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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re all given this …

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Apple previously offered a schedule of live National Basketball Association games in Apple Immersive format. These early examples suggest that, ahead of more ambitious efforts in the years to come, Apple is stretching its muscles in next-generation live sports broadcasting by partnering with venues and leagues.

For those who aren’t following the overall trend here, Apple Immersive might be thought of as a format for video that dramatically moves past the limits of current 4K broadcasts with higher frame rates and, in VR headsets, the addition of transportive stereoscopy in wide field of view. Sports fans are unlikely to be won over by the prospect of buying a $3,500 headset just to watch a few games in VR right now, but these four Fridays offer a compelling reason for Vision Pro owners to schedule watch parties with friends who love baseball. You can essentially preview what attending live sports in VR will feel like when next-generation devices drop weight and cost while adding more robust streaming schedules with this display quality and overall immersion.

Here’s the Friday live schedule from Apple:

• August 28 @ 7 p.m. ET (Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees)

• September 4 @ 6:30 p.m. ET (Los Angeles Angels at Pittsburgh Pirates)

• September 11 @ 10 p.m. ET (San Diego Padres at San Francisco Giants)

• September 18 @ 10 p.m. ET (San Francisco Giants at Los Angeles Dodgers)

Apple is promising as part of the live experience “commentary from Paul Severino (play-by-play), Xavier Scruggs (analyst), and Michelle Margaux (sideline reporter), dedicated replays, and an immersive graphics package that includes team lineups and stats floating in the viewer’s space.”

Full game replays will also be available to those with an Apple TV subscription in Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the UK.

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

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

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

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

You can find more information about XpertVR on their website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Since then I’ve hosted roughly 40 of the world’s leading practitioners of immersive design on the Good VR Podcast and created the Certified Good VR Collection highlighting the work of artists pushing the medium …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HOLY SHIT”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the last 12 years I’ve owned and adopted into regular use as much as reasonably possible DK2, Gear VR, Vive, Rift, Daydream, Oculus Go, PSVR, Index, Rift S, Quest, Reverb, Quest 2, PSVR 2, Quest 3, Quest 3S, Bigscreen Beyond 2 and Apple Vision Pro, among other headsets.

I harvested PSVR 2’s controllers for use with Vision Pro and recently gifted Sony’s headset to a friend after it sat unused for over a year. The Index sat on a shelf unused for years but its controllers from 2019 remain in use when I take Bigscreen Beyond 2 out of its VRChat storage can. I gifted Quest 2 to one of my kids who uses it infrequently. I use Quest 3 when a developer has something interesting to test. Vision Pro is in a protective carry case with my prescription lenses magnetically attached to the headset. I use the Apple headset on a weekly basis to watch an occasional movie, do a FaceTime call, or try something interesting. When I travel by plane I always take Vision Pro for its ability to whisk me away from cramped transportation to a calming escape on Jupiter.

Trying to adopt VR headsets as wearable personal computers over roughly 1/4 of my life reveals a number of things about their use which are generally overlooked.

How VR Headsets Are Like Cameras

Photojournalists learn a trick of the trade that’s extremely relevant to VR headsets. They screw polarizing filters onto all their expensive lenses. These lenses help reduce glare in photographs. The main reason they do this, however, is to protect their expensive hardware from damage and dust. Replacing or cleaning the inexpensive filter is much quicker, easier and cheaper than repairing the expensive glass of their lenses. If your job is to move quickly through a crowd of protesters with a camera hanging off a strap at your side the chances are high that filter will collect dust or collide with a sharp object. Snapping an important moment of action requires abandoning the idea of a lens cap and, if the filter cracks rather than the lens itself, you can replace it quickly with another from the bag. You don’t miss the action, expose lenses to the environment, or leave the field to go to a camera shop and spend hundreds on a repair that could take weeks.

The digital SLR camera won’t reveal dust until reviewing photos after they’re taken. In a headset, you’ll immediately see grease, skin flakes, or dust in your field of vision even if you might not be able to consciously identify exactly what’s wrong with your view.

The lesson here? The interior lenses of a VR headset should be thought of in the same way photojournalists think about the lenses of their cameras. It costs hundreds and takes weeks to fix something wrong with a VR headset’s internal optics. You can save yourself tremendous effort in repair, as well as keep your vision clear, by protecting those lenses the same way a photographer protects their hardware. It’s actually more important to VR headset use that the lenses stay clear than the camera because post-processing can fix a spot on a bad photo while you continuously see the unclear visuals through your headset. Whether prescription or otherwise, a pair of lenses snapped over the internal optics can allow you to swap to another pair very quickly when sharing the device, or if they become blurred by grease and scuffing.

How VR Headsets Are Like Glasses

Every time you remove a VR headset you are reminded what you lose when wearing the device. In addition, each spot of grease, fleck of dust, or incredibly tiny scratch diminishes visuals compared with how VR looked on day one. If it takes decades for many humans to age enough from 20/20 vision to require corrective glasses, most VR headsets begin already at a diminished view and then degrade from there in a matter of days, weeks or months. The lens cleaning cloth included with many headsets can only do so much to fix what a pair of kids might do to smudge or scratch VR optics in one day.

Consider the moment a child asks their mom, dad or grandparent for a peek through their prescription glasses. The adult might reasonably deny the request for a couple of reasons. If the child touches the lenses even once they risk temporarily or permanently degrading their family member’s vision for the lifespan of those lenses. The corrective lenses could also hurt the child’s eyes to look through even though plenty of adults hand those glasses over. If they stop laughing long enough about how funny their magnified eyes look in the mirror the child can viscerally understand aging and variation in eyesight. Invariably, the mismatch in vision will see the glasses passed back over to the rightful owner with the child instructed in the hand-over that smudges and scratches can be an expensive and time-consuming fix.

The lesson here? That even in daily eyewear that might cost hundreds of dollars to replace there is a strong inclination to handle them with extreme care. They are made, usually, for a single person to wear and steps are taken to educate additional users on the idea of careful handling to avoid any interference in the lenses. If this is how we treat the care of pristine prescription-corrected vision, why are console-based headsets like PSVR 1 or PSVR 2 often left out on the floor or shelf to collect dust for weeks on end? Eyeglasses are very often stored in a protective case when they aren’t worn. VR headsets should be the same.

How VR Headsets Are Like Laptops

Both VR headsets and laptops are constrained by the need to dissipate heat away from the body. A laptop might make you sweat or burn your skin. A headset needs to do so much sensing through its silicon, and our bodies dissipate so much heat from our heads, that the challenge of radiating heat away is still an unsolved problem in product design. Dripping sweat into a headset or clothes and getting red-faced from a session in VR can both embarrass and derail plans for the day.

The lesson here? The last decade of product development from Gear VR to Apple Vision Pro and Bigscreen Beyond has seen incredible variance in design primarily around trying to solve this heat problem. From a phone strapped into a plastic head-mount to rear-mounted battery pack to a side-worn processing or battery puck, the biggest gains in long-term VR wearability are won in getting heat away from the head while simultaneously keeping weight down and maintaining transportive focus.

Misplaced Focus

Why are so many developers shivering in a VR winter in 2026? Hardware designers didn’t apply these lessons.

Meta is the largest headset maker and it built no infrastructure for lens care and repair. Innovation in shipped lens design is geared toward fitting as many faces as possible and not toward keeping those faces looking through lenses with visuals after two years of use that look as good as they did on day one. In comparison, Apple entered the market in 2024 with a low-volume product that offers the option to add prescription inserts at purchase time. These lenses snap on magnetically and ensure no dust or scuffing touches the core headset while Apple’s retail footprint allows for some degree of rapid repair and replacement.

In Quest Pro, Mark Zuckerberg himself made the decision to ship the device with an open periphery as its central focus while Vision Pro includes a black soft fabric nose guard to keep a person immersed in the headset’s visuals. The differing choices here point to the cutting edge of design and the biggest unknown quantity in all computerized eyewear. How often, and for what purposes, does a person want their vision to include some element of their physical environment?

For room-scale VR as supported by Valve since 2016 the physical environment is only relevant very occasionally when the chaperone warns a person they are nearing the boundary of their designated safe VR space. For a pair of Specs from Snap or the Xreal Aura you never fully leave the physical world. The difference in optical architecture between rooting oneself in the physical world or in a virtual environment has left everyone unsure how to maintain focus, provide utility, and maintain both long-term comfort as well as affordability. Is it more valuable to a corporation to ground your time in rigid physical reality or in the free space of virtual reality?

I don’t know the answer. The idea, however, that a VR headset needs to look fashionable from the outside doesn’t rank near the top 10 or 15 considerations for design. It is in the same class of importance as a laptop displaying a logo on its backside. The important aspect of the hardware design is what faces the user and what a person does with that across hours, days or years of use. The considerations I weigh here are whether you bead sweat on your forehead just sitting on your couch and whether you experience 10 years of simulated vision loss in two months due to infinitesimal scratches on unprotected lenses. Each of these ideas needs to be among the first problems solved in headset design long before the question of whether you look cool to others seated in the shade at the beach grasping at air.

This is why I recently spent $55 for a pair of non-prescription snap-on lenses from a company called Reloptix to protect my Quest 3 optics, as well as why I sell microfiber Good VR bags to carry headsets. I’m trying to apply the lessons I’ve learned from laptops, cameras, and glasses to the ongoing care and love of VR headsets. Stay tuned for a post on the lenses as I review them in the weeks ahead and consider buying my bags to shield your headsets inside whatever larger carrying case you use. The aim is to keep your headset away from dust no matter how it travels and your purchase will simultaneously support my ongoing work at Good Virtual Reality.

I’ve been on jury duty the past week and will continue my service next week, returning soon to the Good VR Podcast as well as Good Virtual Reality with an exciting lineup of guests and posts.

She’s spent 4871 hours in Flight Simulator 2024 from Microsoft directly and another 394 hours in the version she bought on Steam. She spent every minute in VR — she doesn’t play flat. Based in England, she has no other games installed on her PC.

The rig carrying her around the world in virtual reality features 64GB of RAM with the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card and an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D central processing unit. Her seat is on a DOF Reality H3 motion platform that can tilt 20 degrees in different directions with an HF8 pro pad providing full body haptic feedback.

Her controls use the Moza AB9 base with Virpil Alpha Prime lefty grip as well as force feedback from the Moza AY210 FFB yoke. She’s also using the Bravo Sierra TPM throttle module for trim and landing gear controls as well as the Virpil Falcon pedals with damper kit. For flying helicopters, she’s got the Virpil TCL collective.

Finally, she’s got a Logitech autopilot panel and an Elgato Stream Deck for managing video capture and hitting next on her Spotify playlist on earbuds connected over Bluetooth to her phone. Game audio as well as Discord voice chat with other pilots and friends comes over the Pimax Crystal Super’s DMAS speakers. Of course, she’s also using a trackball mouse which stays stationary on her motion rig.

“VR has taken me to places I only dreamed about,” Sarah wrote to Good Virtual Reality over direct message. “I can't explain how much I love VR, it's truly changed my life. The young girl in me who played flight sim 2000 dreamed of this stuff.”

She is disabled with a few conditions that cause her extreme pain, so she’s essentially housebound the vast majority of the time.

“I do my videos during the day and play Steam Deck with my sister then I get up at 7 and fly till I can’t stand the pain anymore,” she wrote. “It’s my happy place and I see things I would never dream of in VR.”

Sarah often flies short takeoff and landing planes with the name Sazzle and you can find her cinematic flying videos on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

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

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

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

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

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

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Everyone knows you pull the trigger to fire, but there’s also a whole universe to experience in the interactions before, during and after that moment which do not exist in any software except Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades. RUST LTD.’s 10-year journey building H3VR relentlessly explored that space week by week to develop those complex physical interactions.

The journey begins around here in 2016 in Anton Hand’s developer log:

And it wraps up around here in 2026:

When you include H3VR’s community as part of what this project is, it becomes clear this simulation is not just software — it’s a staggering work of performance art that represents the maturation of an artist and his collaborators in the age of the Internet. H3VR reaches with two hands into VR and grasps what traditional games overlooked as too mundane to be interesting for the press of a button. In these moments and their interactions H3VR proves VR’s worth not as a videogame platform but as a place worth visiting for long stretches of time.

Here at Good Virtual Reality you can peek inside the mind of developer Anton Hand across two podcasts, one each covering H3VR1 and H3VR2.

For the addition of H3VR to the Certified Good Virtual Reality Collection I reached out to the people who spent hundreds to thousands of hours inside this masterpiece and asked them to tell me what it means to them. Below are some selected comments I received over email with bolding added for emphasis and a few corrected typos:

• Admiral Snackbar: Originally I had written off H3VR as just a gun sandbox / shooting range that I wasn’t really interested in, although I was aware of it. Sometime in December 2019 I was playing Windlands 2 co-op with a random online person and as we were chatting, he kept raving about H3VR and especially the rogue-lite mode of take and hold. He told me about how there were over 300 guns (at the time - now we’re around 500+) and how it was way more than a shooting range. I said I’d get it on sale and he told me - it doesn’t, so I bought it that day. Over 400 hours of game time later, having participated in multiple take and hold tournaments, there is no better game in my eyes for VR. There are other great VR games for sure and I have a list of favorites, but none of them approach the depth of interaction and true skill development that is present in H3VR. I think that comes from the raw time and energy spent in developing it for a decade. Armswinging Movement has been refined to a degree not seen anywhere else. It’s the only VR game that has had this kind of longevity for me and had me coming back for years. For me personally, H3VR has become my comfort game and place to blow off steam. Especially during the pandemic when it felt like everything was crashing down, I could escape to a place where I could take out my frustrations, running through concrete hallways, listen to some music or a podcast, and blast hot dog soldiers as they utter comical one liners.

• Hoyt: For me I think H3VR is about community. Its kind of weird to say that about a single player VR game, even putting on VR goggles is an isolating act. And for the first couple hundred hours of my playtime that’s what it was, me vs the hotdogs. But then I found the tournament scene. Once a year tons of people in the community get together to have a live-broadcasted and live-commented community run tournament and it is an amazing experience. The creativity, kindness and enthusiasm of the H3 community is second to none, and for a few months every year I get to hang out with some truly great people from all over the world and celebrate this game we all have hundreds or thousands of hours in together…When people finish a tournament run, we let the audience ask questions and its a running joke to ask them one of the sosig lines: “Why hotdogs?” and my answer is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

• Mr. King: H3VR has been in my life since i was 17 I learned about H3 from NerdCubed when they did a video covering the game around Update... 40ish and that was the moment i knew i need to get into the VR ecosystem….For me H3VR is the VR game that should be looked at and studied. Its mechanics its style the way it tackles locomotion, it pushed VR to its limits.

• KTU (writing through Japanese to English translation): After saving enough money, I bought a gaming PC, an Oculus Rift S, and H3VR. I still vividly remember the first time I handled a firearm in VR. It was an unforgettable experience. Since then, I’ve watched every weekly Devlog that Anton has uploaded. Every update brought something new to explore, and I would spend countless hours enjoying all the new content. Take and Hold quickly became my favorite game mode, and I’ve spent the vast majority of my 1,300+ hours playing it.

• Waddicker: H3VR is the entire reason I even considered buying VR in the first place, despite how primitive it was by comparison at the time. I bought H3VR on July 8th 2016, nearly 10 years ago and the very same day I received my first VR headset. Ever since that day I had played, watched, and kept up with H3VR’s development keenly, pouring hundreds of hours into the game. I was vocal on all the spaces that existed for the game at the time, the steam forums, the reddit, etc. It wasn’t until December 2016 that H3VR began to truly change my life and become more than just a game I was following, where I contributed an illustration I made to the game’s first Meatmas Contest. I ended up winning one of the awards and had my art presented inside the game’s old Meatmas Snowglobe scene, alongside a physical package sent by Anton himself of which I still have all the contents of today...His community understands him and he understands his community, both able to talk with and understand each other on such a level field that it’s unlike any other game I’ve seen in recent years.

• Tim: I’m a Mechanical Engineering PhD Candidate in Canada. H3VR to me will always be a game I look fondly on, even years from now. I bought my first VR headset, an Oculus Rift S, the week before the Covid-19 lockdowns landed. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades was one of the first titles I bought after perusing some lists of best VR titles. Once I got over the initial learning curve of VR gaming, I was hooked. Like many, the lockdown was a tough time. H3VR provided a good outlet for gaming, especially as I started to get good at the Take and Hold game mode. Through chasing the leaderboard I got involved in the First to Wurst community, competing in a few of their tournaments. As a fun fact, I am actually the one who designed and 3D printed the very first First to Wurst physical trophy (though I only made it to the quarter finals). Finding such a fun, vibrant community was a great balm for the trials of the Covid lockdowns…I often joke that it ruined VR shooters for me because of how good it is. While I do not have the time to play it as much as I did, I am forever grateful for the experiences I had and the chance to connect with people in another fun community in a dark time.

• Hydro: I have about 250 hours at the time of writing. I got the game in 2024, around the time I got my Quest 2, but I haven't played it too much until 2025. I've been following Anton's work since 2018 or 2019, when I saw Jedit's silly reload videos, and Take N Hold runs. These videos alone made me in awe over how interesting the game looked, how the guns functioned, the whole ordeal making my interest in firearms spring back into my life…H3VR Has changed my love for VR From "It's a little niche thing that I like to use for socializing" to "A dream come true in physically draining myself while having a lot of fun" and a safe haven for my interests in firearms, while living in a country that has strict firearm laws. From deep of my heart, thank you Anton for making this game, it's been a life changer for me.

• Team Skyborne: I picked up the game in May of 2017, and have just shy of 530 hours since then…I got an original Vive back in 2016 after trying in-store demos over and over, and H3VR popped up on my radar in its early forms while I was still playing basic things like Job Simulator, The Lab, and Space Pirate Trainer. They were good, but what became H3VR caught my interest because of the depth of simulation and the iteration that the project was going through. H3's development made me excited for VR because it was a look into someone doing serious independent research into what kind of interactions were actually possible, and the frequent devlogs made me interested in seeing what kind of ways the tech could be built upon. All these years later, it's still my go-to any time I want some shooty action, especially with Take and Hold in its modern form and the large community of modders who've added their own contributions to what the game has to offer.

• Nick: I first got into VR in 2019, just a few months before COVID hit and everything shut down. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, so when I wasn’t working on academics, I was typically playing video games. I also purchased H3VR during the pandemic. H3VR has been a part of my life for over 6 years now, and it has been with me through high school, college, job changes, and many other things that life has thrown at me. There are very few games that have stuck with me for this long. I was actually playing H3VR last night, and as I was slaughtering some Rotwieners, I was reflecting on how much this game means to me, and how I have always returned to it despite numerous big changes in my life.

And some selected comments from Reddit:

• “I love that the game really started as a way for Anton to dick around with vr and it's resulted in one of the best dicking around games ever made”

• “I’m from a country that guns are totally illegal, and going to a shooting range is extremely difficult, unless you’re friend of someone who is in the armed forces. So, unlikely, this is the only opportunity that i have to be as close to shoot a gun in my entire life…”

• It gives me nearly everything I want from guns and in some aspects far more than I could get regular. And all that in my living room, for the cost of one decent gun without any legal hassle.

• H3VR meatmas was always there for me when my family couldn’t be.

• H3VR has been with me for a large chunk of my life. Its outlasted relationships, friendships, and transition. The weekly devlogs were something consistent i could look forward to when I didnt have much else to and, though maybe this is a bit cringy to say, honestly the desire to see what comes next week after week kept me going a lot longer than i would've

• To me, H3 is the pinnacle of VR gaming, along side VTOL VR. These are the two games I always recommend to people when they're getting into VR. I always see threads here on reddit talking about Boneworks this, HL:A that, and I always try to advocate for our silly little hotdog shooter. No one does guns better, be it vr or flatscreen, in my opinion.

• H3VR was one of the main reasons I bought a PC. I spent years watching YouTube videos before finally being able to play it myself. I love the attention to detail and how in depth the guns are. I’ve probably spent close to 300 hours just in take and hold beating off wieners.

• I had been following the development since I was still in elementary school in late 2016 Ive watched every single devlog that was ever posted hoping that when I got a decent gaming PC and an VR headset that I would play the shit out of H3. It’s currently my longest played VR game double the hours of the two runner ups Pavlov and ITR1.

• First got this game in spring of 2016 when i was in like 8th grade and was one of the only people in my friend group that had VR and thus got a lot of people into vr letting them come and play it. Im now turning 24 with a masters degree and still fire the game up when i feel like shooting but the weather isn’t good enough to hit the real range

• When I had space for my VR rig to be set up, H3VR was a fantastic physics playground that just happens to have guns.

• H3VR has been like crack for me; it scratches an itch I didn’t know I had, in ways I didn’t know were possible. I’ve had the game since Feb 15th of 2021 and have almost clocked 1,000 hours, which would make it the 3rd game in library to do so. If I were to take a guess as to why I love this game so much, I’d say it’s because I love guns but don’t own any myself. The interactions with the firearms are some of the best in VR…

Lastly, I also reached out to one of RUST LTD.’s co-founders Luke Noonan for his thoughts about H3VR. Here’s why he thinks H3VR is successful:

First, many VR titles optimize, first and foremost, for the initial 5-20 minute experience. There are plenty of reasons to do that, from marketing to battery life. But that is not what we did in H3VR. The first hour of H3 can, honestly, be pretty rough for a new player. But for the players that make it through that, the simulation depth, humor, and subtle world building, make H3VR one of the few places in VR that really rewards extended engagement. H3VR is optimized for hours 2 through 200.

The second thing was Anton’s environmental design. He built the environments knowing that he would have to spend hundreds of hours in them and as a result they were very nice spaces to spend time in. All video games are virtual worlds, if you want people to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in your virtual world, you have to make it a compelling place to spend time. Based on the number of users who have told stories about how they hop into the game to relax after work, I think that Anton’s calm, restrained approach to environmental design really resonated with players.

The third thing that has really made this game such an enduring success is something we can only take a little credit for: the community. There are all the content creators making videos, the tens of thousands of people who hang out in our discord server/subreddit/steam forums/etc. and the handful of people that built the truly epic IMFDB page. But a ton of credit has to go to our modding community. Even with a decade of early access development time, there are limits to what we have been able to build. So many people in the community found one of those limits and said “no problem, I’ll build that myself”. The sheer amount of time the community has spent watching, reading, and playing community made stuff is awesome.

H3VR is available on Steam for $19.99.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Valve is planning to ship the Steam Frame “this summer” and I could not be more excited to kick back on my couch and mess around with a Linux desktop and microSD card. A couple years ago when I first heard about how thin and light “Deckard” was expected to be I reached out to a manufacturer to make some simple fabric VR Bags you could slip the headset in to keep its lenses protected while it sits inside any other bag. Now with Steam Frame actually approaching, I’ve had a fresh batch of VR Bags made for Good VR and you can buy them today on Shopify to support the production of independent journalism.

Supernatural Coaches Returning

June kicked off with some reinvigorating developments for fans of VR fitness. The Supernatural coaches are returning to pump up the heart of the service as the founders spin out Supernatural Health after the Meta mothership dumped them earlier this year. Supernatural’s relaunch joins H3VR2 and Sock Puppet Superstar as widely varying projects steadily stacking up excitement for VR headsets again.

Imaginations Mingling & A Cat Smoking Cigarettes

The Good VR Podcast this month heard from New Zealand-based developer Yuewei Zhang romanticizing a smoky bar from 1990s Hong Kong with its anime-inspired patrons and bartending mechanics. PROJECT MIX successfully targets adult players to make it onto more than 130,000 wishlists, the highest figure for any VR game on Steam. I wonder if, by the time it releases in early 2027, the game’s cat who can smoke cigarettes will have a name.

I encourage you to listen first to Zhang discuss the idea of exploring fantasy in VR and then follow up by listening to Tomáš Mariančík aka Frooxius as he develops Resonite. These developers appear at first glance to be building for niches in VR but ultimately they may be building for the true core of the VR market. When Frooxius says “virtual reality is about putting people into your imagination and visiting [the] imagination of other people” he’s not just talking about the visitors to his PC-based virtual network.

Selling Aircraft & Visiting AWE

A short immersive film and high quality interactive 3D models equipped on Apple Vision Pro headsets are now in the hands of pilots working to sell Cirrus luxury personal aircraft. The example of how instantaneous transportation into the skies via fully enclosed high quality virtual reality sits in stark contrast to what I saw at Augmented World Expo.

My sincere thanks to Snap for paying for my trip to Long Beach to see this chart from CEO Evan Spiegel acknowledging headsets like Vision Pro as capable while alleging they are not wearable. When I spoke to former HTC leader Alvin Wang Graylin in the shade by the pool at the Hyatt Regency he echoed the benefits of Snap’s framing even as I insisted a VR headset could provide both wearability and capability in that specific location, same as my laptop. The Xreal Aura glasses I wore during the conference use a similar optical see-through approach as Specs. Without testing Snap’s glasses at all, and unable to take the Auras out walking into the harsh Long Beach sunlight, it remains to be seen whether that approach truly offers capability and wearability in the same scenarios phones and watches reign supreme.

I’d love glasses featuring the hand tracking and eye tracking of Vision Pro while lacking any display. They could redefine the “AI Glasses” category currently defined by Meta and, if they lacked the ability to take photos, would erase the privacy concerns inherent to them. They’d also immediately offer capability to Apple’s integrated ecosystem. You could hypothetically navigate Apple TV, for instance, with the same low effort pinch gesture as Vision Pro while looking through the same prescription lenses Graylin praised as providing value (and wearability) even when the battery runs down. Apple Airframes would be such a cool name for this device category. Good Virtual Reality, meanwhile, is home to a first-hand account of someone who found Vision Pro so wearable they’ve used it as a nightly sleep aid for more than two years.

Flat2VR Studios & Virtual Desktop

Virtual Desktop creator Guy Godin sounded war-torn as he recapped butting heads with Meta over a decade while Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza teased releases they’re working on into 2028.

Uniza:

“Make great games and have fucking fun. You have to tell me why this deserves a spot in VR and why I should pick it over any other experiences.”

Godin:

“There are some good engineers at Meta that care. 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.”

Places To Go In VR

If you’re looking for a chill escape unlike anything else in VR, Grant Hinkson’s Connectome is available now on Quest or Vision Pro. It’s a calming place of quiet discovery where you follow the lines to connect the dots in the space around you.

Steve Lukas’ Jigsaw Night is now available on Apple Vision Pro with an impressive new feature that syncs up for colocation by using hand tracking in an unexpected way.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades will join the Certified Good VR Collection this week as the game exits early access after more than a decade of development. In June, I added to the collection VR’s best party game Acron: Attack of the Squirrels and the game I’ve spent the most time in VR with Pistol Whip.

Lastly for Good Virtual Reality in June, you can listen to me answer reader questions for just over an hour as I explain my path from being a fan of Star Trek as a kid to designing space stations as a teenager to exploring the scale of the cosmos in Titans of Space as an adult. I’ll be doing a podcast like that again sometime and, if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, you can email editor@goodvirtualreality.com.

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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.