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.

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.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is scheduled to headline the event with a keynote talk titled “Making Computing More Human” on Tuesday, June 16 starting at 9:30 a.m. Pacific time.

Snap has been in development of the Spectacles platform for a full decade with five generations so far — the first three as camera glasses with added capabilities over time and the last two as full AR glasses for developers ahead of what’s expected to be a broader push for consumers. Notably, a USB-C connector on the latest units can connect to a side-worn battery pack to enable all day use.

After more than a decade of work in this space, my attendance at AWE this year allows me face to face contact with a broad collection of industry experts and professionals for the first time as a fully independent journalist.

The event also allows me to take a deep dive into contrasting Snap’s approach with others working in the space. Snap’s app and design principles include colocated experiences with nearby glasses that find one another quickly as well as a snappy mobile app for managing the hardware from a mobile phone. My recent podcast with Steve Lukas and Alex Coulombe outlined colocation as the core thing needed for mainstream good VR. Meta, meanwhile, still chokes its app for managing Quest headsets with flatscreen Horizon Worlds content rather than quick and easy operation of the eyewear you bought, as the Meta AI app for managing glasses is bogged down with AI generated slop. Meta also took a note from Snap’s playbook with a collapsing pocketable charging case for Spectacles seen in an earlier generation of the glasses. Will we see new work from Snap presented at AWE 2026?

There’s a hackathon planned in connection with AWE and, with the event taking place shortly after the official closure of Rec Room, I’ll be asking around to see what details I can find about what a number of people hired from that effort are up to at Snap.

My thanks to Snap for supporting my work here with Good VR. You can donate directly to support Good VR or email sponsor@goodvirtualreality.com if you’re interested in scheduling a sponsorship.

And yet, good VR continues to be made.

Kluge’s Arturo Perez added a Dua Lipa music pack to Synth Riders as he’s taking the music software everywhere Beat Saber won’t go. Next in May, we’ll see the Blokhaven course release from Walkabout Mini Golf with Creature teasing updates to its lineup of games as H3VR game creator Anton Hand posted a “nudge” suggesting people should tune into the showcase May 6 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific time.

Good Virtual Reality marked the occasion of the 10 year anniversary of consumer PC VR hosting a range of voices exploring the medium as a place of unmatched free expression.

From the forefront of exploring simulated space, VR artists shared their ideas and their journeys:

• After Tender Claws founders Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro carried thousands of people through the pandemic with their performances of The Tempest in headsets they’ve returned to their roots with immersive installations.

• After working on Tilt Brush, Cosmonious High, and Starship Home, Ashley Pinnick hopes to “see more people making their weird art and their weird games” while suggesting new artists have “a point of view and…something you want to share.”

• After thousands of hours in VRChat, K. Guillory describes the practice of immersivism as “impressionism plus the Internet”. When she joins a new online space she sets up a workshop and starts exploring. “Let’s make some art. Let’s make some memories of this art. What kind of art is going to pop up this time?”

Schell Games founder Jesse Schell worked on the pioneering Disney VR attraction Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride in the early 1990s while Oluwaseyi Sosanya has been making VR for a decade with Gravity Sketch producing products both digital and physical. I also spoke with Dauntless XR co-founder Sofia Lazaro who is exploring where headsets help In aerospace. These creators serve completely different markets with their software underscoring a recurring theme of Good Virtual Reality that simulated space is still being explored and discovered.

Enthusiasts JoyReign and JDun champion experiences in Apple Vision Pro as pioneers Alex Coulombe and Steve Lukas work in Unreal and Unity to solve the biggest problems facing VR use. The developers are trying to take the shared experiences two people can have together in $7,000 worth of Apple systems to people using much more affordable hardware.

The Good VR Podcast also talked with a series of people building coalitions in VR:

• Joseph Simpson gathers a community in Vision Pro development

• Vanessa Moss explores the future of meetings.

• Paul and Mike meet across every possible space in VR to support Alcoholics Anonymous.

• Sonya Haskins aka Hasko7 works as Head of Programming for the Augmented World Expo coming up in June after helping build community in Echo Arena last decade.

The Good VR podcast ramped up in a major way this month with several thousand downloads across all podcast platform for its 19 episodes, most of them going out to paid subscribers first.

You can email me about Good VR at editor@goodvirtualreality.com.

Subscribe now

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.

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”.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

I met the group recently for a pair of discussions held in Walkabout Mini Golf and gleaned some insights about the evolution of meetings from ancient times, when humans gathered around a fire to eat and talk, to modern day meetups organized via calendaring across time zones or held in VR.

Across 46 minutes, organizer Vanessa Moss and I discuss the value of “digital first” meetings and the ways people can be disadvantaged by wearing a headset or trying to join a meeting in multiple ways. Moss points out that the “this isn’t a solved problem, it’s an exploratory space…people often say online meetings, they’re so awful…we’re still trying to figure out what the etiquette is, like a lot of different companies, organizations are trying to come up with these rules of engagement. We’ve had like tens of thousands of years to figure out in person and arguably we’re still kind of bad at it sometimes, right? So yeah, online technologies are something that are still very exploratory…there’s excitement in the unknown.”

Developers toil away for days, weeks or months at their desks with little contact. Often, the VR software they develop doesn’t help. The experience they’re building can isolate a person in a universe occupied by exactly one person for dozens or even hundreds of hours.

Sometimes this solitude can be part of the charm and lure of good VR. Half-Life: Alyx, for example, completes its transportation to City 17 by taking people there totally unbothered by anything or anyone else. More often than not, though, the headset needs to come off fully for a momentary interaction with someone in the physical world looking to ask a question or see how they’re doing. Only the Apple Vision Pro currently features system-wide people detection, for example, allowing the wearer to set the conditions when someone present in the same physical space can pop into a virtual environment. And still, this solution only solves half the problem. It brings people together but doesn’t give them a shared understanding of the digital environment. Why can’t a person point their iPhone or Android at someone in a headset and make a request to join a shared reality?

“My ultimate vision of VR…is copresent, multiplayer, whatever you want to call it by default,” said Owlchemy Labs head Andrew Eiche in an interview about his game Dimensional Double Shift, which opens its next dimension next month. “It’s not a metaverse. I think that’s where we keep getting hung up is like you push [players] the wrong way. You push them into a product….no, the operating system is copresent. So I can join you, Ian, in the default space. And then you go, ‘Hey, let’s jump into Dimensional Double Shift.’ And you open Dimensional Double Shift and it knows that it’s on my headset and we go together  into Dimensional Double Shift. And if I’ve never made an avatar, it automatically takes the hyperrealistic avatar, converts it, and I hit a button or two and boom, now we’re in that experience together. And then we play that for a while. And then you go, “hey, we should play Walkabout. And you open Walkabout together, we jump to the next experience. It is a shared platform…stop trying to make a second place for me to make my games. Just make the operating system work, copresent.”

No other headset but Apple’s even solves the first problem of people sharing the same space across a decade of consumer VR and the $3,500 device is out of reach for too many for the benefit to have wide impact just yet. On every other headset, and in every experience, it is entirely up to each developer to provide multiplayer of any kind, and they largely have to explore without tools, guidance, or support.

This is the space in which Steve Lukas and Alex Coulombe are pioneers. Each of them embrace the concept of BYOH — Bring Your Own Headset — as I attended events recently with my headset in tow to try colocated experiences from them built in Unity and Unreal. Not only are they working to colocate people both physically in the same space, as well as those who are remote, they’re working to lock virtual content to the same location as well so that everyone shares the same reality.

“VR can be a very isolating experience,” Coulombe said during the Good VR podcast. “And I think it definitely has a stigma around that to the public where, yes, you’re alone in an experience and you go through it and it might be an amazing experience, but you are inherently alone. And colocation, both in its physical on-site version as well as its remote version, is what brings us together. It’s what allows us to have amazing shared experiences that otherwise would be impossible.”

Lukas’ app Jigsaw Night is a simple idea to recreate the social experience of jigsaw puzzling in a VR headset, but the components he’s adding to his app have never been built before. The latest versions of his software allow colocation of media and people across both iPhone and Quest 3.

“When you look at colocation, what that means is that we’re looking at leveraging the people in our surroundings to provide us with that activity and entertainment,” Lukas said. “Humans have been doing this since the dawn of time. You grab a piece of paper, you get a pen, you got tic-tac-toe. You don’t need much more than people. And people play games like mafia or imposters, right? It’s just people talking. You don’t need rich environments, you don’t need artificial content, you just need to bring people together. What mixed reality does is that it gives us a canvas to work from where we can start with something as basic as a set of playing cards or what I’m doing is a jigsaw puzzle. Something basic that lets us engage with each other. But the industry is chasing bigger, flashier, and more spectacle, but when you can minimize it, and just bring us back to being able to engage with each other as human beings with basic digital content that just lets us engage in ways that we’ve never been able to do before, then that brings about a whole host of possibilities. And then you start to focus on what allows us to do these things together versus how many particles can I throw on the screen?”

“When Beat Saber dropped out of PSVR 2, we released a song ‘We Are The Champions’ the same day,” Perez said. “We played that up [to] say we’re not going away from this platform. We were day one launch on Apple Arcade with Apple Vision Pro via Apple Arcade with Synth Riders there. We have a demo on Spectacles…and then we were day one partner on Galaxy XR as well with Android XR. So we’re not making a secret that that’s what we like to do. We like to be there first, everywhere that Beat Saber’s not.”

The podcast follows recent talks with artist Ashley Pinnick, VR evangelists JoyReign and JDun, and Gravity Sketch founder Oluwaseyi Sosanya joining for unrehearsed conversations covering the kind of focus, patience, passion and curiosity that drives exploration in virtual reality.

Perez and I cover a lot of ground across the 1 hour and 17 minute conversation as we talk about everything from work outside VR to ideas like eye tracking that may become necessary in next generation headsets.

“We’re not stopping…we’re not going away,” Perez said.

Most podcast episodes publish first to paid subscribers. Email editor@goodvirtualreality.com if you have something you want to share.

As she hooked the headset up to her Mac, back before Oculus stopped supporting that platform, Pinnick quickly found her last year of college work shifting to realizing her art in VR.

“I kind of ended up just falling into it out of curiosity and intrigue of this space that was kind of reopening,” Pinnick said. “Because I was aware of kind of the virtuality era of VR, if I remember correctly, you know back in the 1990s when I was a young kid and seeing this kind of new wave was super interesting to me."

Her work has become a fundamental part of a string of projects including Tilt Brush, Cosmonious High, Color Space, Starship Home and more. Over the course of our roughly 45-minute conversation we cover her journey and advice to artists who might be discovering VR for the first time in 2026.

“I just want to see more people making their weird art and their weird games. I want everybody to have that support so that they can make great art that needs to be seen, especially with just all the darkness in the world,” Pinnick said. "I think that having a point of view and having something you want to share, having taste, that kind of stuff is applicable across so many different mediums, so many different spaces. It transcends tools. It transcends software."

Across an hour-long conversation, the VR evangelists talked about how they met, their discovery of Horizon Worlds, their regular co-watching of movies in headsets and their belief that Apple is building to a more affordable product than the $3,500 Vision Pro.

“We think within a year or two we’re going to see a Vision product for around $2,000,” JDun said.

A good chunk of the conversation covers their experience across the full evolution of Horizon Worlds from building with primitive shapes in Quest 2 to finding community and the eventual invasion of children, and finally to the recent announcement of closure to VR. Through it all, their excitement for sharing great VR experiences with others continues.

“If you have a bad experience, you will never want to put it on again,” JoyReign said. “It’s like, okay, I’ve been there, done that. I don’t have to do it again, I’ve gotten motion sick or whatever, no interest. But if you have someone that really takes their time, walk you through it, hold your hand and also know your interests as well, it’s like perfection.”

Mark Zuckerberg is head of the metaverse. The domain is his, claimed as captain of a ship called Meta with a crew of metamates he tosses overboard regularly by the thousands to periodically replace with new crew drawn into servitude clasped in golden handcuffs.

The crew’s conscience is of no value as their orders flow from above, their mouths gagged in cash to stop them from warning anyone under risk of professional suicide.

The Meta sails to Africa where subcontractors under camera surveillance label personal information fished from its clouds. Meta Ray-Ban glasses are confiscated in Saudi Arabia while Iran warns its citizens to delete WhatsApp. Zuckerberg seeks name tags to label the thinking of every living soul while his right hand, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bosworth, protects the idea of capturing people for the metaverse after death.

Zuckerberg stuns his meals and speaks in his language on his terms with people he can use to spread his definition of reality. He promises new jobs to solve problems that get hidden by hiring instead of solved by focus, while distracting from the studied science of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The idea of the metaverse draws us away from the possibilities of creating in space with personal computers and into mindless consumption. It’s a place not made for the use of space by people but for Zuckerberg’s use of people across space. In Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, you have no ownership and no rights, only terms of service.

Bosworth wrote a thread stating: “The metaverse is *not* just Horizon or VR. It’s the blending of the digital and physical that will define the next computing platform. We can experience it on VR and AR sure but we also see it on mobile platforms.”

Bosworth and Zuckerberg ripped an idea from fiction to apply to the science of VR and then they wonder why their idea didn’t take, tossing more people overboard when each course correction fails.

Bosworth failed to capitalize on VR by linking Facebook accounts, by forcing advertising into virtual spaces, by bringing in third party headsets, and by flooding the zone with generated slop. He’s moved his efforts on to capturing bodies and living quarters for their cloud while adjusting laws and culture to serve his ends.

What does Horizon Worlds on mobile have to do with “blending of the digital and physical”? What does taking on Fortnite and Roblox have to do with VR? Nothing. Does Bosworth feel the plank receding below him?

The metaverse only truly exists in your mind as an idea placed there by Zuckerberg and Bosworth. Even Neal Stephenson suggests “picking a different name” for an idea so obvious. Evict this word from your lexicon and it goes the way of NFTs, disappearing along with the nearly $1 billion stock grants promised to each of Zuckerberg’s top executives if they can make the idea inescapable. The metaverse is a domain where you own nothing because a king believes “Aut Zuck aut nihil”. If the choice is Zuck or nothing, choose nothing.

You can make infinite space in VR from nothing.

VR Headsets Are For Private Discovery

For decades now, VR headsets put the wind in the sails of explorers discovering new realms. Your presence is delivered there by wide field of view opaque optics and the embodied presence it provides. You can layer on mixed reality passed through cameras and may even spend a majority of your time in this merged space, but pure VR is always there underneath when you want it. Remember why you are here starting and ending in the privacy of your own home. You can start out on Jupiter and end in a place you’ve pulled straight from your imagination.

We go to VR to explore, escape and do impossible things. In VR, we take the weirdness in our minds and make space for one another to look around. This space is vast and ever-growing, and we need each other to call out good VR when we see it. Seek refuge there in open personal computers that don’t need your name, age, or your face to deliver what you seek.

There are free islands in Linux and Github and OpenXR and WebXR and Godot and Blender where you can trade time for resources. You can use these tools to fashion your own private vessel and choose when, or even if, you want to hoist a flag and announce your presence to explorers of a growing multiverse.

There are no kings in VR. There are only explorers making discoveries.

We cover the founding story, investors, headcount, an overview of the product and come back to advice he has for others looking to develop and build in this space.

“Stay patient and be practical,” Sosanya said. “Spatial computing is so exciting. It’s really going to evolve over time. The hardware is going to change, the platform is going to shift, but it’s gonna take time because this isn’t a technology that replaces something that’s existing. Like a phone replaced the phone, the watch replaced the watch, the headphones replaced the headphones, even the laptop replaced the typewriter. This is a brand new paradigm for humans to interface with a computer. There’s never really been an equivalent. I think like the smart glasses is probably the closest thing, but even then it’s not obstructing your vision, right? So I think patience and really trying to understand where the space is going and grow with that space is really important.”

Might all these efforts have fared better if Meta took action on a Quest piracy effort earlier and not diluted social VR? No matter, three headsets continue building toward good VR in 2026:

• Apple teased over email “more news on the availability of iRacing and X-Plane soon” as the projects prepare to take high-end simulation to the next level on Apple Vision Pro.

• Valve may challenge developers looking to port their work from Quest to Steam Frame at supremely comfortable 90 frames per second for standalone verification.

• Pico seeks bug hunters to sign an NDA for a loaner unit of its next system.

When it comes to good VR experiences, party game Acron: Attack of the Squirrels saw its first update in over five years, Owlchemy’s hand tracking app Sporelando opens in April in Dimensional Double Shift (now with snap turning) and you can mini golf across a Hollywood studio in Walkabout Mini Golf.

Commentary

This site now has sections so subscribers can find just what they want from Good VR.

Guest authors Dr. Ruth Diaz and Steve Lukas added their voices to my own with each responding in their own way to Meta’s Horizon Worlds closure.

• Diaz outlined how Meta can make amends to creators: “Give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.”

• Lukas wrote a rallying cry to the development community: “Whoever’s left out there, it’s time to get serious and take the ball. The platforms have done their part, it’s time to step up and do ours. No more relying on another executive’s annual thesis, let’s build our own with everything that we uniquely understand, team up where we can, and let’s be loud about it.”

The original Vive and Rift were from an era when exploring good VR was the guiding principle in headset design and, after one full decade, they still account for over four percent of SteamVR usage. While Snow Crash author and former Magic Leap employee Neal Stephenson no longer believes in headsets, Apple’s holistic approach to VR as a spatial computer answers many of his critiques with realistic avatars.

Apple’s got an enormous opportunity to capture something Meta ignored in the standalone Quest — the market for comfortable high-end simulation in Vision headsets. I’ll go so far as to suggest that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, despite facing a nearly $1 billion payday should he succeed, may face dismissal when Apple’s carefully executed plan fully exposes how empty the attempts were to realize the metaverse across five Quest headsets. His desire to capture bodies and living rooms and keep them on Meta servers so they can keep you posting on the social network after death faces the reality of good VR in true personal computers.

Podcast & Exclusive Quotations

Mark Schramm:

“I just love this medium, I’m gonna be around until it either becomes super successful and eventually I retire, or it doesn’t and it goes away again. So that’s sort of why I’m in this space, because ultimately as long as I can make a decent living out of it, I’m not gonna leave.”

Thomas Van Bouwel:

“Cubism kind of got started like that. It wasn’t made in the game jam, but it was just a prototype that I wanted to build at one point. And so I did a very quick prototype over a weekend.”

Avi Bar-Zeev:

“I don’t use any Meta products to this date, even though I’d like to. The hardware is relatively nice and cheap, and I’d love to play with it. I might even love to develop for it, because I have all sorts of applications in mind, but I won’t touch it because of their privacy policy.”

Ryan Engle:

“You don’t have to be the first to be the best. Up until this year, we’ve always decided we would rather prioritize speed and adding features and adding courses and refining our existing software versus expanding to other platforms. When you expand there’s just a cost to every platform that you add. It takes QA time…you’re going to run into different issues on different devices.”

Andrew Eiche:

“My ultimate vision of VR…is co-present, multiplayer, whatever you want to call it by default. It’s not a metaverse. I think that’s where we keep getting hung up is like you push [players] the wrong way. You push them into a product….no, the operating system is co-present.”

Recreation Rooms

• Mark Schramm’s VR collection is a sight to behold.

• In a bedroom with one wall covered in boxes for VR headsets, Daven Bigelow used Wine to play the entire original Halo game with Quest 3.

• Javier Davalos thinks about mixing realities while riding his electric unicycle.

Eyes In

Early in the month, my experience with The Met’s art at home and at the museum revealed the enormous space for exploration in VR. By the end of March, this publication had its first sponsorship as I joined Steve Lukas at a jigsaw puzzling conference in Atlanta to witness his quest for good VR. Colocation is still a puzzle to solve, but work like Jigsaw Night shows how powerful it can be.

Catch up on Good VR’s first month and thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting this work directly. You can reach out over direct message on Substack to tell me about interesting things in VR — I broke several stories this month originating from my readers — and you can email ianontherecord@gmail.com too.

In the closure note, copied below in its entirety to save for posterity, Rec Room promised a tool available from Steam in about a week allowing creators to download their room and invention data “in formats that can help you recreate the room elsewhere if you choose." It’s important to note that while Meta leadership changed course to keep Horizon Worlds online after first announcing closure on a similar timescale, they still have made no similar promise that would allow creators to download their work for use elsewhere.

Dr. Ruth Diaz noted in a post on this site that Meta still needs to make amends to its Horizon creators, writing that it should “give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.”

As long-time believers in VR feel the air sucked out of their lungs at the 10-year anniversary of PC VR, Good VR reached out to VRChat for comment and received the following statement:

These are hard times for the space, and our hearts go out to the Rec Room team and their community. For Horizon Worlds, regardless of where it lands, this instability is tough on its creators, players, and team. Building social platforms is really difficult work, and these moments deeply affect real people. VRChat is in a strong position. We're continuing to grow, hitting new concurrency records, and actively investing in the platform. What's kept us here is our community -- their creativity, their ingenuity, and the fact that they show up every single day. We don't take that for granted. VRChat is not going anywhere. We're hiring, and we're building for the long term.

Here’s the post from Rec Room announcing closure titled “School’s out for Rec Room”:

Rec Room will be closing down on June 1st 2026 at noon Pacific time.

Over the past decade, Rec Room grew into something amazing, reaching over 150 million players and creators along the way. Players made over half a billion friends on the platform. In total, people all around the world spent a cumulative 68 thousand years in Rec Room. The top UGC rooms saw over 500 years of play time each. That’s a lot of people having a lot of fun.

What this community built together is incredible, and something we’ll always be proud of. Even today, millions of people are showing up to spend time in this fun and welcoming place every month.

Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business. Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in.

We spent a long time trying to find a way to make the numbers work. But with the recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming, the path to profitability has gotten tough enough that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut things down.

We’re making this decision now, while we still have the ability to wind things down thoughtfully and do right by the people who built this with us.

So what does this mean exactly?

On June 1st:

• You will no longer be able to login to and play Rec Room

• The rec.net website will go offline.

• Online services related to Rec Room Studio will no longer be available.

In preparation for the impending shutdown, as of this update the following things are changing:

1. You can no longer create new accounts

2. You can no longer add someone as a friend

3. You can no longer sign up for Rec Room+ (RR+)

   1. If you have an active RR+ membership, that membership is extended to June 1st.

4. We have removed the RR+ requirement from Partnered Creator. Anyone with sufficient tokens can choose to cash them out.

   1. New registrations for Partnered Creator will be halted on May 1st.

5. You will no longer receive token rewards (e.g., at the end of an RRO)

6. You can no longer create new monetized UGC content, including:

   1. Room inventory items and offers

   2. Room keys, consumables, and currencies

   3. Avatar items (in-game and Avatar Studio)

7. The Room Rewards program has ended. March Room Rewards will be paid out in early April.

8. You can no longer purchase or receive new Roomie Energy

As a thank you to our players:

• We are discounting first party content in all stores by 80%

• Some RR+ only features (e.g., avatar items, custom emoji, auras, body paint) will no longer require RR+

After May 1st:"

• You will no longer be able to purchase tokens or any $-denominated offers.

• You can no longer redeem gift cards for tokens.

After May 18th (at 11:59 PM UTC):

• You will not be able to earn any more tokens as a creator. You can still collect any previously-earned tokens.

• You can continue to spend the tokens you have until June 1st.

Downloading Data

We understand that people will want to download their data, and we want to help as much as we can.

For Players:

• You can download all the photos you’ve taken - follow the instructions here

• You can download a “final report card” that is a memento of your avatar - follow the instructions here

For Creators:

• Unfortunately, you cannot download a working copy of your rooms. We know that would be ideal. But without the Rec Room servers operational that is not possible.

• Instead, we are providing the ability to download your room and invention data in formats that can help you recreate the room elsewhere if you choose (e.g., as a standalone Unity app)

  • Room/invention data downloads only work via the Steam PC build, so please install that if you want to download room/invention data.

  • Note: This functionality is in final internal testing and will be available in a Steam PC update ~one week from today. Room/invention data downloads will be available until June 1st.

• To download room and/or invention data - follow the instructions here

Thank you

On behalf of the team we’d like to thank you for being a part of the Rec Room community and helping us create a fun and welcoming place for players from all walks of life over the past ~10 years. Your boundless creativity and enthusiasm has been a source of great inspiration and joy. We wish we could have found a way to keep things rolling, but unfortunately this is the end of the road.

We’d also like to thank everyone who has been part of the amazing Rec Room team over the years. It has been an honor and a career highlight to work with the talented, creative and dedicated Rec Room team. Thank you for your innumerable contributions to something that brought a lot of joy (and some heartache!) into the world.

Over the years, Gribbly often described Rec Room as “an explosion of love and creativity all around the world”. We hope it was that for you. It certainly was for us.