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

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

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

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

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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.

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?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is that they wouldn’t.

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

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

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

Banners & Bastions arrives on the Pico Store May 21.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H3VR2 wishlist pages are available for Steam and Quest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The transcript for this podcast is auto-generated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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