Up on his shelves I see everything from Tilt Five to Magic Leap to Galaxy XR to HTC Vive to Apple Vision Pro to the entire Oculus product line from DK1 to Quest 3, and so many more more besides.

When Schramm turns the camera to the corner of the room you might just break apart at the seams. That’s a Vive Tracker centering his seat in virtual reality attached to a DOF Reality Motion Simulator with Xboxes nearby. When he drives or flies in simulation he does so with up to 2X supersampling driven by an NVIDIA 5090 and 96 gigabytes of RAM.

If you are already staring at these images with eyes bulging I must warn you before you go any further. Prepare to eat your heart out in envy when you read the next sentence. Schramm is one of the few people on Earth who can tell the tax collector that everything depicted here is legitimate business expense. All of it is research for the future, installed on the path he found porting SUPERHOT VR to Quest and engineering the first-of-its-kind room-scale mixed reality experience Starship Home for Creature, led by Doug North Cook.

A video Schramm shared on social media shows the quick-change system he made to quickly swap from flying to driving. Since he first posted the video he’s now built a quick switch plate for the foot pedals.

While you’re thinking about the future VR projects Schramm might be involved in, let your imagination run wild with the secrets he’s pixelated on his wall above the spot where he and his wife work side by side in the living room.

When he’s not working on VR Schramm also woodworks. He built a deck, some shelves, and more interactive projects he chronicles on his Bluesky.

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“My daughter watched me build a deck…and she watched me build a game from scratch to the extent that she asks of any other game if I had built that one as well,” Schramm wrote. “I want her to grow up knowing she can achieve anything as long as she tries.”

Episodes of the Good VR Podcast publish first to paid subscribers with the latest episode a conversation between Schramm and I covering his journey into immersive building from SUPERHOT VR to Creature.

Good Virtual Reality is seeking more Recreation Rooms to feature showcasing the spaces and hardware that take people where they want to go — details are here for how to share yours.

He wears a helmet with no headsets, glasses, or eyewear in existence today that would augment reality in ways to help him with his travel. As he balances himself sailing across the pavement, Davalos sees the arc of technology and he knows the day will come when reality extends past what his unaided eye can see. He builds Figmin XR for that day.

In the Recreation Room where he designs Figmin you can see his passion for moving through space starting with the license plate above his widescreen monitor. Mixed in with the remote control aircraft and model cars on his shelf, you can see every generation Magic Leap, HoloLens and a collection of Quests alongside other VR headsets.

The ergonomic keyboard and mouse hint at the number of hours he spends in this space with climate controlled carefully for his reptiles. The dirty Magic Leap box as a foot rest is symbolic — it has been there since he started coding the app and it grounds him to the dream of see-through XR.

“Someday we'll get it,” Davalos says over direct message.

In a video Davalos shared showing his roving unicycle gang riding along a paved path through the green of the Pacific Northwest, you can hear mention of constant range anxiety.

A still image shows the electric unicycle (EUC) up close, with rugged tire and a handhold to carry his transport to an electric outlet.

“The fastest I've been is 41 mph,” Davalos wrote. “But that was an exception, generally we ride at around 20/25. But every time someone asks me how fast those things go I tell them ‘as fast as you could possibly want’. It's not like a motorcycle that you have handlebars to hold on to and get a sense of safety. You are getting pushed around by the wind at high speeds and all that's holding you is your feet. So even though these machines can go very fast most people don't ride that way.”

The range anxiety Davalos feels riding his physical transport relates to the design choices in the headsets he wears to travel virtually. The Magic Leaps offload components to a wired side-worn pack, similar to Apple Vision Pro, despite the two headsets delivering augmented reality in vastly different ways. When you look closely at his desk, you can see that, much like Daven Bigelow and so many others, he’s willing to exchange discomfort when wearing Quest 3 by weighing down the back of his head with extra battery to eliminate his range anxiety in mixed reality.

Figmin XR offers multiplayer and the experience runs on a wider collection of devices than practically any other VR or AR software. His construction over the years has been helped by funding injections from most of the major platforms, giving him the freedom to disappear into his Recreation Room and come out after months of work with a major new component layered into the software. When the breakthrough art project Tilt Brush ended, for example, one of the creators of the software noted that by open sourcing the software he was committing it not to death but to immortality. Figmin keeps that spirit alive, with Davalos integrating the entire project as just another creativity component alongside voxel sculpting, Web browser integration, text editing, a motion editor, and scripting support.

The latest tooling being explored with the app is the integration of an AI assistant to help in scripting, leading to the possibility that Figmin might soon close the gap between Star Trek’s holodeck and Davalos’ imagination.

You can find Figmin XR on Quest, Steam, as well as Apple’s App Store and in several other places.

The chameleon’s name is Lumen joined by snakes Ruby, Magic, and Spot. His geckos are named Garto and Lacerta.

Good Virtual Reality is seeking more Recreation Rooms to feature showcasing the spaces and hardware that take people where they want to go — details are here for how to share yours.

You can see a lot of love for virtual reality from Bigelow in the photo he shared showing the physical packaging for everything from Gear VR to Valve Index. He’s got the new Virtual Boy in there and PSVR sets for the Aim controller and Iron Man VR. If you use Horizon Hyperscape from Meta, Bigelow’s bedroom is the first Recreation Room covered by Good Virtual Reality that you can actually visit in a VR headset.

I adore the foresight to mount the actual boxes for the first consumer VR headsets to the wall. While I have all these headsets too, I simply couldn’t justify the space required to keep the boxes. After so many years of shifting messaging and priorities in the transition from Oculus to Facebook to Meta, Bigelow can look back anytime he wants at how the first headsets were marketed to people. Steam did the job of selling the Index, for example, so you can see just how clean the packaging looks for room-scale VR in a box.

In the other direction, with photo taken from where the bed is, we see the sparser computing station (plenty of room on that wall for more VR headset boxes) with a dock for the Quest and its controllers as well as multiple Bobo battery packs to go the distance in VR.

You can also see in this room that, like many obsessed VR, gaming is big in Bigelow’s life.

“Nintendo SNES and SEGA Genesis was 50% of my childhood at least,” Bigelow tells me over direct message. “Now I have a wireless Genesis controller that says ‘Nintendo SEGA’ on the back of it.”

When it comes to Halo in Quest 3, Bigelow uses WinlatorXR to make that work. The software creates a sandbox using Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) as a compatibility layer. The tool can essentially create any number of containing sandboxes to run classic games for old Windows systems and then tweak their settings for VR.

For those interested in trying to follow in Bigelow’s footsteps, there’s a tutorial video as well to get the original Halo CE Trial in VR.

Good Virtual Reality is seeking more Recreation Rooms to feature showcasing the spaces and hardware that take people where they want to go — details are here for how to share yours.

I have that same Logitech MX keyboard. I’ve used four 3M Command Hooks underneath my desks to essentially create hidden docking bays for the keyboard that I can slip in and out of as needed. The keyboard can connect over Bluetooth to three different devices with the press of dedicated keys and this is incredibly useful for switching input between a Mac, PC and directly to a VR headset. The only problem with my strategy is that sometimes I forget the keyboard is hiding there under the desk. Overall, I find that a clean desk is necessary from time to time to explore apps like Pencil requiring a sheet of paper and classic pencil to learn how to draw.

Romagnoli tells me they keep the Quest and Vision Pro at the ready to ensure they can dive into a headset at a moment’s notice to test something out.

“A lot of my work revolves around trying experiences in a headset,” Romagnoli says. “If it is not something I can try or share about I just skip it because people see enough trailer and fake videos already.”

Romagnoli interviews various founders and makers at the intersection of XR and AI with particular interest in the toolchains building up around Gaussian Splatting — the idea that may ultimately be the key to cross-platform calling as spatial avatars that look like digital twins. The interviews are what the light, microphone and teleprompter setup are all for.

“The Vision Pro would basically be a paper weight if it wasn’t for Gaussian Splatting,” explains Romagnoli over email. “That is my main use case for the device.”

Even with every available digital tool at their disposal, Romagnoli finds themselves still organizing their tasks on paper with the pictured notebook.

“It helps me dump my brain and just feels satisfying to manually scratch things off,” they wrote over email.

Read details on how to share your Recreation Room with Good Virtual Reality.

There’s the couch and Insignia massage chair next to the game systems off to one side with Xbox 360 and Kinect, Xbox One X, Wii U and PC carrying 32GB of RAM, an RTX 5070ti, and an Intel i7 11700k.

I can spot what look like Disney Infinity figures on a shelf below the surround sound speakers installed in the top corners of the room. There’s a Quest 2 and Quest 3 ready to be worn and prints of nebulae on the wall with a hidden Darth Vader next to the TARDIS.

And then, off near the front of the basement, there’s the Kat Walk. Kundert plays just one game walking on “one of the world’s two major ODTs (Omni-directional treadmill)” — Skyrim VR.

“The sound of my Kat Walk is only tolerable because it’s in the basement,” Kundert wrote to me. “And our bedroom is on the top floor. When [my wife] is on the main floor, the sound of my feet clanking on the treadmill drives her nuts.”

Kundert’s kitten Link chased a mouse cursor across the screen as I asked him to estimate how many miles and minutes he’s spent walking across Tamriel.

Steam reports Kundert has so far spent 272 hours in Skyrim VR. All of those hours have been on the Kat Walk. If you figure in sleeping time, that’s easily half a month of Kundert’s life spent sleeping and walking in virtual reality across Tamriel.

There’s one more photo Kundert shared with me for my Recreation Rooms series here. He’s a networking technician by day, and so I have the creator of this impressive “nerd cave” posing in front of the network switch that keeps this universe running. If you’ve got a Quest, you can take a look around for yourself in Meta’s Hyperscape app.

You can check out Don Carson’s Recreation Room now and share your own as part of my series with ianontherecord@gmail.com. Just be sure to include as many details as you can provide.

Carson shared his space in an email to ianontherecord@gmail.com explaining:

Starting with the first Oculus DK, through a series of HTC Vive, and finally Meta headsets, I have tried a variety of setups. From the dream of Room Scale, the fantasy of an omni directional treadmill, to standing in the middle of my studio waving my arms around... this is where I settled. In the end, with the exception of putting a golf ball, all my VR creation and socializing happens in this comfortable wingback chair. I tether to an old PC (the one I bought to run the first Oculus), but only when working on hefty Gravity Sketch models or when visiting PC worlds in VRChat. I don’t play many games but I do watch videos from this chair and even settle into it when collaborating during our WMG Design Retreats.

A video Carson posted to Instagram in 2024 shows a quick time-lapse view of how Walkabout courses take shape. The creations begin in the VR app Gravity Sketch during those design retreats and then the rough work gets passed around to different members of the art team at Mighty Coconut adding various elements over the course of a year.

Thanks to Carson for sharing his Recreation Room. If you’d like to share yours with our community here, email ianontherecord@gmail.com with “Recreation Room” in the subject and photos of your space and hardware. Include any details about the specifications and objects in your space, as well as the experiences you have in VR and why you designed your space this way.

One of my favorite details in the photo Carson shared is a piece of art on the wall called The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg. There was a print of this classic work in my home when I was a child and I am on the lookout for a copy myself to add to the walls of my VR space. I’ve reduced entire shelves of Blu-ray discs and DVDs down into binders hanging from my walls, and I’ve even hung a step ladder using heavy duty utility hooks from 3M. I can pull out the ladder and step up a few steps to access high shelves all the way to the ceiling. Up there, I store a few of my favorite stories from games and movies in their original packaging, alongside some books that have stayed with me like Lord Of The Flies by William Golding and Night by Elie Wiesel. In those moments when I am up on the ladder, looking at the media I keep close even when I’m in VR, I remember The Bookworm. Carson says the artwork is one of his “favorite possessions” from his grandmother’s estate.

Some people install fold-down beds to make floor space and others only need to put up base stations. There are racing rigs, flying rigs, weather rigs, counterbalance systems, treadmills, and so much more. Even a triple monitor setup on swiveling arms and a shelf full of action figures representing childhood inspirations speak to something we quietly share in common about our passion, yet rarely discuss or show one another.

I want to change that.

People who make and use VR find little and big ways to make their experience in headset last longer and enjoy their time more. They often do so by bending their physical spaces, or even their whole lives, around spending time in headset. With this in mind, I’m hoping to pull from among you my first contributors to this series I’m looking to start called:

Recreation Rooms

I’m looking for photos, videos, and detailed explanations of the hardware and objects in the physical spaces where you wear your headsets.

Some of you even have diagrams and maps you’ve made for these complicated setups, with the square footage marked off for VR use and display cases for all your headsets. Sometimes these spaces are different from the ones in which VR developers do much of their work behind a flatscreen. All these elements are interesting to share because, while each space is unique, I’m convinced that when others see these spaces they’ll begin to realize how alike we all really are. I expect we will also discover ideas and inspiration in the sharing too.

Whether you have a room that looks just like Star Trek’s Holodeck or you carefully planned a racing rig to fit perfectly in a closet, your belief in VR as a medium can absolutely be seen in these locations, the rigs, and the objects you keep close.

So here’s what I’m looking for:

• Send your email to ianontherecord@gmail.com with “Recreation Room” in the subject line and I’ll assume you mean for the content in the email to make it onto this Substack.

• Include clear photos of the VR space as well as the hardware and items or artworks within.

• Include the specifications of your PC that produces VR for you and any other specifics around the hardware setup.

• Try to answer with as much detail as possible: Why is my VR space set up like this?

• What country is your space in and how long did it take you to put everything together that we see?

• What hidden features might your space or rig have that might not be obvious in the photos?

Thank you so very much for your support — this is the first article I’m sending out over email to paid subscribers — and I hope to see some of your VR spaces soon.