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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I’ve always had issues with my sleep. Throughout my life I’ve had occasions of insomnia and, at times, even resorted to medication. The first time I fell asleep in my headset was an accident, but then with very few exceptions I’ve been using it to fall asleep practically every night since February 2, 2024.

The first day I got the Vision Pro I barely took it off. It truly was a dream device to me, or as close as I’ve ever gotten before. Before Vision Pro I owned a Quest 3 I used occasionally for games, Bigscreen and VRChat, and I was a Supernatural member before they laid off the coaches. I never really considered using Quest 3 at bedtime. I use a battery strap that would make it too uncomfortable and the overall user experience didn’t really make me think it would work well in that situation. With Vision Pro, I decided to wear it in bed that first night.

Normally, I would scroll on my phone or iPad Mini in bed. In Vision Pro I had infinite floating iPads in front of my face and the light from my device wouldn’t disturb my fiancé. This was perfect! So I laid there, on the moon, with AirPods Pro in and noise cancellation turned on. My eyelids grew heavy looking through less light pollution at more stars in the sky than when I was a kid. I had a Safari window with YouTube open to my left and the Reddit iPad app floating to the right. I was in nerd heaven. The next thing I knew I woke up in the middle of the night still wearing the headset. How long was I asleep? The YouTube video had stopped but something about the total silence of the moon and being under a starry sky just lulled me into an exquisite slumber. Surely this was a fluke, right? I couldn’t possibly fall asleep normally with this heavy head-mounted display strapped to my face. Or could I? I put the headset away and went back to sleep normally that first night.

The next night I wore the headset at bedtime again. I fully intended to take it off before falling asleep but, before I could, I fell into a deep sleep. This was a eureka moment. Instead of my normal tossing and turning, thinking about what I had to do the next day, or that embarrassing remark I made to a crush in the 10th grade, I just drifted off and stayed there. The combination of the starfield above me and noise cancellation on the AirPods totally transported me to a bed on the moon. This place delivered complete silence and peace. I was able to escape the cacophony of Earth for a few hours and my restless brain found calm.

I expected this device to replace my iPad, maybe for it to possibly replace the monitor on my desk, or perhaps occasional television watching. I never thought it would replace sleep aids.

My exploration of Vision Pro as sleep mask progressed to regular use and I own five light seal cushions which I swap every few days. When I start using the 5th cushion I wash the other four in fragrance free dish soap and I dry them on the windowsill. I haven’t experienced any irritation and don’t usually wake up with marks on my face from the headset. I sleep on my sides and flip back and forth throughout the night. I keep the battery wedged between the mattress and the box spring with it wired into wall power throughout the night. I’m nearsighted and also use the Zeiss prescription lens inserts at all times.

I swapped between two sets of AirPods Pro 2 to keep noise cancellation through the night initially, but the new AirPods Pro 3 will generally last me till I wake up. Sometimes they will die shortly before my alarm, depending on how much YouTube I watch before bed. I generally fall asleep fairly quickly in VR now once I lay down.

I know my experience won’t translate to everyone. I must have the perfect head shape for Vision Pro and tolerance for long term use of AirPods in my ears. I was one of the few that was very comfortable with the original Solo Knit Band of the Vision Pro, but I feel the Dual Knit is just perfect.

People often ask me “how often do you actually use that thing?” I can honestly say: “Every single day (and night 😉)”

Editor’s note: My thanks to ParmaJohn for sharing his experience in VR as well as becoming a founding member of Good Virtual Reality. This publication is 100 percent independent and supported entirely by its community. You can become a paid subscriber to receive podcasts and occasional emails before everyone else, or donate to support Good VR.

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:

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

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

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

4. 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?

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

6. 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?

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

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

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

10. 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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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.”

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.

This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

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.

This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

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.

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.

This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

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.

This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

From today puzzlers can piece together in the same shared reality on Apple Vision Pro and Quest with a new trick developed to simplify colocation. Deployed by Steve Lukas in his app Jigsaw Night, the method sees a person wearing a headset put their hand up in front of another’s headset to create a bridge between their devices. If you’ve ever worn a headset and accidentally seen it track someone else’s hand instead of your own, Lukas’ feature uses that quirk to share the relative position and rotation of a virtual object to effectively sync the realities of both headsets.

“Part of the process of porting Jigsaw Night to Apple Vision Pro was to port the Meta Interaction SDK, which has a consistent method of tracking hand joint poses. So we already had a system that essentially read hands in the same way even though the underlying architectures may be different,” Lukas wrote. “When puzzling together with friends and we got too close together, we noticed that our hands would sometimes get ‘grabbed’ by the wrong devices under a specific set of circumstances. So…if we purposely reconstruct those circumstances, can we have a situation where both headsets are tracking the same hand, each thinking ‘that’s my hand’ and being able to use that as a solid ‘shared anchor’ in 3d space? The answer was yes.”

The app features a circular table that functions as a control center to change options and the gesture syncs its relative position and rotation between the two virtual realities. By repeating the process to other headsets, several players piecing together a jigsaw puzzle together in one physical location can create one single shared space with remote players.

“Really it could be done with any headset,” Lukas texted, teasing that it should be possible to “auto-sync with hands between Quest, AVP, and other immersive platforms and view it all through a phone or iPad.”

Most multiplayer VR games don’t allow players to hand digital object to one another remotely and the number of apps that enable the same thing with someone standing in the same physical room is vanishingly small. The app Figmin XR, for example, allows players to sync their realities but you have to carefully put a shared anchor in the same spot on the floor on each headset and ensure it’s at the same height with the same rotation.

In April, I outlined colocation as the biggest problem to solve in software for mass market VR after I watched Quest headsets struggling to consistently create this experience with shared spatial anchors at an event in Atlanta. Since then, Lukas has attacked the problem in every possible direction digging into Unity’s ARFoundation, Google’s ARCore, Apple’s ARKit, Meta’s Shared Spatial Anchors and even developing his own Local Area Network techniques to more robustly allow devices to share reality. Early this week I was the first to test the feature ahead of the launch of the Jigsaw Night companion app for Vision Pro and iOS.

You can find Jigsaw Night on the Meta Quest Store and Apple App Store and find guides to the companion apps in headsets and phones via the game’s website.

This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

The new Jigsaw Night companion app is available now for iOS and visionOS with cross-play to Meta.

“What we’re looking to do is expand the reach of Jigsaw Night so it goes beyond the Meta Quest ecosystem,” developer Steve Lukas told Good Virtual Reality. “Other people can join in even if they don’t have a headset on the low end [and we] provide access to Apple Vision Pro users to participate with Meta Quest users as well.”

Lukas is the one-man development force building Jigsaw Night out as a kind of spatial study solving for the myriad friction points that keep people from using VR headsets. The idea is to access a familiar activity tapping into every benefit of spatial computing while building out components that may one day be reusable far beyond just Jigsaw Night.

“This actually started out as a hobby project that I was building for me and my son,” Lukas said. “We were putting together Lego and jigsaw puzzles every weekend, and as part of my next virtual reality experiment, I thought, is there a way we can do this without having to find more table space, without having to find more shelf space, without having to go to the store and be able to still have that enjoyment of puzzling together?”

From this core idea Lukas’ work has burrowed deep into the reality of the current VR winter as Meta rebuilds for a more lightweight future with Apple, Google, and Pico steadily building out components of their own emerging platforms.

“We can actually make puzzles of the things that we care about without having to send them off to a manufacturer and wait so many days for it to be printed and be able to play together,” Lukas said. “So we can instantly puzzle together, but also by being able to do this in a 3D space then we’re able to move puzzle pieces wherever we want and if we are putting together a five hundred piece puzzle, and we’re only halfway done, we can pause, pack it up virtually, and then pick it up again tomorrow without having to take up any shelf space or table space in our house.”

On Quest headsets the app includes Facebook support so players can make puzzles from photos in their account. Players can start a sample puzzle on Vision Pro but, given the limited reach of the Quest ecosystem and an even smaller user base on visionOS, he’s only built out the Facebook support and full puzzling experience for Quest so far. Before he tackles next steps, he’s hoping to prove with this release that creating a bridge between ecosystems will compound overall usage.

“We’re not quite there where pick up and buy a bunch of headsets is the current mindset of the typical family,” Lukas said. “What we saw as a big need was being able to bring people in and allow them to participate with their family. If they’re in a group at their home for the holidays and they have just two headsets, then two people could play together and what would the rest of the family do?”

The LIV camera included in the Quest version lets streamers share their puzzling session with anyone and a new experimental feature colocates people on different headsets by tracking a hand from two headsets at once. He’s expended tremendous effort illuminating the invisible barriers that keep multiple devices from sharing the same reality, from wireless networking to syncing up coordinate spaces for colocation.

“The beauty of colocation is that when you’re doing activities together, then you really crystallize that concept that what we’re seeing digitally is real,” Lukas said. “Because then as I pick up a puzzle piece and hand it to you and you pick it up, then it feels seamless. It feels like this is an actual physical object and we are virtually using digital light to assemble a puzzle. While the dream is a full family of four playing together, it really starts with two people playing together in a session…being able to capture with a phone would be one way to start growing this understanding of what magic and power there is to this platform.”

You can find Jigsaw Night on the Meta Quest Store and Apple App Store. Guides are available to the companion apps in headsets and phones via the game’s website.

Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

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.

Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Donate to support our journalism and help support the expansion of the Certified Good VR Collection.

Bullets are more threatening than Beat Saber’s boxes — you dodge or you die. Controllers in hand and vibrating when you fire back constantly reminds that any threat can be neutralized. So when thumping music teaches you to move around its dreamy landscapes like Neo in The Matrix, Pistol Whip’s sustained state of pure physical embodiment grabs you and never lets go.

Cloudhead doesn’t gate content behind paid add-ons, so buying Pistol Whip provides access to multiple campaigns as well as mods, like “Deadeye” that removes the game’s centerpiece aiming assistance and replaces it with incredibly intense challenges. The studio’s thoughtful approach to development also armed it with a way to effortlessly enjoy community content, even in standalone mode.

You may enjoy other rhythm games more for any number of reasons, but Pistol Whip’s unique approach to balancing flight and fight makes it the perfect rhythm game and a perennial reason to own a headset and return to VR for one more shootout.

Find it on Steam, the Quest Store, and PlayStation VR2.

Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Donate to support our journalism and help support the expansion of the Certified Good VR Collection or become a paid subscriber to receive full podcast episodes days before they become public.

Resolution Games immediately embodies players in VR as a mighty tree that transports a player straight from their living room to protect shiny acorns from thieving squirrels in VR. Your fingers turn into the wooden branches of the tree and VR’s ability to scale the environment makes you tower over a field invaded by scheming squirrels. Tree vs. squirrel matches are just a few minutes each and random codes make it easy for squirrels on phones to find their tree in VR.

The speed by which a match starts and ends, with the joy and surprise associated with the tree tossing squirrels into the far reaches of simulated space, is exactly the reason why Acron can entertain for an hour or more as players take their turn in VR with just a single headset.

Acron was released in 2019 and received its latest update in 2026. The game is available on the Quest store with free companion apps on Android and iOS to log in as the squirrels.

Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Donate to support our journalism and help support the expansion of the Certified Good VR Collection or become a paid subscriber to receive full podcast episodes days before they become public.

The new page on Valve’s Steam begins with the following sentence:

“Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer.”

Summer begins June 21 and ends September 22 for Valve’s U.S.-based offices.

Pico asked for NDAs for a new headset while both Google and Meta rebuild their strategies relative to VR around ultra-lightweight designs and Apple is steadily building toward something beyond the current ultra-high resolution Vision Pro. This means Valve’s window to ship the super comfortable Steam Frame is growing tight before other companies aim to push the market forward.

Fans of Supernatural VR fitness share that in common.

Many in the community of more than 110,000 on the official Facebook group for Supernatural had become despondent, seeking solace in other services like FitXR and FunFitLand, after Meta laid off the coaches in January. Yesterday’s announcement that the fitness service is relaunching later this year as an independent startup, and bringing the coaches back, is turning that sentiment around.

“I’m literally walking around my neighborhood while I read comments and bawl my eyes out,” replied coach Raneir Pollard to a crying fan. “You’re not alone fam!”

Coaches call subscribers to the fitness service “athletes” and deliver positive reinforcement throughout the workouts and beyond.

“We are building something beautiful and we’re doing it with you,” said Leanne Pedante on the new sign-up page for the service. “Get on board lets ride till these wheels fall off.”

I posted to the Facebook group in search of reactions both to the layoffs in January and unexpected news of its rebirth in June.

“I was heartbroken when they left, and I canceled to send a message to Meta that I was not okay with this,” wrote one user. “I started working out and running and doing more organically from home, but I missed Supernatural... my mother passed away yesterday, so hearing this news has been like a life preserver, and I am feeling such blessings right now, and hopeful and happy”

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Below are five Supernatural fitness stories I received over email from people who have used the VR fitness service over the last five years, bolding added:

Therese Martin

I have NEVER like to exercise, not in high school, not in the Army and certainly not in my adult life. Supernatural changed that for me. It wasn’t overnight. It took me about a year to realize that this exercise was fun, required minimal coordination, and no gym bod required. I started using Supernatural in 2022 but didn’t get serious until 2023. I had a 192 week streak going until early in 2026 when I missed a couple of weeks. I work out 4 days a week. Every week. I have NEVER stuck with an exercise routine for longer than a month until I started Supernatural. Now, I am lighter, stronger and happier than when I started.

I started for the movement and the music. I have stayed for the coaches and the way they make me feel supported, important, powerful. We have never met in person, but I spend time with them 4 days a week and it doesn’t feel virtual to me. I feel so much more confident! I have so much more belief in myself. I feel better and when I am not working out, I don’t feel great. These coaches have inspired me so much. I hear, “You can do hard things!” in the middle of some hard workouts and I believe it. I believe it so much I got a tattoo that reads “ICDHT”. I can do hard things.

I cried all day when it was announced that Meta had pulled the plug on Supernatural. I felt betrayed. I was angry. These people, the choreographers, the VR folks, had all put their heart and soul into this program and this community. I felt betrayed for them as well. I thought about dropping my subscription but then I remembered how much joy I get from working out in the Supernatural world. I remembered how much everyone worked to create this program and make it special. I decided to ride or die with Supernatural. And, if I am truly honest, I know that if I quit Supernatural, I would not bother to find a replacement. I would slowly just go back to not moving.

Today, I am glad that I kept doing my Supernatural thing because now I know there is something better waiting for me down the road. I am grateful for the powers in the universe that made this happen.

Supernatural since January 2022

Leela Sinha

I don’t have a big fancy Surgery to Superathlete story, just the regular kind we see so many of in the community. I’ve tried all my life to exercise, but for two reasons, it’s always been hard: one, I have some medical issues that make it hard for me to be far from home if something goes wrong. The other is just that I get BORED. Weight lifting: boring. Running: boring. Everything else: also boring. Sports: why does this matter?

I discovered way back in the days of the XBox Kinect and the PS...gosh what was it called? that computer games were one way to get me moving, but the tech really just wasn’t there, and then there wasn’t enough game development for those platforms. Then I realized what I love is adventure sports: kayaking, rock climbing, hiking--but due to the aforementioned medical situation, all the pieces of the puzzle have to be perfect for me to get to do those things, and then really, for safety, I should have someone else along. Then I got another medical situation that also makes outdoor sports tricky.

And bored. Did I mention I got bored SO EASILY? (I’m an intensive--we are intense personality type people, I wrote a book about us--and getting us to exercise is a real challenge). I wanted intense and fun but low actual risk because I can’t afford to be getting injured.

When I found SN it was before its transfer to Meta and I was DELIGHTED. I used it so much I got my second sports injury ever (shoulder problems) but couldn’t find a PT who understood the game, so they couldn’t really help me fix it. That sidelined me, and I was so upset. I’ve never been upset about not exercising before--first time for everything, I guess--and then I recovered, and then I reinjured myself and for the first time in my life I understood why athletes aren’t just relieved they don’t have to play their sport for a few months while they heal.

I was just coming back from my second hiatus when the shutdown was announced...and I was so disheartened I couldn’t get in the headset at all. All the cardio fitness (I discovered I could run by accident after I’d been doing SN for about six months the first time) and strength and flexibility I’d built slowly ebbed away, and my doctor put his Disappointed face on, but I just couldn’t make myself. It was like going to a graveyard.

So I’m incredibly excited to be anticipating the reboot. When indie companies are bought out I never begrudge them their exit (I consult with small businesses which are often partly or all the way software companies--I know how much work it is, and they deserve their flowers) but so often the values get lost in the money-only-value that a takeover involves. I can’t wait to see the values of community and support and fitness and access to athletics for all return to the app and those of us who love it.

Tammi Strong

On June 12, 2023, I put on a VR headset and started Supernatural for the very first time.

At the time, I had no idea it would completely change the way I viewed exercise.

For all my life, I hated even the thought of working out. It was something I knew was good for me but that wasn’t enough reason to actually do it.

Supernatural changed all of that. Somehow, exercise became fun. It became something I wanted to do, not something I forced myself to do.

But it wasn’t just the workouts.

The magic of Supernatural was always the people behind it.

The coaches weren’t just faces that appeared in a headset. They were real people who genuinely connected with the athletes. They celebrated wins, encouraged us through struggles, and built a community that felt surprisingly personal for a virtual platform. Over time, I even became close with one of the coaches and would chat with each other about things outside of Supernatural.

So when the changes started happening and then the coaches being laid off, something shifted for me.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, but the excitement I used to feel every time I put on the headset started to fade. The workouts were still there, but the heart of what made Supernatural special felt different. To me, the coaches were the super glue that held everything together. Losing them felt personal because they had become such a meaningful part of the experience.

Today, everything changed again.

When I heard the announcement that the coaches and some of the original staff would be launching their own version this fall, I instantly felt something I hadn’t felt in a while: excitement.

Real excitement.

The kind that makes you smile before you’ve even finished reading the announcement.

The kind that makes you immediately want to put the headset back on.

For the first time in a long time, I felt that spark come back.

It’s funny how sometimes it isn’t the technology, the workouts, or the features that keep us coming back. It’s the people. It’s the community. It’s feeling connected to something bigger than yourself.

June 12, 2023, was the day I fell in love with fitness.

And today feels a little like getting that feeling back.

Fall can’t come soon enough!

Sherer Minor

My name is Sherer Minor, and I am very much a SN fan. I’d call myself a devotee, but I’ll admit I’ve wandered over to FitXR recently in an attempt to find an alternative, as I assumed SN had been put out to pasture.

I’ve been a SN athlete for a few years off and on, and just like most people, life got in the way of me sticking to it. I lost track of my fitness goals for a few years when work and my child’s schedule obligations started monopolizing my time. The weight crept on and I chose to be blind to it. It just wasn’t a convenient time for me to put myself first.

Then, in November 2024, my Mother was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Since I live the closest (about an hour away), I was her caretaker. At first, she was independent, and in her brave and stoic way, took it all, considered it just a temporary setback, in and was determined to beat it. She elected to try chemo. I took her every two weeks, and during that time, watched as her health declined. She’d lose weight rapidly, and I’d seem to find it just as rapidly.

When she passed in June of 2025, I was mentally and physically broken. I was 230 lbs, and my emotional health was as destroyed as my physical health. So in July, I went to my doctor, and told her that something had to change. Her response was to provide prescriptions for anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, as well as Zepbound to help kick start my weight loss. Surprisingly, insurance covered it, and I tried my first dose that weekend. Boy, did that ever suck. The nausea was REAL.

Despite the side effects, I kept taking it, and within a few weeks at a small dose, started to see my weight drop a little. Once I saw the scale move, I got motivated to keep going, and see what else I could do. I started walking around my small neighborhood, and that got boring fast. I joined a gym and tried the treadmill and weight machines. Hated that too! One day, I looked at my Quest 2 collecting dust, and muttered out loud but to no one in particular “meh, why the hell not?”

I was sucked in from that moment on. From the first wind chime-like sounds of the opening intro, to the final swings I took during my low intensity quick hits workout, I felt like I was “home”. Sweat was dripping into my eyes and mouth, but I couldn’t stop smiling. It felt like the first time I had smiled in a month. To be honest, it probably WAS.

I put the headset on almost every day. I built a VR gym area in my basement, and also picked up some equipment to start strength training. I stopped taking the antidepressants, and only use the anti-anxiety meds when I absolutely need them. I’m still taking the Zepbound, because it helps with the “food noise”.

When the announcement was made that the SN app was being sunset, and the coaches let go, I felt like I had been sucker-punched in the gut. It took me a second to remember to breathe. All I could think was “Oh shit, what am I going to do now?” I felt abandoned. I kept using the app, but honestly it wasn’t the same. It felt hollow. I then wandered over to other apps: Funfitland, Les Mills Bodycombat, and FitXR. I hated the first two, but despite the music being abysmal, FitXR had different options that I liked, such as the daily challenges, and the “ghost” multiplayers with the leaderboards in each session, which spoke to the competitive nature that I didn’t know I had. So I started using FitXR first as my warm up, then SN for my main workout.

Today, when the announcement was made that the family is coming back together, my first reaction was pure joy. It was the best news I had heard in a while! I virtually SPRINTED to the sign-up page and became a founding member, then I shouted my jubilation from the Official Supernatural Community FB page rooftops! Once the initial excitement wore off, I was surprised to notice that I felt guilty. FitXR has become a staple of my routine, which means that I’m now a customer of their competition.

Well, damn. I’m cheating on my fitness family.

I realize that there’s room in my headset for both, as there has been these many months. However, I will likely drop FitXR when SN comes fully back online, especially if they take some of the features of FitXR, like the varied workouts (HIIT, Sculpt, Combat) and the competition aspect. I know where my true loyalties lie: to the app that saved me from myself.

DeeDee Henry

When the news hit in early January that Meta was putting Supernatural on life support, saying I was devastated would be an understatement. I was in tears, stunned into disbelief, and completely numb. I’m part of #TeamSunshine, myself, Sherry Dickson, Kelly Hines, and my mom, Darlene “Cookie” Norman, and we truly went through the stages of grief together. But when we reached anger, it lit a fire under us.

We reached out to every media source we could. We campaigned, wrote letters, made calls, sent emails, anything we thought might help. We heard a lot of discouragement and skepticism, with people telling us we were wasting our time, that Meta was too big, and that Meta didn’t care. But we refused to listen. Even with so much silence and rejection surrounding our cause, one source connected with us: Victoria Song of The Verge. Through that coverage, we were featured as a small representation of the Supernatural athletes fighting to keep our app alive, and that attention lasted for a couple of weeks, helping bring much-needed awareness to saving Supernatural and our coaches.

Although we haven’t had many other successes since then, we also haven’t stopped brainstorming or looking for new ways to keep fighting. I’ll admit, we were discouraged and unsure what our next move would be, but this morning, everything changed. THIS MORNING we got the news, and I was in shock. I had to verify it was real before I let myself believe it. We found out about ten minutes before our morning workout together, and we spent our morning rejoicing, laughing, crying, dancing, and singing together in our “together” workout. We celebrated. The only thing that could have made it better would have been doing it all in person.

I’ve been a Supernatural VR user since October 2020. I’ve participated in beta testing and user interviews to help improve the human side of the app. It’s hard to fully explain to someone else how deeply this fitness app and its community have impacted me. Like many others, I originally started using it to lose weight and get healthy, but it became so much more than that. It created a genuine community, a family offering support, human connection, and encouragement while helping us build healthy habits.

It became a transformative tool for both physical health and mental health. And by mental health, I don’t just mean the meditation and stretching sessions. I mean the community of people connecting through shared struggles, experiences, victories, losses, and vulnerabilities, you name it, we’ve shared it. I never imagined a VR app could have this kind of power, and I’m sure the creators of Supernatural never could have imagined the level of virtual intimacy it would help build among people from all over the world.

A huge part of that closeness and success is thanks to our human coaches: Leanne Pedante, Mark Harari, Antonio “Doc” Harrison, Raneir Pollard, Dwana Olsen, and Mindy Lai. They connected with us on a personal level. They shared their real-life stories, struggles, and lessons while we worked out with them. Even more importantly, they showed up every day in the Facebook community and interacted with us there too. We could message them privately, and they would show up for us there as well.

We have cried tears of triumph and loss in our headsets while listening to and genuinely connecting with our coaches. We’ve also shared some very personal losses as a community.

And that’s only part of it. The users themselves have built a community of love and support. There are workout groups, competitions, and “together” workouts that let us see each other’s avatars and move as a team toward shared goals. We meet, talk, bond, and form friendships. I have so many people I’ve never met in real life, yet I truly consider them friends. One of my favorite memories is the “coach roulette” days, when coaches would surprise us by popping into together workouts, and everyone would scramble to “catch a coach” and work out with them. Those were good times.

I’ve also built my own core circle, #teamsunshine including my 75-year-old mother, who lives five hours away. Supernatural is how we talk to each other five days a week. I even won my mom her headset through a Supernatural “write about a woman who inspires you” challenge. I was one of five people who won a free headset and subscription, and I gifted mine to her because I wrote about her as my inspiration. She is moving, staying healthy, getting stronger, and impressing her doctor with her progress.

I also met a beautiful Canadian, Sherry Dickson, in a random together workout, and we quickly bonded. I invited her to join my mom and me, and later I discovered she is actually a distant cousin. The same thing happened with our fourth member, Kelly Hines, in Ohio, she turned out to be a distant cousin too. That makes the world feel small, but wonderfully connected. And even before we knew we shared family lineage, these two beautiful people I met through Supernatural were already my family.

I know I’m not alone in this experience. If you look deeper, you’ll find many stories like mine.

I could go on for pages about the benefits of Supernatural, not just as a fitness app but as a life-changing, legacy-building, beautiful human experience. If it were gone, there would truly be nothing that could replace it.

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January’s seismic strategy shift at Meta to center on AI laid off thousands of employees and shuttered gaming studios ahead of winding down the company’s wider Horizon Worlds effort. The shift also tore the heart out of the acquired service Supernatural as the coaches who guide members through their fitness journey were effectively turned into ghosts. Their performances would remain as “content” in the app but their employment ended.

Now founders Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, who originally agreed to sell the service to Meta in 2021, are going back to their roots as an independent entity called Supernatural Health and planning to bring back the coaches.

“Supernatural is being reborn. Same coaches, same DNA, same obsession with making fitness feel like the best part of your day — now under a new, independent company we’re starting from the ground up. The next chapter is going to be even better than the last one, and we want you involved from day one,” a Q&A page on the official website explains, noting a price increase is also coming to the service to support the effort. “As a fresh new independent company, we want to continue to pay the team industry salaries with real benefits, sign our own music deals, invest in new features and give the coaches you love a career instead of a side gig. The new price is what lets us do all of that and keep the bar high — for years, not just a season. Founding Members will help us get started with a founder discount as a thank you for being there from the start of this new chapter. Subscribers who join after we launch will pay full price.”

The announcement was made through the official Supernatural Facebook group. While the group has more than 110,000 members usually posting positive reinforcement for people on their fitness journey, shock and anger in the aftermath of the announcement in January has given way to a recurring theme of disheartened members finding themselves wondering if they should stick with Supernatural as friends they’ve made left the community.

Update: Read the follow-up report of first-hand accounts from Supernatural fans.

This is breaking news first reported by Good Virtual Reality. This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber.

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.

My two-hour conversation with RUST LTD.’s Anton Hand starts with a kid in 1993 making his first digital art — an icon of a train his dad swapped out for the “My Computer” icon on every PC he ever owned — and the story continues to an artist making a living in Second Life and ends in the present, asking whether he sold out taking money from Meta for a sequel to one of the most loved PC VR games ever made. To drive wishlists to Steam and Quest the studio drip-feeds clips across social media showing the most advanced firearm handling ever designed for a mass market simulation.

When you see clips from an in-development game like H3VR2 driving intense desire to experience simulation first-hand and then again in the silly antics of Sock Puppet Superstar from developer Brandon Montell, you can see that VR remains the ultimate space for passionate people to play and explore even if shifting hardware, software and business priorities imploded the current market prospects.

“It was not a business market-driven decision to start working on it,” Montell says of his puppets on the Good VR Podcast. “And if it had been, I probably wouldn't have started working on it.”

Shawn Whiting shared insight from his time in Dreadhalls that, when making your way down a dark hallway in VR, the limited field of view of the optics can seem to disappear at the edges and increase the feeling of immersion tremendously. Whiting was the head of community at Rec Room for more than eight years and he joined the podcast to walk through the surreal feeling watching that VR playground shut down.

“Rec Room was always pretty much predicated on VR blowing up in a way that it hasn’t really,” said co-founder Cameron ‘Gribbly’ Brown in an AMA video published on the day of its closure. “VR has continued to be pretty popular, but it hasn’t really exploded and become this huge mainstream hit that we really needed it to.”

There’s more to say and learn from the idea Rec Room “needed” a certain level of adoption to justify its $350 million investment, instead of developers just following the fun as Hand and Montell do. I’d point to the part of the conversation with Whiting where I recap Jesse Schell’s bewilderment that the flat-screen version of Among Us 3D failed to reach people in the same way the VR version did as an important insight about the unique value of embodiment in a headset, as well as the incredible risk developers take on building a bridge from VR to mobile phones and other traditional screens with the wrong incentives around engagement and interactions.

If you have time for just one story of human interest to listen to from Good Virtual Reality in May, I encourage you to listen to the story of Rafael Brochado and Sahand Malaei’s team from Iran. Working together from afar, through war, their project Banners & Bastions is a story of artists and developers taking inspiration from one another and then reaching out through the Internet to grasp one another and pull themselves closer together. When I first booted up Banners & Bastions I spent nearly three hours of my time enjoying its Thronefall-like mechanics adapted to three dimensions.

The first three projects to receive the “Certified Good VR” badge are Titans of Space, Walkabout Mini Golf, and Banners & Bastions. I’ll be certifying more projects in June when I’m back from the Augmented World Expo.

Looking forward, I’m curious to see what Job Simulator developer Devin Reimer builds next after his exploratory voice-controlled project Stellar Cafe and I’m looking forward to “fist my bump” with Rocky in the upcoming Project Hail Mary experience from Maze Theory due out at the end of the year.

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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?”