Good Virtual Reality Month 2
Rec Room is dead, Horizon Worlds is on life support, and the second month of Good VR ramped up by introducing people to headsets at a jigsaw puzzling convention.
VRChat is the last platform standing as Horizon Worlds closed its doors to VR and Rec Room announced its closure. “The world’s biggest VR game developer and publisher” nDreams started the month by reducing employment dramatically and Moss creator Polyarc ended it the same way.
Might all these efforts have fared better if Meta took action on a Quest piracy effort earlier and not diluted social VR? No matter, three headsets continue building toward good VR in 2026:
Apple teased over email “more news on the availability of iRacing and X-Plane soon” as the projects prepare to take high-end simulation to the next level on Apple Vision Pro.
Valve may challenge developers looking to port their work from Quest to Steam Frame at supremely comfortable 90 frames per second for standalone verification.
Pico seeks bug hunters to sign an NDA for a loaner unit of its next system.
When it comes to good VR experiences, party game Acron: Attack of the Squirrels saw its first update in over five years, Owlchemy’s hand tracking app Sporelando opens in April in Dimensional Double Shift (now with snap turning) and you can mini golf across a Hollywood studio in Walkabout Mini Golf.
Commentary
This site now has sections so subscribers can find just what they want from Good VR.
Guest authors Dr. Ruth Diaz and Steve Lukas added their voices to my own with each responding in their own way to Meta’s Horizon Worlds closure.
Diaz outlined how Meta can make amends to creators: “Give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.”
Lukas wrote a rallying cry to the development community: “Whoever’s left out there, it’s time to get serious and take the ball. The platforms have done their part, it’s time to step up and do ours. No more relying on another executive’s annual thesis, let’s build our own with everything that we uniquely understand, team up where we can, and let’s be loud about it.”
The original Vive and Rift were from an era when exploring good VR was the guiding principle in headset design and, after one full decade, they still account for over four percent of SteamVR usage. While Snow Crash author and former Magic Leap employee Neal Stephenson no longer believes in headsets, Apple’s holistic approach to VR as a spatial computer answers many of his critiques with realistic avatars.
Apple’s got an enormous opportunity to capture something Meta ignored in the standalone Quest — the market for comfortable high-end simulation in Vision headsets. I’ll go so far as to suggest that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, despite facing a nearly $1 billion payday should he succeed, may face dismissal when Apple’s carefully executed plan fully exposes how empty the attempts were to realize the metaverse across five Quest headsets. His desire to capture bodies and living rooms and keep them on Meta servers so they can keep you posting on the social network after death faces the reality of good VR in true personal computers.
Podcast & Exclusive Quotations
“I just love this medium, I’m gonna be around until it either becomes super successful and eventually I retire, or it doesn’t and it goes away again. So that’s sort of why I’m in this space, because ultimately as long as I can make a decent living out of it, I’m not gonna leave.”
“Cubism kind of got started like that. It wasn’t made in the game jam, but it was just a prototype that I wanted to build at one point. And so I did a very quick prototype over a weekend.”
“I don’t use any Meta products to this date, even though I’d like to. The hardware is relatively nice and cheap, and I’d love to play with it. I might even love to develop for it, because I have all sorts of applications in mind, but I won’t touch it because of their privacy policy.”
“You don’t have to be the first to be the best. Up until this year, we’ve always decided we would rather prioritize speed and adding features and adding courses and refining our existing software versus expanding to other platforms. When you expand there’s just a cost to every platform that you add. It takes QA time…you’re going to run into different issues on different devices.”
“My ultimate vision of VR…is co-present, multiplayer, whatever you want to call it by default. 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 co-present.”
Recreation Rooms
Mark Schramm’s VR collection is a sight to behold.
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.
Javier Davalos thinks about mixing realities while riding his electric unicycle.
Eyes In
Early in the month, my experience with The Met’s art at home and at the museum revealed the enormous space for exploration in VR. By the end of March, this publication had its first sponsorship as I joined Steve Lukas at a jigsaw puzzling conference in Atlanta to witness his quest for good VR. Colocation is still a puzzle to solve, but work like Jigsaw Night shows how powerful it can be.
Catch up on Good VR’s first month and thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting this work directly. You can reach out over direct message on Substack to tell me about interesting things in VR — I broke several stories this month originating from my readers — and you can email ianontherecord@gmail.com too.