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Welcome to Good Virtual Reality and I’m so glad you’re here.
My name is Ian Hamilton. I’m the owner of this website, goodvirtualreality.com, and I’m a journalist. My work here is driven by my human curiosity as well as the direct connections I make to people out there who believe in what they do with their whole heart.
Some weeks ago a subscriber sent me the following message using the chat features of Substack:
“You’ve interviewed so many developers, builders, journalists, and people working inside XR, but I realized I have not heard your own VR story in the same full way. As someone who loves VR, XR, and the whole emerging medium, I would love to hear an episode where the community gets to interview you.”
What followed from my reader Christopher were 10 extremely engaging questions I’ve had on the back-burner of my brain:
* What was the first VR experience that made you realize this medium was not just another gaming peripheral, but something larger?
* When you first became a VR journalist, what did you think VR was going to become — and how has reality surprised you?
* What was the biggest story you covered at UploadVR that changed how you understood the industry?
* What is one VR demo, headset reveal, developer interview, or convention moment that still lives in your memory because it felt like seeing the future early?
* What did working on VR Download teach you about explaining VR to people who are not inside the industry?
* Do you have any funny or human behind-the-scenes stories from VR Download — technical disasters, awkward live moments, accidental comedy, spilled drinks, broken headsets, anything listeners never got to hear?
* What are some of your favorite positive memories of working with David Heaney or the UploadVR team during the best years of the show?
* What is something people misunderstand about VR journalism from the outside?
* What technology, company, headset, game, or developer did you initially underestimate — and later realize was much more important than you thought?
* After everything you’ve seen, what do you now believe “good virtual reality” actually means?
I’ve answered these questions, plus one bonus question, over a podcast lasting 1 hour and 10 minutes. If you enjoy this podcast and have more questions that have been sparked by my answers, send me an email to [email protected], and I’ll address them in a future episode.
Please consider becoming a subscriber on Substack to support my work directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work here at Good Virtual Reality.
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At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I tried the XREAL Aura glasses running Android XR.
The device brings into focus Google’s ambitions to power two completely different architectures for spatial computing eyewear using the same operating system. The two approaches are:
* VR headsets like Samsung Galaxy XR with wide field of view optics featuring opaque displays passing AR through from the external cameras.
* AR glasses like XREAL Aura with smaller field of view for directly optical see through and adjustable lenses that can darken for more immersive VR-like moments.
One of the top priorities for my time at AWE was identifying how VR-like Aura actually is and what the path might look like ahead for XREAL as it continues iterating quickly. I only used Aura for a few minutes and they are still months away from release. Aura features a split architecture which puts processing in a phone-like puck you wear on your side that can also take in a display and power from other devices. XREAL is shipping a lot in the optical see-through (OST) category, including a tier of lower-cost devices not running Android XR.
“We have a pretty robust roadmap that goes across a lot of things…I expect to use Android XR for future devices as well…we’re gonna keep going down the wearable display path, and we’ll also keep going down the spatial computing path,” XREAL General Manager of North America Ralph Jodice says on the Good VR Podcast. “The easier way to think of it is glasses with apps versus glasses that connect to your device that has apps.”
I enjoyed darkening the opacity of the display and seeing my hands reskinned for Demeo, for example, but I also didn’t spend enough time with Aura or interact with enough content to say anything definitive here. Still, I learned a lot from the experience and the conversation with Jodice helps frame how XREAL’s strategy positions the company.
“I don’t think people will stop buying TVs or stop buying laptops and start only buying AR glasses,” Jodice says. “But I do believe they will reach for their AR glasses when that other screen is not available.”
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I met with Alvin Wang Graylin for an in-depth discussion looking back at the last decade of attempts to create a mass market for consumer VR headsets.
He left HTC in 2025 after joining the organization in 2016, a few months before the launch of the PC-based Vive headset powered by Valve’s SteamVR technology. That means he had a front row seat to the effect of Meta’s competitive strategies, from funding VR developers to acquiring them to undercutting HTC’s consumer headsets on price.
“These are things that are just not healthy for the industry, and nobody was really making money,” Graylin said.
If the VR market suffers from a “chicken and egg” problem in that consumers won’t buy headsets because developers won’t make content and developers won’t make content because there are no consumers to buy them, then Graylin’s perspective suggests Meta’s aggressive approach over this decade made it practically impossible for anyone else to help grow the ecosystem that would allow chickens and eggs to flourish.
“ I think everything about our product was better at the time,” he said of the HTC Vive. “We just didn't have the budgets there. They really underpriced us, that was their kind of key competitive advantage is that they were essentially losing money, and they were willing to lose a lot of money per device to sell. We were probably twice their price, we were still matching or in some cases selling more than they were into markets, and particularly for B2B markets. So after I think about a year, we started to ship more B2B because they started to price down lower than our cost.”
Our discussion covered the space between headsets and glasses as well as the differing benefits of see-through and opaque optics. I contend VR headsets slimming down into glasses sizes with lighter weights will help them replace laptops and desktops while progressively accessing larger markets with the added benefits of immersive content. Graylin, meanwhile, praises the architectural benefit of see-through optics allowing glasses to function as prescription eyewear if they run out of power.
We spoke for around 48 minutes by the pool at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach recorded on my iPhone. I passed the audio through Adobe Podcasts and edited it down in Descript to just over 30 minutes.
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A new free app called Pixi Garden available on iPhone brings eye contact and interaction to cat and robot characters sent through messages.
The co-founder and CEO behind the project, Mark Drummond, sat for a conversation on the Good VR Podcast to talk about his path to develop these bite-size interactions after working on the impactful Encounter Dinosaurs experience on the Apple Vision Pro as well as Siri before that.
“We created the character intelligence team and worked with a variety of Hollywood studios to do that,” Drummond said. “We worked with Disney and Marvel. We worked with Kevin Feige on the Marvel Universe, and we worked with John Favreau on a variety of things. The one that shipped there was the Encounter Dinosaurs app. So we learned a few, I think, interesting things in the character intelligence team working with these Hollywood studios. It’s pretty easy to do AR, but most AR is just sort of an animated idle position overlay on the real world. And one of the things that we learned is that if IP characters’ backstories come to life in such a way that the characters pay attention, then things feel present. It feels present. So it needs to react to sounds as you think would be appropriate, react to movement, the introduction of objects, the disappearance of objects. Like as a person, if there’s a cup on the table, and then you look away and you look back and the cup is gone. That empty table is really interesting to you because there was a cup there. But from a traditional sort of machine learning perspective, it’s just empty table. Why are you excited? Well, I’m excited because there was a cup that is no longer there. So that style of paying attention brings these characters to life, makes them feel present.”
Our conversation covers the Encounter Dinosaurs project and why he’s decided to start with these short-form interactions on iPhone. We spoke for around 40 minutes on the recording platform Riverside edited down to just under 25 minutes.
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My first time in Connectome I spent nearly an hour just calmly connecting the dots and making quiet discoveries to reveal hidden shapes in the space around me.
Developer Grant Hinkson describes the project as “an immersive art experience” rather than a game and I hosted him on the Good VR Podcast to discuss the unusually meditative work.
“I started with f…
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The team at Flat2VR Studios ask themselves “why is this in VR?”
When they are able to answer that question CEO Jasmine Uniza says they’ll often make a demo to show a prospective partner why their game should get the full Flat2VR treatment.
“Make great games and have fucking fun,” Uniza says is Flat2VR’s motto. “You have to tell me why this deserves a spot in VR and why I should pick it over any other experiences.”
She spoke about how Flat2VR started as a modding community and marketing effort to become a multi-faceted studio developing and publishing VR games over the course of about four years, with their most recent release FlatOut 4: Total Insanity carrying a mostly positive rating on Steam with support for racing wheels and pedals. She hints during the Good VR Podcast that more racing games are planned and they are already building games for VR that won’t release until 2028.
We spoke for just under an hour on the Riverside recording platform and I cut the conversation to around 40 minutes for audio platforms and 27 minutes for video.
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In PROJECT MIX the player embodies a bartender making drinks for patrons in an “alternate-history 90s Hong Kong” and after their workday they come home to their apartment, to a cat that can smoke cigarettes, as part of a story that takes place over 12 days.
The anime-inspired narrative adventure is made for mature audiences and scheduled for release on Steam in 2027. While many developers building for consumer VR markets are targeting kids on Quest headsets, PROJECT MIX has become the most wishlisted game in PC VR by targeting adults instead.
“There is strong sexual language, but any sexual content will be implied and not shown explicitly,” the mature content description for PROJECT MIX explains. “Expect lots of suggestive and risque fan service elements though. There is alcohol drinking and bartending in the game. There is also smoking, but that is optional.”
New Zealand-based developer Yuewei Zhang at PROJECT MIX studio PLECTRUM SOFT joined the Good VR Podcast for a conversation about the effort. He shared that, like Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin, he hasn’t received a Steam Frame developer kit despite more than 130,000 people putting the VR-only game on their Steam wishlists.
“I'm just really drawn to the sort of the romance and the fantasy of the smokiness of going to, say, a late-night underground bar in, like, say, Hong Kong or Tokyo or Shanghai,” Zhang said. “In New Zealand, we're not exactly known for the city of great skylines and tall skyscrapers, but since I grew up in relatively more rural areas, my mind naturally romanticized the idea of these neon lights and these smoky underground bars, the metropolitan life. So I just wanted to put that all in a video game.”
We talked for roughly 45 minutes about his inspirations and independent approach on the recording platform Riverside and I cut the conversation to 31 minutes.
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The creator of Virtual Desktop recalls the Tuscany demo as his first VR experience and Senza Peso as his favorite moment of presence in a headset.
Guy Godin’s recollections are from a different time in the VR industry. Enthusiasts launched their VR experiences by clicking around with their mouse on a PC outside VR instead of selecting from a menu inside. Watching videos of people doing that led him to start work on Virtual Desktop.
His work in VR has both been sought by Facebook and also competed with the work Meta built, leading to some tense and frustrating interactions over the years.
“There are some good engineers at Meta that care,” Godin says on the Good VR Podcast. “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.”
I spoke with Godin using Riverside for just over 45 minutes and cut the conversation to about 38 minutes recounting his path through VR.
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An app called Let’s Go Fly is available free today as part of Cirrus Aircraft’s pitch to sell personal airplanes starting with Apple Vision Pro demos.
The sales team at Cirrus now carry Vision Pro headsets to show potential buyers the short immersive film made with Blackmagic immersive cameras, with the project representing a new sales tool to help in selling luxury personal aircraft.
Cirrus’ sales personnel are all pilots themselves and will fly to local airports to meet with potential buyers and show off planes, which can cost over a million dollars to buy. Potential customers and aviation fans can now wear the headset to get a good look at the aircraft in 3D as it appears on the ground, in the cockpit and in flight from the outside with views captured by the immersive cameras.
“If you can actually give somebody a real experience that creates an emotional impact, they start to understand…[this] is a thing that people do every single day,” said Cirrus Media Development Director Anthony Bottini on the Good VR Podcast. “We have this huge amount of people out there in the world that could afford to and do have the right mission to be able to do this, but they’ve just never been inspired. Or we’ve never contacted them the right way. And so where we’re coming from as an airplane sales organization, is we’re kind of limited to the airport, many times the first point of contact that a potential customer will have with our aircraft, or with our experience, is looking through a barbed wire fence on the edge of an airport, and that’s not a great way to start a conversation. And so what we’ve done here is we’ve deployed Vision Pros across our global sales team with this app that includes an immersive film and everything else. And we’re hoping what we’ve just given them is the ability to bring a strong, impactful, emotional flying experience outside of the airport for the first time ever.”
Bottini spoke with me for about 20 minutes for the podcast about their early attempts to move people to have that emotional experience. I’ve tried the Let’s Go Fly app and the immersive film delivers an experience reminiscent of Soarin’ Over California while conveying the vibe of flying a Cirrus plane.
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AstroBeam’s Stellar Cafe is buried in Meta’s Quest ecosystem underneath the Horizon Worlds slop and a whole bunch of casual shooters, but it does something new and innovative with virtual reality that demands attention.
It’s a game that can be played entirely with voice input. Across three days of interactions with more than half a dozen robots, you’ll find yourself feeling a lot of emotions because, as AstroBeam founder Devin Reimer says on the Good VR Podcast, “it triggers different parts of your brain, the speech part of things that we just haven’t had a chance to experience in interactive media before.”
Reimer is one of the founders of Owlchemy Labs as well, so our discussion covers his path from being electrocuted by early wired Vive controllers to forgetting where he was physically located. He spent so much time developing a VR game in one spot before jumping on a plane and picking up the work elsewhere that he connected VR to the physical realm tethered to a specific locale.
From putting work up on Oculus Share and adding hand tracking to Job Simulator to back at the cutting edge of development with voice input, Reimer’s conversation with me was just over an hour recorded and edited to 54 minutes with Riverside for the Good VR Podcast.
“We built so many tools over like two plus years to actually allow you to make games with this because it is so difficult,” Reimer says. “We can’t be like, if the user says this, then do this….We can’t do that at all. So we have to think through what the character’s motivations are, what their goals are, all of that stuff, and then test a whole bunch. We learned all a whole bunch of stuff about how to build good characters….That very first character took us five months to build. It was like so hard to build. And then some of the ones in day three, I built one in four days because it was like, okay, I understand all the gotchas. We had built all the tech and stuff like that. And so with the next game, that we’re working on now, it’s like, okay, we have all that. Now, how do we bring this up and make this something bigger and more dynamic?”
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The statuesque Weeping Angels of Doctor Who only move when they aren’t observed by a living being. When the episode Blink aired in 2007, the creatures became iconic lore and, roughly a decade later, three creators working with the HTC Vive pitched the BBC and Doctor Who rights holders with a demo they made centered on the terrifying creatures.
They formed the studio Maze Theory to build the project and now, nearly another decade later, they’ve adapted the Thief series to VR after tackling adaptations of Peaky Blinders and Doctor Who to immersive headsets. Maze Theory’s next project is slated for release in 2026 for the Quest headset — an adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.
Players are promised a personal connection with Rocky as they step into the virtual shoes of Ryland Grace across both mixed and virtual reality.
“One of the things we’re trying to get across is that feeling of one-to-one interaction and being able to problem solve and companionship with Rocky,” said Chief Creative Officer Russ Harding during the Good VR Podcast. “We really want to build on that feeling that you get from the film, that companionship that sits between Ryland Grace and Rocky.”
We talked for about an hour using Riverside and I cut down the conversation to 44 minutes as we covered the journey.
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From June 1, 2026 a place that’s been the foundation of VR for many ceases to be.
The end of Rec Room is still “surreal” for one of VR’s “OG” supporters and a core member of the team building the project for more than eight years.
“There can’t be a world without Rec Room,” Shawn Whiting said on the Good VR Podcast. “It doesn’t seem real.”
From his memories playing Dreadhalls to co-founding Convrge to the spike in Rec Room players seen through the COVID pandemic, Whiting talks through a journey more than a decade in the making.
“The mood in the community is super somber, it’s sad,” Whiting said. “You can go to rec.net and export all your photos and, of course, you start looking through all of them and you’re like, ‘man this photo was taken in 2016 or 17’ and you’re looking at all the early games in the first rooms people were creating and it gets very nostalgic. It’s definitely an emotional time and people are starting up archiving projects so people are going in and taking a bunch of video and downloading the rooms and scanning the rooms and turning them into gaussian splat things that can be revisited.”
The conversation between Whiting and I is one of the deepest I’ve been able to bring to the Good VR Podcast as he’s able to speak about his time at the company in a way founders and CEOs can’t. As an early member of the team managing the space between founders and a growing team of engineers and designers, his role saw him attempting to navigate decisions made at a level above his pay grade. Meaning that of all people I could speak with about the closure of Rec Room, Whiting worked there long enough and at a high enough level to both understand the community dynamics and forces affecting its failure, while also not operating in a position where he’d need to deflect or defend any of the chosen paths. Put another way, the discussion is about as candid as can possibly be.
“Imagine you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off Rec Room, like some people were, and then you get the news that the thing’s shutting down,” Whiting said. “That’s like world shattering for you, right? You’re like, ‘f**k, I have to pack all my rooms up and now bring them over to VRChat or some other platform and try to establish myself there.’ It’s never going to be the same.”
We spoke for 1 hour and 22 minutes on the podcasting platform Riverside and I edited the discussion down to 1 hour and 10 minutes.
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After his passion project unexpectedly went viral, developer Brandon Montell rushed to put together wishlist pages for Sock Puppet Superstar.
You can wishlist the game now on Steam and the Quest store.
“Anytime I do something that makes myself chuckle a little bit, I am just like, "Okay, that has to go in the game,” Montell says on the Good VR Podcast. “It was not a business market-driven decision to start working on it, and if it had been, I probably wouldn't have started working on it. But it was just starting as this passion project. I just felt really passionate about learning to make music in different ways in 3D space. So I was following the fun, and I feel like even though there might be some market headwind, I feel like it's no less fun to do stuff in VR and to tinker with it.”
Montell’s episode of the podcast lasts around 26 minutes edited with Riverside and he shows through his replies exactly how Good VR is discovered. Someone with a bit of passion for an idea follows the fun and then shares it with the world.
“This project is the fusion of three of my interests, because I've always loved coding, and that's why I majored in computer science. I also love graphics and animation, And I also have at times been a hobbyist animator. I collected instruments and would try to learn new instruments,” Montell said. “So in a lot of ways, a VR animated music game is the fusion of those three things, of being able to code it, do the art and animation, and figure out the music side of things. I think all of those things are definitely coalescing in this project…I'm having fun making it, so hopefully other people will have fun playing it.”
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How would development studio Not Suspicious fulfill agreements to put mixed reality games Airspace Defender and Banners & Bastions on Pico headsets with developers in Iran during an Internet blackout and a war with the United States?
The answer is that they wouldn’t.
Iranian husand-and-wife developers Sahand Malaei and Pardis Mohtadi just arrived in Finland to continue that work after departing Iran, where they had watched strikes out their window and felt them shake the foundations of the building where they worked on mixed reality games.
The Good VR Podcast hosted Not Suspicious founder Rafael Brochado and Malaei for discussions about everything from their favorite experiences in VR headsets to the reality of attempting to work during a war.
You can find Airspace Defender and Banners & Bastions on the Quest store now.
Banners & Bastions arrives on the Pico Store May 21.
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Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades development studio RUST LTD. revealed a sequel during the Creature Feature.
I’ve told people I’m not really into VR shooters, but the more nuanced truth is that nothing in the category interests me the way Pistol Whip grabbed me with its rhythm focus in about 30 seconds and then kept me playing there for years. Now, I’m anticipating Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 in a way I haven’t any other VR game.
H3VR2 has been in development for some time and it is funded in part by Meta, with the reveal made during Doug North Cook’s latest VR gaming showcase. Some of the most accomplished VR developers in the world have joined RUST LTD. to devote their time to the project including SUPERHOT VR for Quest developer Mark Schramm and Vertigo 1 & 2 creator Zach Tsiakalis-Brown.
“I see these people around me, many of whom are like my dear friends, who are capable of building some of the most incredible experiences that I think anyone has ever made,” North Cook said in February on the first episode of the Good VR Podcast. “And I am just desperate to ensure that they keep being able to build those things.”
In case you are unfamiliar with H3VR, the work from Anton Hand and his colleagues at RUST LTD. exists in a category by itself on Steam. The VR sandbox game has been in development for a full decade of early access accruing more than 20,000 reviews over that time and an overwhelmingly positive rating. Never put on sale below its $20 starting price, its 1.0 version is still in ongoing testing to support the robust modding community after more than 150 updates across the decade adding new game modes, features, and guns focused around shooting targets or human-sized hot dogs.
“One of the big differences that we’re doing now compared to the original game is that there is a very managed onboarding experience in the game,” Hand says on the Good VR Podcast. “It’s both narratively letting you know about the context that you’re in with it, but is actually ensuring do you want to set your locomotion options before you move anywhere? Here are your hands, here is what is going on.”
The action-adventure game aims to reach new players as well as existing enthusiasts alike built in the “spirit of a sim.” There’s a “Certification Range” and voiced tutorials to introduce players to the virtual firearms and their handling.
“While you’re practicing,” Hand explains as an example, the tutorial shares “a couple fun facts about this type of firearm that you might not have heard of.”
Hand is famously critical of Facebook and Meta while being a staunch supporter of PC VR efforts over the years. Shock that he would take Meta’s funding, and that a sequel is deep into development, is likely to reverberate through the VR community and beyond. Even more than Half-Life, a series adapted to headsets rather than born in them, H3VR2 could inject tremendous enthusiasm into the narrative around VR and standalone headsets in particular.
You can listen now to a one-hour Good VR Podcast episode with Hand breaking down his path into VR, 10 years of H3VR, how Meta came to help fund the sequel, and his answer to the question “did you sell out?”
You can also wait for the full two-hour video version premiering tomorrow with a much deeper dive into the artist’s perspective and journey, charting Hand’s path from the first piece of digital art he made in 1993 to his favorite Star Trek captain and top moment of presence in VR.
H3VR2 wishlist pages are available for Steam and Quest.
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Sonya Haskins was Hasko7 to the Echo Arena community, a supportive figure who would help people however she could.
These days she’s Head of Programming for the Augmented World Expo, helping organize its latest conference June 15-18 in Long Beach, California. She recently moved to the city after spending much of her life in the southern United States. From purchasing an Oculus Rift in 2017 after a demo at Best Buy to now, she’s transformed almost everything about her life.
She sat for just over an hour for the Good VR Podcast with me using the Riverside podcasting platform. I edited down our talk to just around 52 minutes covering her journey over this time. When Meta killed Echo Arena in 2023, its closure struck a blow to her identity, with her name attached to a place that formed the foundation of a new persona she found in virtual reality.
“When the game started to shut down,” Haskins says on the Good VR Podcast. “I actually was thinking wow, now who am I? Because nobody ever calls me Sonya. I’m divorced now. All my friends are gamers who call me Hasko7.”
In her family it is tradition to purchase one’s own headstone so that loved ones aren’t burdened with the task. She shares over our conversation that she recently bought hers and, when people pass by her stone in the ground one day, they’ll see her name, the dates marking her lifetime, as well as the disk of Echo Arena.
“Echo Arena was a life-changing experience for me,” she says. “I began to meet people outside of my traditional social circle and society that I was used to and met people from around the world, became friends with them, talked with them. It became a community where you would put a headset on and suddenly you’re in this immersive world with a bunch of other robots and you could play these games and be competitive, but it was so much more than that and, to me, Echo Arena is a great example of the beauty of immersive reality, which is you can be somewhere else and do something else and try on different personalities or different looks and different attitudes and see what you want to be in life or what you want to explore, and so that’s what that game was to me - it really gave me the freedom and the permission and the opportunity to be able to say you know is it okay to do something or be something other than a stay-at-home mom.”
The transcript for this podcast is auto-generated.
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Artist K Guillory joined the Good VR Podcast to discuss her path into exploring the practice of immersivism.
One of the first articles on this site was about Guillory’s work painting a furry in her living room. Now on the podcast the artist dives deep into her path from Second Life to fully immersive virtual spaces in headset and her explorations making art while there.
Immersivism “is when you make fine art about virtual worlds, digital life, cyberspace,” Guillory says on the podcast. “A very quick way to remember it is impressionism plus the Internet equals immersivism.”
Guillory’s Steam account logs the number of hours she’s spent in VRChat at over 3,000, not including the time she’s spent as a “Questie” logged into the application in standalone VR on the Quest platform. She made a space in VRChat she calls “Gate” that’s an island with a giant gate on it that she’s rigged up to connect out to Resonite, allowing her to essentially transition seamlessly between the two social platforms without leaving the headset.
“An artist is somebody that is constantly going to their canvas or their sculpting station or whatever they work with…and they are constantly going there in search of the truth. The truth of themselves, the truth of the world,” Guillory says on the podcast. “They are always trying to create something on canvas, on the table, in their workshop of something that they’re looking for something. And I think that when I began this, I was just following a path of curiosity. I really wanted to know where was my research going to lead me? There was some kind of truth out there that I was going to find. And I just kept following that. And I think that I stay on this path because I must see how the story ends. I need to keep going. There are times when, like when I went to Resonite, and I set up at each platform I visit, I set up an atelier — a workshop — and I just want to see what happens. Let’s make some art. Let’s make some memories of this art. What kind of art is going to pop up this time? And I think when I got to Resonite, it was kind of like when a character in a movie kind of gets towards the end of a simulated world and things start to kind of run out. And it’s like — this next part is the part that I built. And that was very exciting.”
Listen to Guillory’s suggestions now for other artists to check out working in this space, her suggestions for new artists exploring VR for the first time, and her favorite memories.
“While still a niche art movement practiced by a loose network of artists,” Guillory noted after our podcast, she and her friends “practice making this art through an online research facility and gallery called “The Museum of Immersivism”.
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Schell Games head Jesse Schell joined the Good VR podcast and recapped his path in VR from working on Disney’s pioneering VR attraction Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride in the early 1990s to the studio’s recent explorations in generative AI.
Along the way, we discuss the seated I Expect You To Die trilogy, the physically active Until You Fall sword fighting game, and the ambitious effort to transition the mobile multiplayer game Among Us to fully immersive embodied virtual reality.
“The business of watching your back, the fact that in VR, you literally have to turn around to see…is someone behind me?” Schell said. “Like, ooh, that does feel kind of like a match. And so we were excited by the idea of it in conversations with Innersloth, this was something that was interesting to them. And so we ended up kind of being able to team up to get it done. They were very interested in having us be a part of that. And it definitely has been the most, in terms of number of players, the most successful VR experience that we’ve been a part of.”
Most recently, Schell transitioned development of Among Us back to original developer Innersloth. The title represents perhaps the only multiplayer title in gaming to transition across all those platforms and modes of play, essentially going full circle from a flat map on a flat screen to a 3D map on a 3D screen and then, finally, back to a 3D map on a flat screen. Schell says what “shocked us” was that, as the title moved from VR back to flat, they expected more players to enjoy the game in that final mode of play.
“As many players as we have in VR, I don’t know, we’ll probably have three times as many in flat? Of course we will,” he said they thought. “And the answer was no, that hasn’t been true. The VR part of it has been more successful for us than the flat version, which was a little surprising.”
I manually edited the 52-minute conversation with Schell recorded on the podcast platform Riverside down to 44 minutes with an automatically generated transcription available above.
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Sofia Lazaro is the cofounder of Dauntless XR which focuses on products in mixed reality “for the deskless workforce.”
“Individuals who work in aerospace, manufacturing, and defense, and [Dauntless] really aims at use cases to how can we use XR as a medium to give people the information they need when they need it in 3D in kind of a hands-free format,” Lazaro explains on the Good VR podcast. “There’s a stark dividing line through our use cases. And we build hardware agnostic specifically so that we can bring in the right hardware that’s right for the use case. And for us, the hard line tends to be — is this a classroom or a field context? — And if it’s a classroom context or maybe at least not a context where we’re concerned about physical safety, so we don’t have humans in the same space as large machinery or things like that, that is when we would lean more on the things that have the higher field of view.”
Lazaro’s conversation with me on the Good VR podcast covers a range of topics including Dauntless XR’s effort to build software that covers 3D data collaboration and workflow assistance, aiming to relieve people from needing to carry “binders of reference materials out into the field.”
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Some of the most memorable experiences that have ever been made for VR headsets started in the minds of Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro at Tender Claws.
Artists and creators who have closely followed good VR projects over the last decade still carry with them today their experiences in Virtual Virtual Reality on Daydream headsets and, during the pandemic, the intimate social connection possible in Quest systems buying a ticket to a showing of The Tempest in The Under Presents. The pair estimate their theater in VR hosted somewhere between thousands to tens of thousands of individual performances across the pandemic, providing a vital place of performance to actors when their physical venues closed and much-needed magic and social connection to isolated attendees.
Their sequel Virtual Virtual Reality 2 might be seen as prophetic to the ends of Rec Room and Horizon Worlds while Stranger Things VR released at the zenith of Meta’s explorations into mixed reality on Quest systems. More recently, the pair have returned to their installation-based roots with experiences touring through festivals in projects like Face Jumping and, this year, the AI glasses-based Body Proxy.
“What we do is kind of like look at the zeitgeist and look at both the critical and creative landscape that we're participating in,” Gorman said on the Good VR Podcast. “And think about speculative futures and narratives that make people think about technology rollout or what the systems they're engaging in are…I think what has been really supportive and important for us as artists in that our pieces come out as sort of precedent sometimes and make a statement about these speculative futures that then may or may not come to pass.”
Their work across space and embodiment strains the very definition of games, with the pair responding to my questions across an hour-long conversation I edited down to around 47 minutes with the podcasting platform Riverside.
“ I think we have a very blurry definition of game and we will refer to all of them as games and all of them as experiences depending on the audience we're talking to,” said Cannizzaro during the conversation.
I discuss with the cofounders the recent colocation chat I had with Alex Coulombe and Steve Lukas and manually corrected the transcription of our conversation to the best of my ability in an effort to make their deep reflections as universally digestible as possible.
“You have [an] audience and market that feels like, ‘oh, what is a game and what is an experience?’ And that's still a discussion. But in the worlds we inhabit, we are far past that discussion and looking into a broader -- what is interaction in this space,” Gorman said.
“I think it's actually maybe your relation to others through the technology is what creates presence.”
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