Roughly 18 months into development he added speed puzzling to Jigsaw Night. On the floor right above the headsets of first time VR users checking out the free VR Villa, teams of friends gather at tables to piece together as fast as they can puzzles numbering 500 and 1000 pieces.

“For solo they can do a 500 piece in about 30 minutes,” explained event organizer Aly Krasny. “For pairs around 20 minutes. And teams, some of these teams will do 500 pieces in maybe 15 to 20 minutes.”

Attendees to the convention are about 85 percent female dressed in shirts with phrases like “Getting jiggy with it” and “Piecemasters” and “Puzzles are for everyone” and “Big fan of puzzles & human rights” and “Damn it! Fit!”

“The great thing about this community is everyone is very kind and genuine, very wholesome people, who just want to see each other do well. They’re all just very internally competitive,” Krasny said. “They want to do well. They’re all very high performing people. They pick up a hobby and they dive in deep and they do it really well, and they do that across many hobbies. And so they’re all really interesting, excellent competitors, but then very kind, wholesome people. Everyone here, like I said, likes to be competitive and they want to do this thing well, but we’re all reminded that we’re just doing puzzles. So no one takes it too, too seriously. And we’re all really happy to see each other do well and we’re happy to work together too cause you’re really, especially when we’re doing this as pairs and teams, we’re just hanging out with our friends really. It’s just like a shared pastime too…they get to come together and do a thing that they really enjoy with people that they really enjoy in a community that celebrates it.”

On Sunday at the convention Lukas sits at a table in the Villa surrounded by Quest 3S headsets with a nest of code showing on the MacBook M4 Max in front of him. Colocated multiplayer works in his game as does the new speed puzzling, but the “angels” system he and I have been talking about for weeks isn’t working yet. The idea is helpers (and journalists capturing video) should be able to roam the mixed reality play area and pop into different sessions to help players who might need assistance.

“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 earlier in the week 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.”

Eiche and Lukas are each working on very different products in VR but chasing the exact same idea. In the wake of Meta’s pullback from Horizon Worlds, Lukas’ rallying cry on the pages of Good Virtual Reality fuels him across this weekend.

Around 55 percent of people who visit the VR Villa over the weekend never tried VR before. A mother and daughter trying headsets for the first time noted that walking around in relaxed mixed reality was a relief after speed puzzling over a table.

“At AWE last year, someone asked me ‘so is your goal for everyone who has a headset to buy your game?’” Lukas explained. “And I said ‘no. My goal is for everyone who wants my game, to buy a headset.”

“If we want the space to grow, it’s no longer enough for us to merely participate,” he wrote. “The novelty momentum in VR is gone, and just following the next platform’s new thesis is once again not a guaranteed path to success. Even 100 games hitting $1m is also sadly not a rallying cry when billions have been put into this market. So if you’re building in VR just to service the market, stop here. Have fun, hope it works out for you. But if you take up the responsibility to expand it: Don’t build for other people. Build for you, and for people like you. Build something that you truly enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, stop or pivot. Build something that other people enjoy. If they don’t enjoy it, fix it, stop, or pivot.”

Lukas took the red eye flight on Thursday night from California and walked straight into the Villa on Friday morning. By the end of the day with no sleep, his bloodshot eyes were blinking shut as he dozed, before he found a second wind by dinner time. Heading to bed around 9 p.m., he set his alarm for six hours but said he woke up after four to begin coding again.

Lukas’ sponsorship brought both the VR Villa and this journalist to Atlanta so I could bear witness. I woke up around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday to find a text sent by Lukas at 6:30 a.m.

“This is all the validation I need for doing what I do and choosing not to sleep,” it read.

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You can find standout puzzling apps Puzzling Places from realities.io, Cubism from Thomas Van Bouwel, and Jigsaw Night from Steve Lukas on the Quest store.

My son carries in his Roblox account some armor for his avatar that he essentially scanned in a few years ago at The Met as he was exploring the museum on foot with iPhone in hand. Meanwhile, more recently, I gathered for a movie night in Vision Pro headsets with my friend and before the movie started I shared the object I had floating in my virtual space and then handed it to him across our realities.

The “slit gong” is one of the largest musical instruments and I have a replica of it for my virtual space that I pulled straight out of The Met website with my augmented virtuality headset using its AR functionality.

The technical underpinnings of everything described above dates to 2023 and 2020, respectively. Experiencing either in 2026 represents two extremes of virtual reality.

At one end of VR there is bringing yourself to a physical museum to scan objects on foot with an iPhone that you can experience later in a headset, and at the other end the art literally comes to you in your headset, for perusal at a place, time, and with people of your choosing. My friend and I weren’t even in the same physical location in our Vision Pro headsets, yet The Met’s art was able to travel from its physical confines through the open Web and become the centerpiece of our shared reality for a few minutes.

“We think the museum is relevant for everyone, and we also know that not everyone is comfortable visiting art museums (or they’re simply not able to). All of our emerging technology projects are about connection: reaching our existing audiences in new ways as well as reaching brand-new audiences, whether that’s casual gamers, fashion enthusiasts, or children and families,” Brett Renfer, Senior Project Manager, Emerging Technology, wrote over email. “We hope that new audiences can feel the awe that comes with experiencing art across time, in a way that feels relevant and approachable. VR and the immersive web are perfect extensions of this ethos, especially in the ways that visitors can feel a sense of presence and sense of place.”

In between these two extremes was the photo above experienced by visitors to the museum in the Atopia app on Quest 3. The software featured smooth locomotion with the stick on the left controller and, simultaneously, teleport locomotion with snap turning on the right stick. I suggested after my demo that future demos of VR like this at The Met simply leave the left controller out of the demo. Patrons to the museum, many who have likely never experienced VR before, would be better off teleporting only than trying to navigate a virtual world and feeling a continuous mismatch between what their body feels and their eyes see.

“As you saw in Oceania, the spaces are not really about replicating an on-site visit; instead, they’re about doing things you can’t in a museum, in a way that enriches future experiences with art,” Renfer wrote. “Maybe you’ll come visit us with a new appreciation for the Arts of the Pacific, or maybe you’ll visit another museum/gallery/online exhibit and just feel a bit more comfortable or welcome.”

VR headsets today are all “cursed objects”, as outlined in my recent podcast discussion with Doug North Cook, in that they grant incredible powers at enormous costs. The Vision Pro is held back by weight and price while the Quest 3’s analog stick-based locomotion systems can be overwhelming to grasp for the billions of people who haven’t experienced VR yet.

“These projects grew out of our iterative approach to emerging technology, from our focused AR Quick Look Zemi Figure to our XR deep-dive into Greek Polychromy to in-gallery pilots to the more robust Atopia project,” Renfer wrote.

The Met told me they have just over 200 scanned objects with 138 of them publicly available. They scan about 70 works annually but the number is growing each year. You can find more about The Met’s efforts in VR on its website.

That’s when I started to second guess my plans for the evening.

It was around 3 p.m. and I had purchased a ticket for 6:30 p.m. to a sold out showing of Insidious in a New York City screening room hosted by True3D in Quest 3 headsets.

I still had to eat, make it home, say goodbye to my family and take a train across the city to see a movie from 2011 that I remember being pretty scary, but not scary enough to really want to see again in headset. Still, I’d never had the social experience of seeing a movie in a theater while wearing a VR headset, it seemed like an interesting idea, and I’d already paid for my ticket.

I tried to evade my duty to Good Virtual Reality by planning to replace my ticket with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. I’d already purchased The Bone Temple from Apple with a loosely scheduled plan to view it over the weekend with a Vision Pro-owning friend in the same time zone. As I left the museum with my family, I texted my friend to ask if he’d want to watch it in a few hours so that I could skip the trek across Manhattan and stay at home with my family instead. He was up for the movie, but he had to prepare for an incoming Blizzard and couldn’t commit to a specific time.

So I ate, made it home, and delayed my decision until just after 5:40 when I was pushing my ability to make the last train that could carry me to my movie near Times Square.

Ugh. Fine. Let’s go to the movies. Let’s go see the stars.

Watching Insidious Wearing Quest 3 In A Movie Theater

Here was the scene at the theater:

At the bar, the True3D organizer I spotted with his Quest 3 said he had to get a permit to sell me fresh popcorn. So I bought two beers instead, took them into the screening room, and sipped them up to the 10-minute intermission after the movie’s biggest scare.

I don’t get the chance to take a lot of photos like those in this post, so my kudos to True3D for doing something with VR I’ve never seen attempted in this way before.

The most interesting piece of True3D’s effort here is the promise of three versions of the movie. It was neat to see people who have never experienced hand tracking in VR before get acquainted with their virtual hands as they made their selection.

True3D offered the standard version of the film as well as one that promised a countdown to each of the jump scares. There was also a scarier version that was simply teased as “more immersive.” I picked that one and noticed the film’s frame change its aspect ratio and size a couple times. Sound came through the theater speakers and I found myself turning the volume down on the headset to avoid any surprises. In retrospect, I think that effectively outsmarted True3D’s attempt to increase my immersion and fear with surprises through the headset’s audio channels. Another nice touch offered here was that the movie also played in sync on a projector at the front of the theater, allowing people to take their headset off in the case of bugs, discomfort, or to go to the bathroom and still keep an eye on the movie as it plays in sync with everyone else in the theater.

I pulled the headset off before the final scare and looked at the roughly 15 people who were gathered in headset alongside me as the credits rolled inside their headsets. I was sweating, and others mentioned being warm too.

I stopped off in the bathroom, which appeared to have some vomit in the sink, and then put my AirPods Pro back in. Listening to the soundtrack to Blade Runner: 2049 I walked past Times Square to the subway.

Watching 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple In Vision Pro

It was after 9:00 p.m. when I got home. I grabbed some leftovers from the fridge and my wife asked to finish the last 20 minutes of the Star Trek: Starfleet episode we started together.

While we were watching, my friend texted to see if I was still available to watch the new fast zombie movie. If he could wait till we finished Star Trek I’d be ready. So as we finished the episode, I grabbed one of our high-output battery packs, pulled out its retractable cord and started charging Vision Pro in its Belkin bag.

It was after 10 p.m. and time for the second feature to begin. I put a pillow behind my head on the couch, reclined the seat, pulled a blanket over me, downloaded The Bone Temple locally to my headset, and waited for my friend’s call.

I recapped for him the Insidious experience and we debated whether we were going to watch the movie in a virtual cinema or out on the moon Amalthea orbiting Jupiter. The virtual cinema was nice, but my friend also enjoys the sun eclipsed behind Jupiter as a backdrop for a movie theater too, and that’s where we landed.

During the movie I took a break by muting myself, then I got out of my seat on Amalthea and made my way to the bathroom. I also went to the kitchen for a drink and then sat back down on Jupiter’s moon. The definition of “break” here is different than the physical movie theater because I only looked away from the movie for a couple seconds and my friend didn’t even know I left.

I was so drawn into the movie’s narrative I found myself blasting my personal AirPods volume during the final act at nearly 1 a.m.

Quest vs. Vision Pro For Watching Movies

On the survey True3D offered after their Quest 3 experience I complained of the visual quality and told them they needed to incorporate Vision Pro into their offering. The difference in quality between the two presentations was like watching a YouTube video in a place with strangers and vomit present, and watching a film in a place of my choosing with people of my choosing and comfort of my making. There is no contest here.

I didn’t mention it on the survey but, even with the provided disposable face masks, I’m not convinced there’s a future in using someone else’s headset like rented bowling shoes. People should be able to bring their preferred system and batteries to events like this to tap into some kind of social connection. People should be able to go to community events like VR Villa and enjoy whatever they want with whoever they want using the headsets we brought.

Platforms aren’t built to allow that kind of interoperability, at least not yet, and my heart goes out to anyone trying to make something interesting happen in this space without their direct assistance.

Catmosonic

Below is the first cat in mixed reality via the app Catmosonic available on Quest 3 headsets free from today.

The app seems designed to take advantage of Meta microgestures in the eventual absence of controllers. With the controller, I used the analog stick to navigate to the different tools you see in the video and blew bubbles by actually puffing out air for a fantastic interaction.

I’d rather not have been forced to move my child’s playpen to make space for my new mixed reality kitty (Meta’s fault not Catmosonic’s) but the idea that I was moved to reposition the object is also an indicator of how I had been drawn into the software by the interactions. I even enjoyed the way Ziggy, one of my physical cats, came over and blended well with the digital objects I just set down for the headset-based kitty instead.

I’ve seen similar interactions in apps like Hello, Dot and Stay: Forever Home and they were nice too. In Stay, though, the transition to VR mode overwhelms players with the enormity of the space available with traditional game mechanics applied therein to build out experiences for you and the pet. I’ll be curious to see if that particular idea finds stronger footing entirely in flatscreen mode on Steam with the coming release of Stay: Your Forever Pet.

Catmosonic uses VR mode with intention to provide a focused breathing and meditation experience with a controller vibrating on your chest and a digital cat shown overlaid. The software actually shares something in common with the drawing app Pencil because it doesn’t use the Quest controller as a game controller for this. Pencil uses a Touch controller as a paperweight to sync up your drawings across realities. Catmosonic deploys the Quest controller and its haptic vibrations as a replacement for a cat sitting on your chest and purring deeply into it.

I hope, for the sake of Catmosonic and Meta, the haptics in a future Meta Neural Band have enough battery to vibrate like a cat for 10 minutes when holding a hand to your own chest.

I Am Cat

One of the biggest software success stories in Quest headsets is I Am Cat. I wrote about it the day it debuted in 2024 before it racked up 70K reviews.

I played the basketball game HORSE in the driveway with my family when I was a kid and my kiddo plays cat basketball with me in VR. While I was distracted by bugs in the rendering during a recent game my child absolutely schooled me in the game as we played on an airship in the sky.

He is so into the design of this game I reached out to the developers last week to find out when they are launching their announced Beach area. The developers wrote over email “we do not have a confirmed date for the next update yet”. My son has even figured out how to wall cheat using the pause menu. To access blocked areas you can move physically past progression obstacles and then unpause the game. He’s used that knowledge to find a key card hidden in a cabinet granting him access to the cat door to the Beach area even though it isn’t there yet.

My kid spotted Gorilla Tag in the Quest menu and asked about it. I told him it uses similar movement ideas as I Am Cat to make you a gorilla so you can play tag, but it is all based around chat with strangers online and that’s not OK for him yet. I point this out just to illustrate the on-ramp Meta made for cats to become gorillas using a satisfying interaction mechanic at its core centered on Touch controllers.

Kiki Underfoot

Kiki Underfoot is one of my physical cats. He was adopted from Meow Parlour in New York City and he’s the only of my cats to have a last name because, as you might guess, he is constantly placing himself underfoot.

I noted in my recent write up about Retrocade by Resolution Games for Apple Arcade that “I didn’t even stop playing when my cat decided to take a nap purring on my chest right between my headset and the virtual screen.”

I experienced this in pure virtual reality inside Apple Vision Pro reclined on my couch playing Pac-Man while on the moon Amalthea around Jupiter. I was in almost the same position Catmosonic aims to put people in so they can meditate with a virtual cat on their chest made of rigid Quest controller rather than a real furry Tribble-like creature.

Vision Pro’s carefully considered combination of hardware and software invited me to recline first and then Mr. Underfoot jumped at the opportunity to lay somewhere warm and relaxing to him.

That was the single best experience I’ve ever had in VR.

Cat Play

Can Catmosonic make a little furry Tribble-like Touch controller holder to simulate a physical cat more fully? I guess, but even then it would lack the additional warmth of my kitty emanating his purrs directly into the center of my body while I enjoy the solitude of Amalthea and the company of Pac-Man.

Catmosonic is good work in VR, but there are real architectural differences in platforms limiting reach with current designs. I was wearing the Quest 3 Elite Strap, for example, limiting exactly how far I could recline my body and head compared to Vision Pro’s Dual Knit Band. I Am Cat’s performance (alongside Gorilla Tag) shows the Quest platform is at its best when using both controllers in the most active way possible. Developers exploring hand tracking, or turning controllers into tracked objects, must now survive long enough for Meta to ship hardware designed for these kinds of intentions first.

Vision Pro, meanwhile, is at its best when you find its eye tracking and hand tracking enabling you to slip down so far into VR that it invites other creatures to join with the vibe it creates.

“So how is this different from the Virtual Boy I bought you?” she asked.

I just stared at her.

She had bought me the original table-mounted VR system for my birthday last year. 15 feet away from me there’s a cartridge for Virtual Boy Wario Land playable in Nintendo VR from 1995. I could only answer her with honesty.

“This one is subscription-based,” I replied.

I don’t know how to describe the look she gave me in response other than disgusted love.

I had just spent almost $60 to upgrade my Nintendo Switch Online account to a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack plan in order to enjoy this Virtual Boy. Nintendo charges $80 per year for a family to access a collection of classic games.

The math means if I was exactly at the halfway point of my life at age 40 it would cost me about $3,200 (plus the initial hardware) to enable my family and I to play those classic games for the rest of my life.

Apple Arcade is $7 per month “with family sharing”. If I want to access Pac-Man and Tetris in the Retrocade I’ll need to keep paying that monthly fee. Put another way, both Apple and Nintendo locked the playing of classic games in VR to ongoing subscriptions. The biggest difference between Nintendo and Apple here is that Nintendo made it easy to switch save files between different members of the family on a single device while Apple has not.

For comparison purposes, GB Operator is $50 to keep Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games playable anywhere without a subscription and there’s the new SNES edition for $60 with more of the devices planned.

I can also point to the OLED displays of Vision Pro and my Switch OLED as providing the same true black backdrop for the rendering of classic games as well, but there’s one other similarity Nintendo and Apple share in common here when it comes to the decisions they’ve made around VR hardware.

Both Apple and Nintendo chose designs for VR technology that do not weigh down heads with battery. Meta shipped eight years of headsets that put that weight on the front of faces.

More to come on Virtual Boy.

Resolution Games, however, just delivered a breakthrough experience for Apple Arcade and Apple Vision Pro with Retrocade fixing about 10 years of VR development in exactly the right way. There’s a really good chance Retrocade is never leaving any of my Apple devices going forward, not with my high scores in there waiting to be beaten.

Reclined Arcade Play

I’m laying back in the Dual Knit Band on the moon Amalthea around Jupiter holding my iPhone as it charges through the Backbone Pro. The iPhone kicks into Standby mode in my hands, becoming a clock tethering me occasionally back to reality when I look at it. The gamepad wrapped around my phone connects directly to my Apple Vision Pro over Bluetooth for precision control of Pac-Man, Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, Galaga, Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble, Frogger, Track & Field, and Haunted Castle.

Pac-Man is my favorite of this bunch — you’ll see more headlines from me if or when Apple and Resolution add Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong or Tetris — and I can barely convey the sheer joy and focus one can find playing the game out there beyond the Asteroid Belt, watching the reflections of the ghosts chasing Pac-Man on the metallic border surrounding the game’s screen. You can turn off the reflections in the settings, but you’d have to be a lizard person to do so because it is exactly this simulation of a real reflection that makes this such an extraordinary experience.

Resolution Games and Apple have teamed up to create a way to play these classic games that is fundamentally better than any other way. Bold words, sure, but I don’t think you can show me another way to play classic arcade games with this much flexibility. I played some of the best arcade games ever designed this week while I reclined on my couch. I didn’t even stop playing when my cat decided to take a nap purring on my chest right between my headset and the virtual screen.

People pay thousands of dollars to recreate physical arcades in their home with a fraction of the flexibility Apple and Resolution Games just delivered. Now people can pay thousands of dollars for an Apple arcade that can be carried anywhere in a Belkin bag. The value proposition around buying an Apple Vision Pro is not as black and white as Meta’s low cost devices would lead you to believe. This kind of wish fulfillment is practically priceless to some people.

Apple has been stacking serious value into Vision Pro headsets at the two year mark, from live Lakers games to the Dual Knit Band, and there’s absolutely foundation here in Retrocade for Apple to build on for a decade or more.

“I think this is a great showcase of things you couldn’t have any other way,” said Resolution Games CEO Tommy Palm in a spatial interview. “If you have a headset where you still see pixels, you still have this rather digital feeling. Once it becomes so incredibly realistic and you can see all the details — it does something else, at least for me.”

Being able to hold a natural conversation with NPC's and having them react realistically to what you say is nothing short of magical, and must have taken an immense effort to get working well. At some point in the future it might feel normal for players to naturally talk to NPCs in any game, but its games like this that are laying the foundation now to get there. Super impressive!

The reviewer I worked with for UploadVR started their review:

Your enjoyment of Stellar Cafe comes down to two things: how you feel about AI in video games and how good of a conversationalist you are.

Both these perspectives are valid views on the software Devin Reimer’s Astrobeam delivered roughly a decade after he was building the subsystems of Job Simulator.

A game where you must coalesce actual words and sentences to speak from your brain rather than button presses to send through your fingers recalls an era of text adventures none of the young gamers asked to spend $15 on Stellar Cafe have ever experienced. Indeed, there are only 38 reviews for the game and at least one of them is from another developer.

What more is there to say about an experimental piece of software that can be completed in a couple hours of pure voice conversation?

You will feel more emotions in a shorter span of time playing Stellar Cafe than in practically anything else on the Meta platform.

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