In a bedroom with one wall covered in boxes for VR headsets, Daven Bigelow used Wine to play the entire original Halo game with Quest 3.
You can see a lot of love for virtual reality from Bigelow in the photo he shared showing the physical packaging for everything from Gear VR to Valve Index. He’s got the new Virtual Boy in there and PSVR sets for the Aim controller and Iron Man VR. If you use Horizon Hyperscape from Meta, Bigelow’s bedroom is the first Recreation Room covered by Good Virtual Reality that you can actually visit in a VR headset.
I adore the foresight to mount the actual boxes for the first consumer VR headsets to the wall. While I have all these headsets too, I simply couldn’t justify the space required to keep the boxes. After so many years of shifting messaging and priorities in the transition from Oculus to Facebook to Meta, Bigelow can look back anytime he wants at how the first headsets were marketed to people. Steam did the job of selling the Index, for example, so you can see just how clean the packaging looks for room-scale VR in a box.
In the other direction, with photo taken from where the bed is, we see the sparser computing station (plenty of room on that wall for more VR headset boxes) with a dock for the Quest and its controllers as well as multiple Bobo battery packs to go the distance in VR.
You can also see in this room that, like many obsessed VR, gaming is big in Bigelow’s life.
“Nintendo SNES and SEGA Genesis was 50% of my childhood at least,” Bigelow tells me over direct message. “Now I have a wireless Genesis controller that says ‘Nintendo SEGA’ on the back of it.”
When it comes to Halo in Quest 3, Bigelow uses WinlatorXR to make that work. The software creates a sandbox using Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) as a compatibility layer. The tool can essentially create any number of containing sandboxes to run classic games for old Windows systems and then tweak their settings for VR.
For those interested in trying to follow in Bigelow’s footsteps, there’s a tutorial video as well to get the original Halo CE Trial in VR.
Good Virtual Reality is seeking more Recreation Rooms to feature showcasing the spaces and hardware that take people where they want to go — details are here for how to share yours.