Month 5: Supernatural Coaches, Cigarette Smoking Cat, Furries Resonating, Selling Airplanes, & Sleeping In VR
If you're ready to slap Steam with a credit card would you like a VR Bag with that?
Rec Room ended at the start of June but Good Virtual Reality is still ramping up coverage of great simulations in month five.
Valve is planning to ship the Steam Frame “this summer” and I could not be more excited to kick back on my couch and mess around with a Linux desktop and microSD card. A couple years ago when I first heard about how thin and light “Deckard” was expected to be I reached out to a manufacturer to make some simple fabric VR Bags you could slip the headset in to keep its lenses protected while it sits inside any other bag. Now with Steam Frame actually approaching, I’ve had a fresh batch of VR Bags made for Good VR and you can buy them today on Shopify to support the production of independent journalism.
Supernatural Coaches Returning
June kicked off with some reinvigorating developments for fans of VR fitness. The Supernatural coaches are returning to pump up the heart of the service as the founders spin out Supernatural Health after the Meta mothership dumped them earlier this year. Supernatural’s relaunch joins H3VR2 and Sock Puppet Superstar as widely varying projects steadily stacking up excitement for VR headsets again.
Imaginations Mingling & A Cat Smoking Cigarettes
The Good VR Podcast this month heard from New Zealand-based developer Yuewei Zhang romanticizing a smoky bar from 1990s Hong Kong with its anime-inspired patrons and bartending mechanics. PROJECT MIX successfully targets adult players to make it onto more than 130,000 wishlists, the highest figure for any VR game on Steam. I wonder if, by the time it releases in early 2027, the game’s cat who can smoke cigarettes will have a name.
I encourage you to listen first to Zhang discuss the idea of exploring fantasy in VR and then follow up by listening to Tomáš Mariančík aka Frooxius as he develops Resonite. These developers appear at first glance to be building for niches in VR but ultimately they may be building for the true core of the VR market. When Frooxius says “virtual reality is about putting people into your imagination and visiting [the] imagination of other people” he’s not just talking about the visitors to his PC-based virtual network.
Selling Aircraft & Visiting AWE
A short immersive film and high quality interactive 3D models equipped on Apple Vision Pro headsets are now in the hands of pilots working to sell Cirrus luxury personal aircraft. The example of how instantaneous transportation into the skies via fully enclosed high quality virtual reality sits in stark contrast to what I saw at Augmented World Expo.
My sincere thanks to Snap for paying for my trip to Long Beach to see this chart from CEO Evan Spiegel acknowledging headsets like Vision Pro as capable while alleging they are not wearable. When I spoke to former HTC leader Alvin Wang Graylin in the shade by the pool at the Hyatt Regency he echoed the benefits of Snap’s framing even as I insisted a VR headset could provide both wearability and capability in that specific location, same as my laptop. The Xreal Aura glasses I wore during the conference use a similar optical see-through approach as Specs. Without testing Snap’s glasses at all, and unable to take the Auras out walking into the harsh Long Beach sunlight, it remains to be seen whether that approach truly offers capability and wearability in the same scenarios phones and watches reign supreme.
I’d love glasses featuring the hand tracking and eye tracking of Vision Pro while lacking any display. They could redefine the “AI Glasses” category currently defined by Meta and, if they lacked the ability to take photos, would erase the privacy concerns inherent to them. They’d also immediately offer capability to Apple’s integrated ecosystem. You could hypothetically navigate Apple TV, for instance, with the same low effort pinch gesture as Vision Pro while looking through the same prescription lenses Graylin praised as providing value (and wearability) even when the battery runs down. Apple Airframes would be such a cool name for this device category. Good Virtual Reality, meanwhile, is home to a first-hand account of someone who found Vision Pro so wearable they’ve used it as a nightly sleep aid for more than two years.
Flat2VR Studios & Virtual Desktop
Virtual Desktop creator Guy Godin sounded war-torn as he recapped butting heads with Meta over a decade while Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza teased releases they’re working on into 2028.
Uniza:
“Make great games and have fucking fun. You have to tell me why this deserves a spot in VR and why I should pick it over any other experiences.”
Godin:
“There are some good engineers at Meta that care. What sucks for them is that they’re not incentivized to ship quality software and fix bugs. I wish they were, because some of them are really good and they’ve done some incredible things.”
Places To Go In VR
If you’re looking for a chill escape unlike anything else in VR, Grant Hinkson’s Connectome is available now on Quest or Vision Pro. It’s a calming place of quiet discovery where you follow the lines to connect the dots in the space around you.
Steve Lukas’ Jigsaw Night is now available on Apple Vision Pro with an impressive new feature that syncs up for colocation by using hand tracking in an unexpected way.
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades will join the Certified Good VR Collection this week as the game exits early access after more than a decade of development. In June, I added to the collection VR’s best party game Acron: Attack of the Squirrels and the game I’ve spent the most time in VR with Pistol Whip.
Lastly for Good Virtual Reality in June, you can listen to me answer reader questions for just over an hour as I explain my path from being a fan of Star Trek as a kid to designing space stations as a teenager to exploring the scale of the cosmos in Titans of Space as an adult. I’ll be doing a podcast like that again sometime and, if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, you can email editor@goodvirtualreality.com.
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