Good Virtual Reality Month 1

Exclusive comments from an Oculus founder and the heads of Khronos and Owlchemy Labs as well as a podcast with the most important VR developer in the world today.

Good Virtual Reality started on January 28, 2026.

Before I bought goodvirtualreality.com I made a simple statement about how people discover the experiences they want to have inside VR. A couple days later, I outlined why I departed UploadVR and the personal lines I will not cross when it comes to the idea of writing alongside an AI bot. This month I have been able to connect with, and write about, a lot of humans and their ideas.

Thank you for your support. I am just getting started.

Key Exclusive Quotations

Doug North Cook at Creature:

What you’re getting at here is a harsh truth about all current hardware, which is that it is all cursed. Like most role-playing games have the concept of a cursed item and a cursed item grants you great power, but at a great cost.

And so the vision Pro, the curse is that it’s too expensive and it’s too heavy, and most of the greatest immersive games that have ever been made are not available on that device. That is the curse. But I think the thing behind what you’re saying and the reality here is that we have been stuck. We have been stuck for years now because the first wave of great VR games were all conceptualized on PCVR.

Nirav Patel at Framework:

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.

Neil Trevett at Khronos:

Today the industry has agreed on how to store Gaussian splats; now it can work on how to animate and stream them.”

Andrew Eiche at Owlchemy:

I give Meta a lot of credit for trying to accelerate that timeline. They likely have cut 5-10 years out of the growth curve. That’s huge for a private entity! They should be very proud…there is a hardware technology that did get adopted by over a billion people in 10ish years. Satellite broadcasts. From Sputnik to Apollo 11 was a little over a decade. The cost: 2.5% of the ENTIRE US GDP. So if we’re ready to invest an average of 777 billion dollars a year I bet we can get XR to a billion people in an incredible form factor with technology we can only dream of.

Recreation Rooms

My effort to humanize VR shows the spaces where people use their headsets and the equipment taking them there. Follow the instructions to share your Recreation Room with Good Virtual Reality. I showed three spaces in the first month:

• Arlen Kundert walks around Skyrim VR In his basement

• Don Carson shared his cozy chair where he designs Walkabout Mini Golf

• Gabriele Romagnoli explores gaussian splatting and spatial tooling

Meta Quest Restructures As Apple Vision Rises

In February 2026 Meta restructures around the hiring of an Apple executive in December 2025. The overall hope is to right the direction of Meta’s ship while manufacturing consent for the use of digital name tags in public and retaining whatever Quest users and developers they can in the long hype up to whatever head-mounted displays they ship next.

I added commentary to two key strategy documents marking the transition from Facebook to Meta. The first document was written by Mark Zuckerberg in 2015 outlining his vision for VR. The second came near the end of February 2026 written by Samantha Ryan, the VP in charge of content at Meta, who has a mandate to make Quest “a better home for developers all around.”

I noted Meta’s unfocused strategy and how it affects developers three weeks before Meta formally acknowledged it separated Quest from Horizon Worlds. While Meta workers negotiate their marching orders between the public and Zuckerberg — and as Valve struggles to afford components for Steam Frame — Apple continues ahead at its own pace.

Vision Pro marked its two year anniversary in February as Apple continues to improve its offering in major ways. Google added YouTube to the visionOS platform officially and it doesn’t seem to be serving ads yet. The company is building major reasons to subscribe to Apple TV and Apple Arcade, even though Apple hasn’t announced anything exclusive to Vision Pro for the upcoming F1 season, as of this writing. They’ve run immersive tests, though, and the official F1 Movie is stellar viewing in headset which will also be true for the upcoming race season.

Apple Arcade rolled out Retrocade with Tetris hidden in a back room and it is a tremendous experience that provides the vibe of an arcade from 1989. Classic games like Galaga and Pac-Man can even leave the arcade to a preferred destination like the moon. My new personal high water mark for VR in general happened in February when my cat chose to sleep on my chest while I reclined on my couch playing Pac-Man on the moon Amalthea around Jupiter.

Analysis & Reporting

Attempts to create social connection through physical gatherings hosted by VR Villa and True3D highlight the extraordinary steps community builders need to take to create novel experiences that lag traditional entertainment in major ways. When will VR headsets have enough interoperability that we could have a bring-your-own-headset locally networked movie theater or gaming experience?

VR headsets are teleporters and I’m tiring of platforms putting their priorities in front of reducing the time it takes for them to do their job taking us where we want to go. Those extra travel times forced by platforms across every headset make it a miracle VRChat could draw 156,716 into concurrent use during a Japan-centered music festival.

Software like Stellar Cafe from Astrobeam can deliver an unexpected mix of emotion using nothing but your voice for interaction in a Quest, while ReadyPlayerMe ran through $56 million and shut down on little more than the idea that they were the non-Meta solution to avatars. I find enormous inspiration in the work of artists like K. Guillory, who explored Immersivism by painting a furry in their home with VR. I confirmed the next Walkabout Mini Golf course is coming in March and I’m just about ready to record that next tour after flying in on art director Don Carson speaking to The Future Of Meetings.

VR development can be a lonely existence as artists chip away at the realization of dreams when the rest of the world sleeps. I hope the first month of Good Virtual Reality showed some of my subscribers they aren’t alone in this. Your presence is seen and valued.

You can reach me with ideas and suggestions by emailing ianontherecord@gmail.com.