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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does this mean exactly?

On June 1st:

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

• The rec.net website will go offline.

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

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

1. You can no longer create new accounts

2. You can no longer add someone as a friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

   1. Room inventory items and offers

   2. Room keys, consumables, and currencies

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

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

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

As a thank you to our players:

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

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

After May 1st:"

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

• You can no longer redeem gift cards for tokens.

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

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

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

Downloading Data

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

For Players:

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

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

For Creators:

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you

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

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

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

Good Virtual Reality passed through airport security sometime after 3 a.m. at LaGuardia Airport in New York to fly to Georgia and attend the VR Villa at the 2026 USA Jigsaw Nationals & Convention on a ticket sponsored by Jigsaw Night. The mixed reality app from Steve Lukas presses the limits of the Quest platform in an effort to realize colocated mixed reality and VR centered on puzzling with camera options and avatar customization that stretch the limits of Meta’s technologies.

“What I feel like I’m doing with those technologies is merely helping them achieve their potential,” Lukas said.

Below is a video shot on my Quest 3 showing the system with players colocated and piecing together a double-sided puzzle in the same digital reality. Lukas hands off his virtual camera to me in mixed reality while it captures pure VR as I’m simultaneously capturing my own view.

That the $300 Quest 3S headset and $500 Quest 3 can accomplish this at all is a marvel of modern technology, but the colocation unlocking the magic of experiencing the same shared digital reality still proves to be a little bit finicky, plagued by featureless floors and unexpected wireless interference. I saw similar issues at The Poly Awards over the previous weekend produced from an Unreal Engine-based project put together by Alex Coulombe’s Agile Lens.

“Meta still doesn’t make it easy…or reliable,” Coulombe wrote to me, noting that they haven’t performed the “non-trivial” overhaul to the latest version of Meta’s colocation system, which doesn’t appear to be supported in Unreal yet. “Our goal right now is to move off of any Meta dependencies we have and embrace full OpenXR standards whenever possible.”

The Poly Awards, in their 6th year, are an extraordinary undertaking attempting to pull in experts in VR technology on video calls alongside those situated together physically in a real New York theater while streaming it all out live on YouTube as it happens. The video below, also shot from my personal Quest 3, shows a moment when Agile Lens’ technology saw attendees in headsets toss digital confetti into the air as pictures of award winner Nonny de la Peña appeared to headsets centered on the physical stage with a traditional screen in the background showing the stream.

Coulombe and I effortlessly played pickleball colocated together late last year in a pair of Vision Pro headsets, but that experience wasn’t without a couple minor issues either.

Lukas uses Unity for his app with a number components inside he can use beyond this core idea of 2D puzzling in 3D space. The outstanding 3D puzzler in 3D space Puzzling Places is also available at the VR Villa alongside Thomas Van Bouwel’s Cubism and the new game Interlocked: Puzzle Islands, alongside a few others.

“People who gravitate towards video games and stuff may be more apt to do something like this, whereas if you are of a generation where the point was to sit down and do a puzzle without technology and be present in the moment, you’re gonna have two flavors of people here,” said puzzling competitor Anne Stockdale, fresh from Quest 3S after having her first experience in VR since the 1990s Virtual Boy. “When I come here, I’d love to video game and I love to do puzzles, so this is kind of a mesh of two worlds that I really enjoy. I see it’s got a place. It’s not gonna be for everybody, but it’s got a place in here.”

Stockdale’s comment highlights the dream both Lukas and Coulombe are chasing to produce good VR. The headset and technology should disappear so people together can be together and just be “present in the moment”.

Acron: Attack of the Squirrels sees a player embodied as a tree in headset protecting their acorns from up to eight squirrels logging in with flatscreens to steal away their precious nuts.

The title from Resolution Games debuted in 2019 on Steam and Quest (it is available on Pico headsets too) featuring an assortment of squirrel types to pick from with abilities like tunneling or building to face off against the tree across a handful of maps accessible by private room codes. The new “Cherry Glade” level rolled out today alongside “major network fixes”, according to developer Resolution Games, meant to address “high ping issues for some players.” The new level promises to switch up gameplay a bit as well with more sideways movement.

The VR game can be purchased on Meta Quest (2, 3, 3S, Pro), SteamVR (HTC Vive, Valve Index, Rift), and PICO headsets and works in conjunction with a free companion app on iOS and Android.

The skewering of Florida follows add-ons focused on Texas, New Jersey, and Seattle as the Google-owned studio continues to adapt its formula from Job Simulator to hand tracking in multiplayer with playful interactions.

Both Mighty Coconut and Owlchemy Labs arrived at the same price for their paid content updates — $5 — with guest passes allowing friends to join a space even if only one person owns it. Owlchemy’s work in VR presses for accessibility and comfort with snap turning now supported by hand tracking with design work chipping away at the long path to 1 billion people in headsets.

Sporelando arrives on Quest and Android XR headsets on April 23 promising a version of Florida “where sentient fungi call the shots, golf carts seem to have a pulse, and the local diner is serving up exactly what you’d expect from a place built three highway exits past civilization.”

Here’s the trailer:

For years, piracy on Quest headsets has been one of several thorns in the sides of VR developers looking to make a living from development on Meta headsets. The same cash-strapped gamers Meta targeted with Horizon Worlds slop also found themselves drawn to downloading pirated Quest APKs, with some arguing that they essentially used piracy for extended free trials before promising to purchase and support the work.

“Oh fuck off. The amount of time and effort I put into running this place…None of this would be here,” one poster to the group noted. “The library got huge. Over 10tb for just Quest Games. Plus handling all uploads, our working files, etc…No one wants to pay for and manage another server.”

A post on Reddit from an organizer noted that a DMCA removal request was filed related to Meta’s property Beat Saber and its delivery through side-loading software — that software is also no longer available on Github.

I’d love to see this feature shamelessly copied by Apple for use in the home environments of Vision Pro, for example. Here’s a screenshot from Owlchemy’s post announcing the feature that shows it in action with the hand menu pulled up:

Just pinch on those little left or right bubbles and your presence in VR will snap to a new rotation facing that direction more head on.

Owlchemy says you can also toggle on “Floating Bubble Snap Turn” to put the directional bubbles directly in front of you with height and distance adjustments available.

My exclusive tour of the course features Walkabout creator Lucas Martell joined by art director Don Carson in night mode. You can subscribe to Good Virtual Reality now on YouTube for the occasional video upload.

The video is roughly 30 minutes long crossing from hole 1 to 18 with behind-the-scenes commentary about the design of the course.

Walkabout Mini Golf is available to buy on these stores:

• PlayStation VR2

• Quest

• Steam

• Pico

Slides in Steamworks documentation mention developers building standalone VR games for the Steam Frame need to deliver performance at 90 frames per second.

While 90 FPS has long been considered the bar for delivering comfort in VR to the vast majority of VR users — all the way back to the first Vive and Rift on PC — you can see on Meta’s website that its requirements for developers of VR titles on Quest headsets are more lenient than that, allowing refresh rates down to 72 Hz.

Quest and Steam Frame are very different systems, so it’s possible achieving 90 FPS on Valve’s headset won’t be a challenge for many developers. Still, it is possible the higher rate requirement could make it difficult for some developers porting their standalone interactive VR apps from Meta to Valve to receive Steam Frame Verification. Some major titles, for example, may be using a technology called Application SpaceWarp on Meta headsets as a trick to get their software running even at the 72 Hz minimum.

The Quest ecosystem remains in disarray after Meta’s costly data gathering period promoting slop in Horizon Worlds in front of developers building Quest VR games. Some developers have simply walked away from VR or handed off their projects to others, and those that haven’t are still cash strapped and may struggle to devote time to the kind of optimization required to boost a title from 72 Hz to 90 Hz.

While not exactly a show-stopper technically for developers who want to take their games from Quest to Frame, from experience I know that seeing Steam Deck-verified on a title in the store makes me much more likely to lay down some cash for a game to play in handheld. The same is likely to hold true for Steam Frame Verification.

Article updated after publication with additional context.

Developer Laminar Research indicates that a combination of Apple’s foveated streaming in the forthcoming 26.4 release and NVIDIA’s CloudXR 6.0 technology will be key to the launch. What’s more, the developer is promising to "track cockpit positions” using ARKit. From the announcement:

By leveraging image detection through ARKit, the sim can reliably track cockpit positions, allowing you to seamlessly merge the physical and digital worlds.

Laminar says a companion app on the App Store will enable the simulation to automatically detect the Vision Pro and begin streaming to from a local PC. I still have a number of questions about hardware compatibility and requirements — the announcement mentions pilots will “be able to stream immersive PC and cloud-based experiences from NVIDIA RTX systems, including X-Plane 12” — and I reached out to the studio for details.

Described as the “world’s most advanced flight simulator”, X-Plane 12 is sold on Windows, Mac, and Linux for $60.

Laminar says the update will come “later this spring.”

Staff employed by nDreams numbered 250 when it was acquired by Aonic in 2023, a time when the group called itself the “world’s biggest VR game developer and publisher”. The group was split across a few internal studios including Near Light and Compass, which are now closing, with 120 remaining staff gathered at Elevation, the studio behind Reach.

The group was involved in titles like Little Cities, Synapse, and Wreckin’ Raccoon.

Reaching For Good VR At The Wrong Time

Reach from Elevation released late last year to mixed reviews on Steam. The title carries just 346 reviews on Quest, which is not much more than Steam. Those numbers are likely to make other experienced VR developers wince as they calculate how many sales were likely won during the height of Meta’s data-gathering period for the failure of Horizon Worlds in VR.

Ultimately, any wince here is because “78 roles at risk of redundancy” with 120 people remaining “engaged on unannounced projects” may be still multiples larger than the current VR market can support.

“nDreams will also retain a lean group dedicated to XR R&D,” the announcement note says. “Together, we will remain focused on delivering world-class VR and XR games.”

The language seems to suggest remaining staff are likely reaching outside the presence provided by virtual reality to adapt their projects elsewhere. The overall story here is a cautionary one about reaching for good virtual reality at the wrong time in the wrong way.

If any long-time VR developers who worked with nDreams want to showcase their portfolios or Recreation Rooms on Good Virtual Reality, please reach out to me.

An email from a Pico representative requested an embargo until March 2 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time for a press release linking to an application for a “classified and confidential” program:

“If it is determined during the program that you are unable to meet the aforementioned usage expectations, PICO will collect your device and you will forfeit all compensation from your participation.”

I told the Pico representative over email that I am New York-based if they want to offer a demo and I clicked through the application for the program linked from the press release. I am happy to disclose that I’m married to an Apple employee, which is one the questions asked by Pico in the application. The application, however, doesn’t leave an obvious space to share that I paid full price for the Vision Pro headset I exchanged for my car. My belief in this medium predates my marriage, and I won’t let an employee discount give space for others to question my dedication to Good Virtual Reality.

Am I willing to sign an NDA and give my feedback to Pico without the freedom to report about it to Good Virtual Reality? No. But if Pico representatives want to offer demos of their headset in New York, I’d be happy to give it a try and tell them my thoughts as I have them.

When Apple invited me in 2023 to test out the Apple Vision Pro headset I was not yet married and I was not asked to sign an NDA. I was not asked to fill out a Q&A, nor was I offered a $160 gift card with an additional bounty to report bugs.

In the cases of Apple, Google, and Valve, I was simply invited to try their latest technologies and then I wrote my impressions in public with no obligations to secrecy for any of them.

Other outlets writing about this embargo will undoubtedly lead their articles with the announced specifications for the intended 2026 launch of Project Swan. Here is the text from Pico of the announced architecture:

Project Swan features a new generation of MicroOLED displays with a pixel density approaching 4000 PPI—approximately nine times that of flagship smartphones—delivering an average of 40 pixels per degree (PPD) with a center sweet spot exceeding 45 PPD for text clarity suited to professional workflows. The device introduces a dual-chip architecture, combining custom XR silicon that powers perception and imaging systems with approximately 12 milliseconds of latency and a flagship system-on-chip delivering more than double the CPU and GPU performance compared to the current XR2 Gen 2 platform. Together, these hardware advancements are designed to support smoother visuals, faster responsiveness, and more demanding mixed reality applications.

The latest Pico software promises “spatial multitasking” for Project Swan.

“The input system adapts fluidly to user needs, supporting look-and-pinch gestures, XR controllers, or traditional keyboard-and-mouse setups without switching modes.”

Of all the things included in the Pico release, the most interesting is the promise of “an open-source framework” for “cross-platform apps“ that “run seamlessly across PICO OS, VisionOS, and AndroidXR.”

Those interested in the “Global Early Access Program” can find the application at picoxr.com.

The latest high mark for a community gathered mostly in VR headsets is 156,716 set during the SANRIO_Vfes Super Kaguya-hime! event last weekend. That’s more than 8,000 people more than the last high mark, according to VRChat community lead Tupper.

The Sanrio Virtual Festival features performances from a range of artists and organizations and the new record for concurrent use of the platform occurred in connection with a character from the movie Cosmic Princess Kaguya, which is currently on Netflix. The character performed a song “through exclusive recorded audio and movement data on VRChat,” Tupper explained.

Today I received a reply. Here’s my email followed by his reply in full:

Hello Framework,

My name is Ian Hamilton, I’ve reported on VR for over a decade at the Orange County Register and UploadVR. I’m newly independent posting to a Substack already with dozens of paid subscribers after just a few days representing some of the most significant VR game studios and companies subscribing to my work.

I personally believe Nirav Patel and Framework have built exactly what Meta is missing in its strategy today. I believe I can point a finger at Patel’s departure being close to the launch of Oculus Quest and the development of Oculus Link as a moment when Meta definitively chose to push a closed platform rather than following the obvious path of truly open computing.

To put a finer point on it, last decade I constructed my first desktop PC from parts I bought and this decade I find myself configuring every type of Framework laptop on your website dreaming of something that would give me top tier VR experiences with more freedom than I had last decade. I’d like to configure it, if possible, to boot into Windows or Linux by holding a particular key.

It seems obvious to me I am saying something pretty fundamental about the need Framework is filling in the market, but I’ve also been largely alone here trying to shout these beliefs as a neutral journalist to a sea of buyers (and developers) who have been captured by Apple or Meta standalone systems. And meanwhile, it is very hard to reach the PC buyers to whom VR is currently only on the periphery of their decision-making, despite headsets like Bigscreen Beyond 2 and Steam Frame poised to be perfectly complementary to a top-end Framework laptop.

Would Nirav Patel be willing to comment on the record to a few specific questions, or reply to the overall thesis of this email directly?

Why did Nirav depart Facebook?

What does he see as the relationship between Framework and VR headsets?

The Reply From Framework Founder Nirav Patel

Why did Nirav depart Facebook?

On Quest specifically, I was one of the individuals driving it at the start, when we were navigating whether to partner with Samsung on a standalone VR headset or to commit to building ourselves. We eventually got the go-ahead to commit internally, though by that point we had already kicked off an internal prototype with Thundercomm, which eventually became the Oculus Santa Cruz prototype we demoed in 2016. Later, in my last ~year at Facebook, I put most of my time and energy into getting Oculus Quest 2 onto the roadmap, which was shockingly difficult despite how obvious it was in retrospect that it was necessary for it to be worth Facebook/Meta continuing investing in consumer VR at all.

All of this is to say that what drove me out of Facebook wasn’t de-investment in PC VR or even the trend into closed platforms. It was actually a fundamental mismatch in belief in what our priorities should have been, and a feeling that I was wasting my time and energy on bureaucracy and trying to overcome organization politics. From 2012 when I first joined Oculus to 2019 when I left, my priority was maximizing iteration speed. VR was, and 14 years later still is, a category in which the fundamental use case that will stick and the audiences that will scale are unknown. In that environment, the priority should be to do closed-loop, audience-and-developer-involved iteration rapidly. Instead, we put years of time, the energy of thousands of engineers, and colossal sums of money into slow big bets that oftentimes moved at such a glacial pace that the product needed to be completely reset years into development before getting public learnings from it.

For many years running in Oculus and then in Facebook, there were also the competing camps of “VR is ready” and “VR is not ready”. Much of what we did end up shipping came out of the “VR is ready” camp wanting to rapidly market test (Gear VR, Oculus Go, Oculus Quest 1 and 2, Rift S), though much of the money, resources, and project cancellations mapped back into the “VR is not ready” camp. Although it might sound like I was in the “VR is ready” camp, I was actually agnostic and just wanted to ship anything we could ship.

What does he see as the relationship between Framework and VR headsets?

“All of this brings me to what makes Framework different than Oculus and Facebook. Fundamentally, we don’t enter categories where the use cases and audiences are still in flux. We choose categories where, not only are these known, but they are so mature that the business models around the category have evolved from innovation to extraction. Our opening then as a company is to go back into those mature categories and build products that actually map to what the customers in the space need out of the product, not what would make for the maximally capital extractive business model. That means a category like laptops is a great fit for our product strategy and business model. A category like VR headsets is not, yet.”

With yesterday’s addition of an official YouTube app from Google, people are discovering exactly what the capabilities are inside the app. You can pinch and drag, for example, while immersed in a 360-degree video to change around what you’re centered on. In addition, nobody has reported seeing an ad in the app yet.

Some have theorized (myself included) that the arrival of the app is part of the deal to power Apple services with Google’s Gemini AI. I’ve reached out to YouTube to ask if there’s an agreement to keep ads out of YouTube for now, or if they are still to come.

On the subreddit for Vision Pro, multiple posters tell one another to shush their theorizing lest they jinx the good vibes produced by a completely ad-free experience in VR.

I’ll update this post if I hear back from Google.

The app is described as “A spatial YouTube” promising the “full, signed-in experience” including the ability for Apple Vision Pro M5 owners to watch videos at up to 8K resolution.

The app is free here.

Here’s the full description from the store page:

Experience your favorite YouTube channels, videos and creators in extended reality. The YouTube app turns every video on the platform into a spatial watch experience.

Experience YouTube like never before:

• Explore every video on YouTube, from 3D 360 and VR180 videos to standard rectangular videos and Shorts

• Get the full, signed-in experience that lets you view subscriptions, playlists, watch history and more.

• Enjoy videos in 8K (Apple Vision Pro M5 only)

See and hear it all:

• Immerse yourself in full 360-degree videos that put you at the center of the action

• Videos stay front and center so you can enjoy a lean back experience

Hat tip to Pieter Montoulieu for noting this on Bluesky.

Apple’s launch of Retrocade on February 5 made by Resolution Games for Apple Arcade included Pac-Man, Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, Galaga, Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble, Frogger, Track & Field, and Haunted Castle. The breakthrough experience fixes 10 years of VR game development and dramatically changes the value proposition for people who wish they could recreate the feel of a classic arcade without the space, money or marriage that would allow for such an investment.

In my initial writeup, I promised more headlines about Retrocade if Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong or Tetris found their way into the application. Tonight, I was just about to fall asleep scrolling Reddit when I found a day-old post from user 5572Life noting a hidden room in the back of the arcade with Tetris inside.

Here’s a video I made showing how you can find it.

If you look at the boxes above the staff entrance in the corner of the arcade one of them will light up and you can pinch your fingers together to enter the secret room. Inside, a terminal appears with Tetris playing in what appears to be the original Russian language.

There are a few more unlit boxes in that corner of the room, so I’m hopeful a few more classic titles might make it into the back room. I’d love to play Spacewar!, Pong or Computer Space back there.

And please, I need Donkey Kong.

I’m reminded of the hidden balls and fox hunts inside Walkabout Mini Golf. Like the recently added rings around Jupiter and the slowly spinning clouds on the planet below, it appears Apple and Resolution designers are more than happy leaving Easter Eggs to find inside virtual reality.

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There’s the website where they sell the utensils one set at a time, and they also bring their wares to conventions everywhere. Since 2016 when he tried the HTC Vive powered by SteamVR Tracking, Jeff Basladynski has also been obsessed with virtual reality.

In the years since that eye-opening demo, the pair have taken their little niche of custom chopsticks designed in the United States and attached it to his passion for VR. That means at conventions where they’ve got a small stand selling unique chopsticks, he’s happy to talk to the organizers of the event and occupy any additional available space to let some VR fans introduce complete noobs to the technology.

Enter the VR Villa.

On the site for the community effort built on Baz chopsticks, you’ll see the support listed in prominent spaces from developers of some of the best games in the VR market, including Schell Games, Resolution Games, and I-Illusions, along with a calendar of upcoming events where he and volunteers will be hauling headsets out for others to check out in protected areas.

“ I’m part of the vendor community where a lot of small businesses go to all these conventions all over. It’s a very small niche group. It’s usually the same people in that industry is very small. It’s the same players, same people, same everything, just you just got different attendees and that’s it,” Jeff Basladynski said. “And then because of that a lot of convention chairs, they see me, they see what we do, how we do it, and then I usually say, ‘hey, you know, I do VR gaming, you want me to help? I’ve got all this equipment we can do some of these things.’ And it kind of spawned off from there.”

There’s a Discord for VR Villa and here’s their upcoming schedule:

• Coastal Comic Con Wilmington, NC March 7-8

• Game On Expo Phoenix, AZ March 13-15

• Golden State Fur Con Los Angeles, CA March 13-15

• KawaiiKon Honolulu, HI April 24-26

• LVL UP Expo Las Vegas, NV April 24-26

• Furry Weekend Atlanta Atlanta, GA May 7-10

• MomoCon Atlanta, GA May 21-24

The Dream Of A VR LAN Party

One of the reasons Jeff Basladynski created this connection between the chopsticks business at conventions and VR is due to his deep love for LAN parties.

A group of friends hauling monitors and PC towers down the street for a weekend spent on machines that can barely run the game, all to enjoy face-to-face connections with zero latency over a local network, is something VR Villa aims to tap into. This is despite almost everything about the way the current consumer head-mounted displays are architected making the dream difficult to achieve. If you head to an Apple Store, for example, you’ll be attended to by worker and when you put the professional-grade headset on your head you’ll turn a single dial to adjust the fit while the lenses auto-adjust to fit your particular face. When a curious passerby approaches the VR Villa, several people are involved in fitting a Quest headset and teaching the player how to enjoy the game.

“I’m just there to make sure that they understand what the technology is, what the limitations are, how they can play the game. We’re fully curated. So every single time that a person comes to our game room, they go to our front desk, they ask what games are available, they ask questions, or we even ask ‘em what games you usually play on a flat screen,” Jeff Basladynski said. “And then we can pare this down to you. If you like a shooter game, maybe play Vail. If you wanna have a casual game play Fruit Ninja. It runs like a restaurant. So they go to our usher, we already designated their booth and their headset, and then we walk them over there. We teach ‘em the game they’re about to play. And then we help and put [a headset] on their heads physically because, if the headset is off it could really limit their perception of how the gaming experience is. We are really adamant about that, it’s a very labor intensive process…they’re probably interacting with four of my staff.”

Jeff Basladynski has never run a flat LAN game through headsets at these events and I understand why — it’s just too difficult. Still, I believe VR fanatics should be able to roll into the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) LAN party at Quakecon each year with a head-mounted display in tow.

You’ll likely wear a Quest 3 if you attend a convention with VR Villa this year — they recently retired all their Quest 2 headsets. That said, Jeff Basladynski seems to be as excited as I am for what Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame headset might do for these events. Valve is about to ship a headset — as soon as prices stabilize — promising an incredible advance in both openness and weight distribution.

Currently, VR Villa has 65 Quest 3 and 3S systems ready to deploy as needed, though many events just see a couple dozen headsets brought out. I asked Jeff Basladynski how many Steam Frames he expects to have by the end of the year.

“That is a Valve question. No idea. Many,” he says.

I pushed a little further by rewording my question.

“How many Steam Frames do you want to have in your possession by the end of 2026?”

“All of them,” Basladynski replied.

Techcrunch in 2022 when ReadyPlayerMe raised $56 million:

“Our bigger vision is to connect the metaverse through avatars,” said Timmu Toke, co-founder and CEO, Ready Player Me, in an interview. “There may be metaverse [experiences] owned by big companies, who will make all the rules, but there is a vision of an open one where people can travel, built by millions of developers, where no one controls the whole thing. Like the internet. We’re trying to push the world towards that metaverse.”

Competing as a startup to be more “open” than Facebook/Meta while simultaneously co-opting Mark Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” branding was not a good idea.

The service sold to Netflix in December for an undisclosed amount.

Close watchers of the immersive industry will recognize Khronos and its standards body as the group behind OpenXR and an assortment of other technologies that help push forward interoperability and cross-platform development in VR headsets and augmented reality software.

For years now, I’ve suggested that full body hyperreal avatars of the sort Meta is pursuing as a “codec” for all human representation is the killer app of immersive technology. Put another way, 3D gaussian splats may ultimately be the key to consumer teleportation.

Meta is a research leader in this space even if Mark Zuckerberg’s need to be the social glue in VR hasn’t been able to put the technology in shipping consumer hardware. Persona visages from Apple on its Pro-level Vision headset are locked behind a scan of your eyes’ iris. Meta, meanwhile, I guess will attempt to connect the economics of verification ($15 per month without the purchase of hardware) to the storage of a representation of your face and body that cannot be worn by anybody else.

Ultimately, companies like Apple, Meta, Google, and Valve are on a collision course to repeat the blue bubble / green bubble chat fiasco dividing people into Apple and Android camps on their phones, but for the 3D animated representation of faces and bodies talking to one another in space. Now will they work out some system of interoperability and will Khronos play a role in that? Probably, but right now you have to choose FaceTime or WhatsApp to make calls in flat systems as the foundations are laid for spatial calling. The battle to be the dominant global technology provider of spatial calls and identity is why I imagine bad decisions keep getting made by Meta, like the closure of Echo Arena and the forced-linking of Facebook accounts.

Anyway, I specifically asked Khronos if this latest step was likely to help with the standardization of avatars. Here’s the full response from Neil Trevett, Khronos President:

“Gaussian splat avatars are already shipping on Apple’s Vision Pro Personas, and other companies have published extensively on the topic. What’s missing is cross-platform interoperability – and that’s what glTF will unlock. The KHR_gaussian_splatting extension establishes the common format for storing and exchanging Gaussian splat data across platforms, tools, and apps. Khronos is actively exploring how to extend glTF further to support avatar animation and streaming volumetric media — building out the standard that cross-platform splat avatars will require. glTF is how Gaussian splat avatars will become portable. Today the industry has agreed on how to store Gaussian splats; now it can work on how to animate and stream them.”

The company confirmed it had hoped to have provided both shipping and launch dates by now.

First noted by Viewport 360, the post from Valve includes some answers to frequently asked questions about the Steam Frame and other hardware projects on the way.

“We have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change,” Valve’s update noted. “We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible.”

Valve promised further updates to the site in the build up to launch.