST LTD. exists in a category by itself on Steam. The VR sandbox game has been in development for a full decade of early access accruing more than 20,000 reviews over that time and an overwhelmingly positive rating. Never put on sale below its $20 starting price, its 1.0 version is still in ongoing testing to support the robust modding community after more than 150 updates across the decade adding new game modes, features, and guns focused around shooting targets or human-sized hot dogs.

“One of the big differences that we’re doing now compared to the original game is that there is a very managed onboarding experience in the game,” Hand says on the Good VR Podcast. “It’s both narratively letting you know about the context that you’re in with it, but is actually ensuring do you want to set your locomotion options before you move anywhere? Here are your hands, here is what is going on.”

The action-adventure game aims to reach new players as well as existing enthusiasts alike built in the “spirit of a sim.” There’s a “Certification Range” and voiced tutorials to introduce players to the virtual firearms and their handling.

“While you’re practicing,” Hand explains as an example, the tutorial shares “a couple fun facts about this type of firearm that you might not have heard of.”

Hand is famously critical of Facebook and Meta while being a staunch supporter of PC VR efforts over the years. Shock that he would take Meta’s funding, and that a sequel is deep into development, is likely to reverberate through the VR community and beyond. Even more than Half-Life, a series adapted to headsets rather than born in them, H3VR2 could inject tremendous enthusiasm into the narrative around VR and standalone headsets in particular.

You can listen now to a one-hour Good VR Podcast episode with Hand breaking down his path into VR, 10 years of H3VR, how Meta came to help fund the sequel, and his answer to the question “did you sell out?”

You can also wait for the full two-hour video version premiering tomorrow with a much deeper dive into the artist’s perspective and journey, charting Hand’s path from the first piece of digital art he made in 1993 to his favorite Star Trek captain and top moment of presence in VR.

H3VR2 wishlist pages are available for Steam and Quest.

Good Virtual Reality is an independent community-supported you can donate to support or subscribe below.

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Sonya Haskins was Hasko7 to the Echo Arena community, a supportive figure who would help people however she could.

These days she’s Head of Programming for the Augmented World Expo, helping organize its latest conference June 15-18 in Long Beach, California. She recently moved to the city after spending much of her life in the southern United States. From purchasing an Oculus Rift in 2017 after a demo at Best Buy to now, she’s transformed almost everything about her life.

She sat for just over an hour for the Good VR Podcast with me using the Riverside podcasting platform. I edited down our talk to just around 52 minutes covering her journey over this time. When Meta killed Echo Arena in 2023, its closure struck a blow to her identity, with her name attached to a place that formed the foundation of a new persona she found in virtual reality.

“When the game started to shut down,” Haskins says on the Good VR Podcast. “I actually was thinking wow, now who am I? Because nobody ever calls me Sonya. I’m divorced now. All my friends are gamers who call me Hasko7.”

In her family it is tradition to purchase one’s own headstone so that loved ones aren’t burdened with the task. She shares over our conversation that she recently bought hers and, when people pass by her stone in the ground one day, they’ll see her name, the dates marking her lifetime, as well as the disk of Echo Arena.

“Echo Arena was a life-changing experience for me,” she says. “I began to meet people outside of my traditional social circle and society that I was used to and met people from around the world, became friends with them, talked with them. It became a community where you would put a headset on and suddenly you’re in this immersive world with a bunch of other robots and you could play these games and be competitive, but it was so much more than that and, to me, Echo Arena is a great example of the beauty of immersive reality, which is you can be somewhere else and do something else and try on different personalities or different looks and different attitudes and see what you want to be in life or what you want to explore, and so that’s what that game was to me - it really gave me the freedom and the permission and the opportunity to be able to say you know is it okay to do something or be something other than a stay-at-home mom.”

The transcript for this podcast is auto-generated.

Artist K Guillory joined the Good VR Podcast to discuss her path into exploring the practice of immersivism.

One of the first articles on this site was about Guillory’s work painting a furry in her living room. Now on the podcast the artist dives deep into her path from Second Life to fully immersive virtual spaces in headset and her explorations making art while there.

Immersivism “is when you make fine art about virtual worlds, digital life, cyberspace,” Guillory says on the podcast. “A very quick way to remember it is impressionism plus the Internet equals immersivism.”

Guillory’s Steam account logs the number of hours she’s spent in VRChat at over 3,000, not including the time she’s spent as a “Questie” logged into the application in standalone VR on the Quest platform. She made a space in VRChat she calls “Gate” that’s an island with a giant gate on it that she’s rigged up to connect out to Resonite, allowing her to essentially transition seamlessly between the two social platforms without leaving the headset.

“An artist is somebody that is constantly going to their canvas or their sculpting station or whatever they work with…and they are constantly going there in search of the truth. The truth of themselves, the truth of the world,” Guillory says on the podcast. “They are always trying to create something on canvas, on the table, in their workshop of something that they’re looking for something. And I think that when I began this, I was just following a path of curiosity. I really wanted to know where was my research going to lead me? There was some kind of truth out there that I was going to find. And I just kept following that. And I think that I stay on this path because I must see how the story ends. I need to keep going. There are times when, like when I went to Resonite, and I set up at each platform I visit, I set up an atelier — a workshop — and I just want to see what happens. Let’s make some art. Let’s make some memories of this art. What kind of art is going to pop up this time? And I think when I got to Resonite, it was kind of like when a character in a movie kind of gets towards the end of a simulated world and things start to kind of run out. And it’s like — this next part is the part that I built. And that was very exciting.”

Listen to Guillory’s suggestions now for other artists to check out working in this space, her suggestions for new artists exploring VR for the first time, and her favorite memories.

“While still a niche art movement practiced by a loose network of artists,” Guillory noted after our podcast, she and her friends “practice making this art through an online research facility and gallery called “The Museum of Immersivism”.

Schell Games head Jesse Schell joined the Good VR podcast and recapped his path in VR from working on Disney’s pioneering VR attraction Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride in the early 1990s to the studio’s recent explorations in generative AI.

Along the way, we discuss the seated I Expect You To Die trilogy, the physically active Until You Fall sword fighting game, and the ambitious effort to transition the mobile multiplayer game Among Us to fully immersive embodied virtual reality.

“The business of watching your back, the fact that in VR, you literally have to turn around to see…is someone behind me?” Schell said. “Like, ooh, that does feel kind of like a match. And so we were excited by the idea of it in conversations with Innersloth, this was something that was interesting to them. And so we ended up kind of being able to team up to get it done. They were very interested in having us be a part of that. And it definitely has been the most, in terms of number of players, the most successful VR experience that we’ve been a part of.”

Most recently, Schell transitioned development of Among Us back to original developer Innersloth. The title represents perhaps the only multiplayer title in gaming to transition across all those platforms and modes of play, essentially going full circle from a flat map on a flat screen to a 3D map on a 3D screen and then, finally, back to a 3D map on a flat screen. Schell says what “shocked us” was that, as the title moved from VR back to flat, they expected more players to enjoy the game in that final mode of play.

“As many players as we have in VR, I don’t know, we’ll probably have three times as many in flat? Of course we will,” he said they thought. “And the answer was no, that hasn’t been true. The VR part of it has been more successful for us than the flat version, which was a little surprising.”

I manually edited the 52-minute conversation with Schell recorded on the podcast platform Riverside down to 44 minutes with an automatically generated transcription available above.

Sofia Lazaro is the cofounder of Dauntless XR which focuses on products in mixed reality “for the deskless workforce.”

“Individuals who work in aerospace, manufacturing, and defense, and [Dauntless] really aims at use cases to how can we use XR as a medium to give people the information they need when they need it in 3D in kind of a hands-free format,” Lazaro explains on the Good VR podcast. “There’s a stark dividing line through our use cases. And we build hardware agnostic specifically so that we can bring in the right hardware that’s right for the use case. And for us, the hard line tends to be — is this a classroom or a field context? — And if it’s a classroom context or maybe at least not a context where we’re concerned about physical safety, so we don’t have humans in the same space as large machinery or things like that, that is when we would lean more on the things that have the higher field of view.”

Lazaro’s conversation with me on the Good VR podcast covers a range of topics including Dauntless XR’s effort to build software that covers 3D data collaboration and workflow assistance, aiming to relieve people from needing to carry “binders of reference materials out into the field.”

Some of the most memorable experiences that have ever been made for VR headsets started in the minds of Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro at Tender Claws.

Artists and creators who have closely followed good VR projects over the last decade still carry with them today their experiences in Virtual Virtual Reality on Daydream headsets and, during the pandemic, the intimate social connection possible in Quest systems buying a ticket to a showing of The Tempest in The Under Presents. The pair estimate their theater in VR hosted somewhere between thousands to tens of thousands of individual performances across the pandemic, providing a vital place of performance to actors when their physical venues closed and much-needed magic and social connection to isolated attendees.

Their sequel Virtual Virtual Reality 2 might be seen as prophetic to the ends of Rec Room and Horizon Worlds while Stranger Things VR released at the zenith of Meta’s explorations into mixed reality on Quest systems. More recently, the pair have returned to their installation-based roots with experiences touring through festivals in projects like Face Jumping and, this year, the AI glasses-based Body Proxy.

 “What we do is kind of like look at the zeitgeist and look at both the critical and creative landscape that we're participating in,” Gorman said on the Good VR Podcast. “And think about speculative futures and narratives that make people think about technology rollout or what the systems they're engaging in are…I think what has been really supportive and important for us as artists in that our pieces come out as sort of precedent sometimes and make a statement about these speculative futures that then may or may not come to pass.”

Their work across space and embodiment strains the very definition of games, with the pair responding to my questions across an hour-long conversation I edited down to around 47 minutes with the podcasting platform Riverside.

“ I think we have a very blurry definition of game and we will refer to all of them as games and all of them as experiences depending on the audience we're talking to,” said Cannizzaro during the conversation.

I discuss with the cofounders the recent colocation chat I had with Alex Coulombe and Steve Lukas and manually corrected the transcription of our conversation to the best of my ability in an effort to make their deep reflections as universally digestible as possible.

“You have [an] audience and market that feels like, ‘oh, what is a game and what is an experience?’ And that's still a discussion. But in the worlds we inhabit, we are far past that discussion and looking into a broader -- what is interaction in this space,” Gorman said.

“I  think it's actually maybe your relation to others through the technology is what creates presence.”

Thank you to Good Virtual Reality’s paid subscribers and founding members for supporting this independent journalism.

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Joseph Simpson’s Project Graveyard is one of my favorite apps on Apple Vision Pro for its simple humor:

“Hopes and dreams have to go somewhere,” the App Store description states. “Project Graveyard is a tiny place where you can bury and remember your dead projects. Create gravestones for all your favorite projects and celebrate them forever.”

Now on version 3.0, the volumetric app shares space with other apps running on VisionOS as Simpson works to fully embrace Apple’s operating system. The project helps Simpson with his work at Step Into Vision, a site with guides and sample code that can help out other developers. He’s also working with a community of Vision Pro developers and enthusiasts on a project called Shared Visions aiming to highlight the leap of faith many took in embracing Apple’s high end augmented virtuality headset that doubles as a spatial computer.

“If all VR is gaming, that’s great, but that’s not why I’m here,” Simpson says during the Good VR podcast. “To me, gaming in VR is an additive thing. I use my Mac all day at work. I don’t really play games on my Mac. I have no interest in doing so. I create stuff on my Mac, that’s what it’s for. If I can’t create stuff on this headset, then I don’t want this headset. And fortunately, the only thing that kept the Quest in rotation for me was WebXR so I could have some creativity outlets for it. If all you can do with it is play Beat Saber, I’m sure there are plenty of people to buy that, but it’s not an interesting device.”

We cover Simpson’s long path into VR from returning the original Nintendo VirtualBoy and exchanging it for Game Boy games to exploratory Quest development, then WebXR development, and now Vision Pro development.

“Shared Visions is a community project that I kickstarted last fall. So I kind of announced it around the anniversary of Step Into Vision as kind of a one more thing. Let’s build something together,” Simpson said during the podcast. “So at its core, it is an immersive documentary about the Apple Vision Pro community. So developers, designers, enthusiasts, filmmakers, anybody who’s just using the headset and getting a lot of value out of it. And we are, …using Apple vision pro technology to make it. It’s a visual app that’s running a reality kit scene that’s running a sophisticated timeline to show multiple kinds of media rather than just — it’s not a video file that you go and play and watch. The timeline itself is going to be made of 3D assets and animations and particle systems and of short video clips that we will animate and position around the user as makes sense based on the story that we’re telling. So it is a 3D project with a bunch of video assets rather than a 3D video project, if that makes sense.”

A time is coming soon when the people who attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in VR can revisit the birthplace of the organization.

Two organizers of VR meetups for AA, Paul and Mike, estimate hundreds of people have been put on the path to recovery from their meetings in virtual reality as they find themselves protected by the total anonymity of a headset connected over the Internet.

The two co-founders of AA are known as Bill W and Dr. Bob and a home in Akron, Ohio is considered the birthplace of the organization back in the 1930s. Paul hopes to be able to visit that place physically soon to scan it with headsets and a 3D camera. Using a platform like Horizon Hyperscape, nearly 100 years later people may be able to revisit that place in VR.

“We want to create the ability to tour that home, which is so important to many people in AA, that will never be able to get there,” explained Paul during the Good VR podcast. “And we’ve got friends and people in Costa Rica and France and England and even other parts of the United States who are not going to travel to Akron but would really like to see, if you will, the birthplace of AA.”

Across a 39-minute conversation, Paul and Mike explain the organization and its principles as well as their journey through virtual reality as well as the fellowship they’ve been able to foster across various platforms, from Altspace to Horizon Worlds to new platforms they’re exploring today.