Good VR Podcast

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  Apple Vision Pro In An Operating Room Points To The Cost Of Doctors Turning Their Heads 20.08.2026 19мин

  A recent paper authored by Dr. Bobby Korn at the University of California, San Diego made some intriguing conclusions from 16 operations completed with physicians wearing Apple Vision Pro to view cameras inside the human body.Here are the listed highlights from the paper, bolding added: * Spatial computing improves ergonomic comfort in endoscopic surgery.* Apple Vision Pro enables immersive, hands-free surgical visualization.* Operative time shortened without increased cognitive workload.* Low cost and small footprint make spatial computing feasible for operating room integration.The paper suggests that, on average, operations could be performed over eight minutes faster because the doctors didn’t keep turning their heads to look at a physical monitor showing the live view from a camera inside the body.“When you’re actually looking at a monitor, you’re actually oftentimes using one monitor that is shared by everyone in the entire room,” Dr. Korn said on the Good VR Podcast. “So it’s not naturally the most ergonomic thing that you’re using. So you’re turning your head, you’re turning your hips, and you’re doing this hundreds of times throughout the case. And that creates a significant amount of fatigue for the surgeon themselves. What ends up happening is that when I’m doing work in the nose, taking instruments in and out, I’m actually doing this hundreds of times during the case. And as I look down and I look up, my eyes are constantly looking for the image on the screen. With the Vision Pro, the image is always in front of us. We always see it.”From the paper’s conclusion:“…contemporary operating room costs approximate $51 per minute. Applying the observed 8.3 min reduction yields an estimated saving of roughly $420 per case, and for a practice performing 100 to 200 endoscopic DCR procedures annually this would correspond to an estimated $42,000 to $85,000 per year.”I encourage you to pair this conversation with my earlier talk with Jamie Lockwood at HMDmd for an overview of the types of procedures that might feature paired cameras providing 3D stereoscopic imagery to doctors looking inside the body. In some situations, doctors might also want an open periphery from their head-mounted display to occasionally look down at their hands directly. Overall, the two conversations paint a picture of the research frontier at the very cutting edge of medical technology.While the scale of the study is small, if its takeaways can be replicated elsewhere, there might be profound implications for healthcare savings provided by VR headsets.“The things that really drew me to Apple’s device was that the resolution is just so high and so crisp,” Dr. Korn said. “The refresh rate is good. But in addition to that, though, is the pass through. So you mentioned that other system where you actually place it over your eye and you’re able to look in the periphery. Every time you do that, your eye has to undergo a process called accommodation where you actually change the shape of your eye…And that just adds to the fatigue and exhaustion to a surgeon if they’re, say, doing an operation for several hours at a time….You want a surgeon who’s comfortable, who can see exceedingly well with the images presented into them, really to give you the best outcome.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  FitXR CEO Sam Cole On Glasses & Bundling Exercise Subscriptions With Hardware Sales 19.08.2026 26мин

  VR’s ability to instantly embody a person in simulated space turns out to be an incredible match for fitness. The idea that you can forget the pressure of the physical world and get into the rhythmic flow of a workout is one of the ways VR is transforming lives all over the world. I captured some of those stories in a recent writeup about Supernatural’s return to independence, but now I’ve had the CEO of FitXR Sam Cole on the Good VR Podcast to discuss their 10-year story building active fitness applications for VR. If there are any FitXR fans reading this, or listening to the podcast, feel free to send an email to editor@goodvirtualreality.com to tell me about how the service has affected your life for potential coverage in a future article. Please include how you want to be identified in the article and as many details as you can about your fitness journey.“Something like only 4% of Americans have a gym membership and actively use that gym membership. It just shows you that the vast majority of the population aren’t engaging regularly with exercise,” Cole says on the podcast. “The fitness industry looks at people who haven’t formed a habit with exercise — they won’t ever publicly say this — but they’ll generally feel like it’s a problem with the customer. And those customers are fickle and can’t form a habit and therefore [are] a low value to try and serve. But the opposite is true. It’s a problem with the product. The more that you’re able to build a product to serve this audience, the more that you’re able to serve a truly mass market audience.”The conversation with Cole goes full circle from their initial interest in building for an augmented reality headset from Magic Leap to being encouraged to build for VR headsets and finally to the coming wave of glasses-sized VR eyewear that can transform people’s perception about what the devices are for.“We will have headsets soon that feel a lot more like glasses in terms of form factor. That’s going to be really significant for overall adoption … we’ve done a bunch of things with Meta over the years where we’ve tried to sell headsets to our target demographic and really market headsets as pieces of fitness equipment rather than a gaming console. When we talk to customers in that kind of sales process, you really understand their skepticism,” Cole said. “Let’s just zero in on the Quest, for example, when they look at that device, they think gaming console for kids. They can’t envision themselves wearing that. For us it’s a piece of fitness equipment. They can’t see themselves wearing that to do fitness, but they also can’t see themselves wearing that to watch a movie. They can’t see themselves to do that to take a video call, for example. When you put the Quest 3 on them, none of them go, yeah, I mean it’s great, but if it was just a little bit less heavy, I would buy it. It’s all of this preconceived ideas about what it is and isn’t going to be. So I think it’s so much tied to how the device looks in marketing materials and therefore that driving the adoption … more people need to look at the device and answer yes to the question of ‘can I see myself wearing that?’ Even if wearing that only means wearing it in my own home. I’m very supportive of the approach the hardware manufacturers take here trying to drive more use cases of people wearing the devices out in public as well, watching movies on a plane or on a train … But also I get it from a productivity use case as well, whereas if you walked around more cafes, right, and you saw people working with these headsets on, I think that that would be beneficial as well. Those are all secondary to this fundamental question of can I see myself wearing that device? The new devices that are coming, the answer to that is gonna be yes for a lot more people than it has been for the historical devices.”You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting truly independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Flat2VR Studios Developing System Shock And High On Life VR Games For 2027 15.08.2026 25мин

  A pair of newly announced VR games are scheduled for release in 2027 from Flat2VR Studios — System Shock and High On Life.System Shock was the influential precursor to BioShock, first released in 1994 and re-released in 2023 by Nightdive. The remake is getting the full Flat2VR treatment alongside the VR version of humor-shooter High On Life from Squanch Games, where the gun you hold is a live alien commentating as you shoot your way through the world.The two games were announced during the latest VR Games Showcase put together by Jamie Feltham, with a Trombone Champ DLC partnered with Disney joining the announcements from Flat2VR. I scheduled a call with Eric Masher, COO at Flat2VR, for a full rundown of the announcements and to get his view on the state of the VR market. He called in from the airport as he’s heading out to Gamescom where he’ll be taking meetings that might lead to VR games for release in 2029 and beyond.“I tried a DK1,” Masher recalls of his introduction to the medium. “It literally changed things for me at that point. It rekindled what I think gaming could be as an immersive platform. I remember getting out of the headset and talking to my wife and I’m like, this is a life changing moment for me. And it sounds cliche, but I remember and she even remembers like me saying … I need to figure out how I do something in this medium.”Be sure to pair the conversation with the previous episode chatting with Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza for a fuller picture of the efforts at the studio. The discussion with Masher covers the difficulty facing VR developers building for a niche within a niche as several manufacturers ship headsets tuned for hand tracking, often selling controllers as separate accessories. Flat2VR is focused on controllers and the studio’s latest announcements join a slowly growing list of gaming projects for VR headsets that require tracked controllers.“Every game that we have focused on for 2027, 2028, and even beyond stuff that we’re preparing to get started for 2029 and beyond are going to be controller focused,” Masher said. “I would not be doing that if I didn’t believe that most of the gaming headsets would be in some way controller focused. The games that we make and what we focus on as Flat2VR Studios cannot be done hand-tracked.”We spoke for just over 30 minutes on the podcast platform Riverside and I edited the conversation down to under 25 minutes.You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Walkabout From Mini Golf To Dungeon Golfer With Mighty Coconut's Lucas Martell 12.08.2026 26мин

  Walkabout Mini Golf development studio Mighty Coconut is taking everything it learned from developing the best way to spend time with family and friends in VR and starting fresh with a new game.Walkabout Dungeon Golfer is in active development as something of a spin-off or sequel to Walkabout Mini Golf and being developed alongside new courses for the original. The new game is still centered on golfing but the gameplay loop around that activity is completely different, Lucas Martell explains on the Good VR Podcast. He cautions that they’re still prototyping, so things can change, but he offered some details about how they’re approaching its design.“What we have settled on is essentially that you’ve got sort of a small-ish dungeon that’s maybe like the size of three or four different holes kind of combined, but you’re able to freely kind of putt around it,” Martell explains. “And you do have enemies that have hit points and you do damage by putting into them. There’s an exploration element where you’re trying to putt around, you actually get power-ups by putting into cups that give you … health or attack. So very, very basic stat points. But ultimately it’s kind of a roguelite where you are playing through each of these different runs. So a run is not unlike a course. It probably takes twenty to thirty minutes or so. The thing that we have loved the most is that even in the prototypes we started building in multiplayer. So where it really gets interesting is when you do have multiple people in there and you’re able to strategize, you putt into this area which will lure this enemy out, and then I will be able to hit him from the back and use various different power-ups and abilities and in a cool way.”Good Virtual Reality is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The discussion with Martell is edited to just under 27 minutes with the podcasting platform Riverside and covers the full Walkabout path from inception to investment offers to layoffs earlier this year as well as the continuing independent spirit there grounded in creative artistry. It all started last decade with the founding of the studio on an island in Belize with artists gathered around the production of a short animated film called The OceanMaker. If you haven’t listened to the conversation with Shawn Whiting, who led community development at Rec Room for many years, the path that startup took over roughly the same period as Mighty Coconut makes for a useful companion conversation for understanding what it means to take outside investment in your company versus staying fully independent. “I’ve also seen so many companies kind of get yanked around. And we’ve seen this with all of the different studio closures that have happened where a company gets bought, and even if they are profitable,” Martell said. “There is this push to make 10x what they’re spending on stuff. And it just seems like it’s a very unsustainable model. And it also means that there’s a lot of times where you could have a game that, yeah, sure, it is making a profit, but it’s not enough. And you still end up getting shut down or something happens at the larger owner level where there’s a restructuring. And all of a sudden your mandate changes. I’ve done that dance before, especially in the film industry, and I just don’t like it. Yes, the more money is nice, but the more money comes with so many strings and so many concessions that it means that you can’t run things the way that makes sense. And currently we’re entirely player supported, which just means that what people are spending on the DLCs and the base game, that’s what’s going into development. That’s what allows us to keep making courses. I won’t say that it’s easy and it’s definitely gotten a lot harder this last year or two, just with everything going on in the industry, but we’re still able to make it work.”We also discuss the end of the Walkabout Mini Golf Pocket Edition’s development and how that relates to their strategy building a version of Walkabout Dungeon Golfer that runs on Steam and possibly for consoles with full cross-play to VR. Our conversation was recorded in August 2026 just before the release of the 1990s-inspired Gloop Lair, Walkabout Mini Golf’s 41st course and work is already underway on courses the studio is planning to release in 2028. You can watch the latest design tour with 3D artist Shane Rhodes the moment the course releases.You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Ferryman Collective Plays In VR With Deirdre V. Lyons & Stephen Butchko 14.08.2026 43мин

  What does it mean to play in VR?It seems a straightforward question. Meta, Valve, Sony, Google, and even Apple all sell games that substitute your reality for a simulated one with rules to learn governing your interactions. These storefronts, however, do little to sell the unique benefits VR offers in embodiment and transportation.“We’re all given this kind of carnival license in this sort of anonymous space to play,” said Ferryman Collective co-founder Deirdre V. Lyons. “We often as adults forget how important it is. How it re-energizes our lives and how it informs our lives and how it allows us to create bonds and special moments that we often don’t allow ourselves time to do.”The Ferryman Collective is a kind of theatre troupe that travels from place to place inside virtual reality to host intimate interactive performances. Most often they perform in VRChat and these days they’re hosting performances of their Emmy-nominated production Uncanny Alley: A New Day. At AWE in Long Beach, California earlier this year I attended one of their other productions alongside Scott Stein, working together with him to make music guided by a performer physically located in Utah.Before the Ferryman Collective formed Lyons was one of the performers who breathed life into Tender Claws acting in The Under Presents and The Tempest. I find live theatre to be one of the most inspiring uses of VR technology, but from Tender Claws to VRChat the productions Ferryman undertakes strain the platforms that host them. And still, some of the most emotionally impactful experiences you might have in VR can happen during one of these performances.“Our work in VR comes to life at the intersection of motion pictures, live theater, and interactive video games,” Ferryman co-founder Stephen Butchko said on the Good VR Podcast. “We pull from all three of those modalities to bring this work to life…this sense of play is for me a release. It is an expression of vulnerability and it’s a sharing of story and emotions with my fellow thespians and audience participants that join us in these performances.”I spoke with Lyons and Butchko about VR theatre for around an hour and trimmed the conversation down to around 43 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside. You can donate any amount via Stripe to help me with my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Specialized Firefighter Training In VR With Evan Sitler-Bates 10.08.2026 23мин

  XpertVR CEO Evan Sitler-Bates joined the Good VR Podcast to discuss work offering firefighters extra training in VR.We spoke for just over 30 minutes and I cut it down to under 24 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside. “This isn’t about…physical training and we’re not replacing live burns. We’re giving you the sets and reps that you can do on a daily or weekly basis between live burns and other live training,” Sitler-Bates said. “It very quickly changes people’s perception. I would say that going to fire departments and training with thousands or tens of thousands of firefighters at this point, by the time people get into headsets, it’s like a point zero zero one percent of people that are still pushing back on it. The vast, vast majority of people get into a headset and they’re like, okay, I see how realistic the visuals are, I see how the communication and tactics need to work, and I can see how this fits into training between our live training.”VR could affect firefighting in a number of ways in the coming years as the same type of sensors that map your environment in a headset like Quest 3 or Vision Pro could potentially help emergency response personnel essentially see through smoke and flame in video passthrough. We discuss that possibility a little bit during the end of the podcast.“When a firefighter’s putting on their gear, normally it’s about eighty pounds of gear with their turnout, jackets, pants, overalls, with their helmet, their SCBA (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus) tank, etc. So to add even more weight on top of that, and especially onto somebody’s head, is going to wear people down when they’re trying to fight a fire and run throughout a building and move with the hose,” he said. “It just obviously needs the hardware to get slimmer and [that] price come down.”You can find more information about XpertVR on their website. You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  6 Months Of Presence In Good Virtual Reality 04.08.2026 28мин

  During most episodes of the Good VR Podcast I ask guests the same question:“What is your favorite moment of presence in a headset?”The answers I’ve received cover a wide spectrum of available experiences in VR. To mark six months of Good Virtual Reality I’ve cut together answers to that question from guests Samantha Gorman, Sonya Haskins, Jasmine Uniza, Tomáš Mariančík, K. Guillory, Guy Godin, Anton Hand, Joseph Simpson, Jesse Schell, Avi Bar-Zeev, Ryan Engle, Ashley Pinnick, Daniel Sproll, Thomas Van Bouwel, Ashley Huffman, Yuewei Zhang, Justin Spice, and Shawn Whiting.You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for making this independent journalism possible.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Pervert Glasses Summer Versus Timeless VR Escapes With Scott Stein 02.08.2026 54мин

  CNET’s gadget expert Scott Stein joined the Good VR Podcast for an in-depth discussion about the social impact of computerized eyewear.We talked for just over an hour and 10 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside and I cut it down to about 55 minutes. “Our social contracts are gonna change. Design fiction — this is a wonderful time for design fiction…the idea of thinking about new interfaces,” Stein said. “I love thinking about stuff like that. This is full of all those questions. It’s a kind of a nightmare putting it in the real world and wrestling with it, but that’s why I like looking at new tech, is it’s full of those questions about how the interfaces and contracts and relationships change. What does it mean to have all this stuff?”Stein wrote some thoughtful commentary for CNET about the lessons to be learned from VR headsets as Meta and others make an unrelenting push toward the use of camera-based glasses. “Don’t call strangers perverts. Point your fingers at the tech companies, and hopefully, more thoughtful work on wearable tech will come,” Stein wrote. “The possibilities of assistive wearable tech — for vision impairment, hearing loss, cognitive decline and more — and its potential to collapse distances and connect people are fascinating. But right now, too few people have access to the technology, and too much about it remains unclear.”You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Space Pirate Trainer Sold 1 Million Copies & Bundled In VR's Arena-Scale Pinnacle 31.07.2026 34мин

  Space Pirate Trainer stands the test of time as one of the best projects ever developed for the medium.In 2016 it whetted player appetites for what VR could do by immediately transporting people to a platform overlooking a sci-fi cityscape with fantastic music and a small arsenal unlocked for fighting off wave after wave of drones. When Space Pirate Trainer debuted alongside The Brookhaven Experiment near the launch of the Vive, the titles immediately became showpieces for VR parties. Neither wave shooter would make any players sick as you stood in place and fought off enemies with your guns. The Brookhaven Experiment, meanwhile, might see players so stricken with fear they run into a wall or tear off the headset.Months passed and VR players looked for more content with copycats producing wave shooter after wave shooter. Players quickly began to critique the genre while Beat Saber took the note about not artificially moving the player to become the highest selling VR game in history. Meta scooped up Beat Games as developers explored every type of artificial locomotion possible to give players what they sought while balancing comfort as best they could manage. This is how Gorilla Tag was born, as it turned out moving like a monkey in a game where you play as a monkey is both relatively comfortable and added to the immersion. Then COVID-19 locked people indoors and Meta set out on the path to focus on its Horizon Worlds strategy.“When they started pushing Horizon on the front page and that was kind of the most important thing of that platform instead of the devs, I think a whole bunch of devs felt that,” Van Welden said. “I felt it even in my sales. I think sales were halved or like thirty percent of my usual sales from that time.”Van Welden and his colleagues at I-Illusions met in an empty hangar next to his home to play test something astonishing. Across the maximum play area supported by four SteamVR 2.0 laser base stations — 100 square meters with wireless transmitters from their HTC headsets to nearby PCs — the developers at I-Illusions roughed out the design for a game of tag set totally inside virtual reality.All these years later very few people have been able to play Space Pirate Arena, which developers bundled up inside Space Pirate Trainer for free. Those that have played it, however, experienced something truly incredible. The reasons why people haven’t played it end up being a study in platform prioritization. Setup is tedious, there is no automatic detection of physical obstacles, and the hardware wasn’t made for tracking in outdoor sunlight. If a new VR headset was made with those conditions in mind, though, Space Pirate Arena is one of the first pieces of software I’d like to try.I spoke with Van Welden for 52 minutes and cut the audio down to just under 35 minutes for the Good VR Podcast using the podcasting platform Riverside. Over its lifetime he sold roughly 1 million copies of Space Pirate Trainer and that helped fund the development of flatscreen snowboarding game Shredders with 14 people now working on it. Our conversation covers that whole journey starting from receiving a headset developer kit from Valve. When Van Welden sent in one of his builds to Valve the email he received from Chet Faliszek just had two words in it.“HOLY S**T” You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality and thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Raven Zachary On VR Versus AR Across Specs, Xreal, Vision Pro, HoloLens & Magic Leap 29.07.2026 1ч 19мин

  Raven Zachary’s story with VR and AR dates back to the 1990s and, in the years since, he’s become involved with a range of impactful projects at the cutting edge of technology. As a guest for the Good VR Podcast he recaps the journey for the first 15 minutes and then we end up having a spirited discussion for the next hour about the current landscape for VR headsets and AR glasses as we cover everything from Steam Frame and Vision Pro to Xreal and Specs.“I've had some very magical, perhaps even mystical experiences, in VR over the years. But when I think of that as a percentage of my time in headset, those types of experiences are a fraction of my desire to go out into the world and augment my life with things digitally in my physical world,” Zachary explains.He’s got a strong point and makes the case for optical AR well throughout our discussion. The talk heats up as I respond with the idea of video AR passed through VR optics. I propose the steady application of mass market economics to increasingly high resolution headsets will win the day for VR. As an example, I discuss the moment when iPhone 4 surpassed so-called “retina” resolution around 2010. For those unfamiliar with the history here, iPhone’s breakthrough user interface debuted in 2007, apps followed in 2008, and in 2010 the iPhone 4 dramatically upgraded the resolution of the display past the point where you could discern detail at a regular viewing distance. This resolution bump essentially unlocked whole classes of use for phones, namely reading and other passive media consumption, that were previously constrained by the display limits. “I certainly think it made media consumption more compelling,” Zachary replies. “How much did it affect the general app market? Web browsing, sure, fonts are more legible. I can use a Kindle app on my phone or the Books app from Apple on my phone and it looks much nicer. But I think probably media viewing had the most impact for increasing pixel density.”Vision Pro’s displays are certainly the highest resolution in consumer-grade hardware right now but its pixels are spread over your field of vision. That means it’ll still be a long time before true retina resolutions are achieved in a consumer-grade head-mounted display. Until that time, experiences you have with your unaided eyes will be more compelling to look at than anything you might see through a VR headset.“What you essentially just told me is in one generation reading wasn't really a thing you really wanted to do on an iPhone,” I said. “And then the next generation reading full length books became something that you could actually do on this device in your hand. The exact same thing is true of VR headsets and the exact same thing gets solved.”The original recording of our conversation was an hour and 36 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside. I edited it down to 1 hour 20 minutes. My sincere thanks to Cameron Brown of Rec Room for giving me permission to use music from Rec Room for the intro and outro of the Good VR Podcast. Become a subscriber on Substack to support Good VR directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality. https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Puzzling Places Developer Daniel Sproll On Cognitive Load, 3D Scanning & Steam Frame Comfort 28.07.2026 32мин

  One of VR’s unique and delightfully meditative experiences started as an error on the PC when a 3D scan got shuffled into pieces.Daniel Sproll joined the Good VR Podcast from Realities.io in Germany to discuss the development of Puzzling Places. The game released first on SideQuest and the creators slowly stacked up a passionate community who find a sense of quiet comfort in Puzzling Places as a kind of meditation piecing together 3D scans.They rebuilt the game in Unity for Vision Pro and, on Steam, the title now runs both in VR and on flat screens. That makes the work a holistic study of the benefits of immersion, with Realities.io working from the early days of 3D scanning scenes with photogrammetry to developing an innovative well-loved VR game and finally to porting that experience back to flat screens.“We did a classical engineering mistake,” Sproll said. “We were thinking a lot about, look, we can capture and we can bring it into VR and that has to be worth something — that’s just a cool thing to do. But it turns out a 3D capture is worth very little without a reason why people should look at it. We spent a lot of time finding what are reasons for people to look at this stuff, why would people want to have a 3D capture? What would they do with it?”Before becoming a VR developer, Sproll was a cognitive scientist and a large chunk of our discussion centers on the idea of “cognitive load” and how that relates to the various modes of play available between total focus and multitasking. With Valve’s Steam Frame due this summer to change up the market, Puzzling Places may be one of the few games playable both in VR and on flat screens with significant resources spent on interaction design for both modes.“It’s one of the most comfortable headsets I’ve ever worn,” Sproll said of Steam Frame. “I’m terribly excited that with Steam Frame I think for the first time we have a standalone headset that is only for games. It doesn’t try to do anything else. It’s only for games…. Valve makes their money selling games. It’s aligned in that sense with the developers who make the games. And with Meta over the years we had so many pushes to, maybe it’s more lifestyle, maybe it’s more media consumption, maybe it’s more productivity, maybe it can also do MR apps. It always tries to be many things at the same time. That makes it lose focus and Steam Frame is gonna be unapologetically a gaming device. And whether that works or not, we will see. But I’m really happy that someone is finally testing that hypothesis and making a device that is only that.”The original recording of our conversation was around 50 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside. I edited it down to just under 33 minutes. My sincere thanks to Cameron Brown of Rec Room for giving me permission to use music from Rec Room for the intro and outro of my podcast. I added a track from Quest For The Golden Trophy to this week’s episode and plan to use it for the foreseeable future. Become a subscriber on Substack to support Good VR directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Iron Rebellion Developers Spent A Decade Building Toward MechWarrior In VR 25.07.2026 30мин

  Justin Spice is on a mission to make something like MechWarrior in VR. In the 1990s he set up a cardboard box around his PC’s monitor to simulate a cockpit for MechWarrior 2 running on Windows 95. Roughly 30 years later, Iron Rebellions’s very positive rating on Steam (and 4.6 on Quest) is a testament to his effort at Black Beach Studio to create a fully fledged VR mech game inspired by his experience back then.“I took a cardboard box and I taped it to the CRT monitor and glued a bunch of buttons on the inside and I had this cheap flight joystick and I would just sit in there for hours,” Spice said. “I was really piloting and the soundtrack and the music and the mood, I was just like, this is it, dude.”We spoke for around 54 minutes I cut down to just over 30 minutes using the podcasting platform Riverside, discussing Steam Frame, Apple Vision Pro and the lure of developing a flatscreen version of the game. “I genuinely believe that VR the concrete settled too soon for the possibilities of things that can be created,” Spice said. “I think in a lot of ways we got into this port mentality. Let’s port things that work on flat screen to VR, which works really well, but it’s literally an entirely new dimension. And you add spatial awareness and things like that and XR experiences where you can start geotagging and having connection to the outside world and things like that. I really think developers should take that 2016 fresh approach and start over again.”Iron Rebellion is on sale through July 30, 2026 on Steam and Meta. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Stereo Displays For Surgical Settings With HMDmd's Jamie Lockwood 23.07.2026 19мин

  Head-mounted displays come in a lot of different configurations and not all of them deliver VR. Still, the elements that make VR experiences worth having can be better understood when looking at related technologies.That’s how I ended up talking with Jamie Lockwood at HMDmd. The company makes head-mounted stereoscopic displays with high resolution microdisplays and open peripheries designed specifically for use in medical settings. The systems allow doctors to see with depth in detail inside the human body while still able to see the operating room through the periphery, and the low-weight balanced design aims to be wearable for a lengthy multi-hour procedure.I spoke with Lockwood for for around 25 minutes and edited the conversation down with Riverside to under 20 minutes with focused questions around the value of stereoscopy — the key tech shared with VR headsets — and the overall trends he’s seeing in head-mounted displays.“The trend that we’re really excited about is for years surgeons have used computer generated images for surgical navigation to put in instruments or to or to plan trajectories,” Lockwood said. “The future is the fusion…of surgical navigation guidance on top of real time 3D anatomical video….but nobody’s cracked the code on how to do this real time with zero latency on 3D video.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Exits Early Access After 10 Years In Development 04.07.2026 54мин

  A game like no other in virtual reality reached full release after 10 years of early access development.Work is already deep into development on the sequel, but as of July 4, 2026 version 1.0 of RUST LTD’s Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades is available for download and the game’s early access label is gone.On the Good VR Podcast Anton Hand and I discuss his favorite guns, modes of play, and the pieces of the game he spent too much time on as well as the unique relationship with his community. Each week on Friday he posts a video to his YouTube channel as a sort of character — “Devlog Anton” — conveying his energy and intent for the game. "Devlog Anton has been one of the most incredibly important…stabilizing effects on my life,” Hand said of his weekly updates about the game for the last decade. “I shudder to imagine the past 10 years of what would have just been my rocky existence would have been like without that normalizing power of no matter what’s going on in me, I need to sit in this chair once a week on a Friday and bring all of my effusive joyful energy possible.”Ahead of full release I reached out to the H3VR community on Reddit and Discord to collect their feelings about the game and incorporated their comments into its Good VR certification.I encourage you to give that post a read to understand how this game — and Hand’s connection to his community — has persisted for over a decade. For the podcast, we spoke about the journey of development for one hour and 15 minutes using Riverside and I edited it down to just under 55 minutes.Become a subscriber on Substack to support Good VR directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Haptics 101: Motors For Touch With Ashley Huffman 02.07.2026 32мин

  When you play a game like Eleven Table Tennis you should hold something paddle-like in one hand that vibrates believably when a simulated ball collides. An open palm with a simulated ball resting on it during a serve should also provide the subtle sensation of it leaving the surface of your skin.Today, the best table tennis game in VR is played with two controllers, one in each hand. These objects feature an array of buttons with motors inside to provide haptic feedback, but as VR advances beyond the Meta Quest it’s possible ideas like a glove, watch or wristband can provide the missing part of the experience better than a second controller.At AWE in Long Beach I tried new gloves from bHaptics that sell as a pair for $385 with 7 motors per hand — one each in the fingertips, two on the palm and one at the wrist. I spent most of my time during the demo petting a simulated cat. To better understand my experience in the weeks after my demo I joined Riverside for a conversation with the “Queen of Haptics” Ashley Huffman, who works at Titan Haptics and runs the All Things Haptics newsletter. Titan makes the wrist motor in the new bHaptics glove. bHaptics gears its gloves toward industrial or military training and they’re able to bring the price down for this kind of equipment from many prior systems because they rely on Meta’s software-based tracking of the hands by the headset’s cameras for interaction.Nearly $400 is still a big ask for a pair of gloves, but as we look to the future I wonder if we could one day go to an Apple Store with $50 or $100 and pick up a single glove that looks a lot like a Titleist golf glove.Just three motors over the palm in a triangular formation could provide that Eleven Table Tennis serving sensation, allowing you to feel the ball move around the surface of your hand, and an Apple Watch at the wrist or perhaps a motor like the ones from Titan Haptics on the back of the hand could provide a satisfying ping sensation. That’s something I’d love to take into software like Golf+, Walkabout, and Eleven Table Tennis.“As soon as you start trying to leverage a buzz or only a low rumble to mean something expressive, that’s where you’re hitting kind of issues,” Huffman says on the Good VR Podcast. “‘Cause you’re basically taking a dog whistle for humans and ‘let’s turn that into putting.’ No, that’s not the experience.”Huffman and I talked for 46 minutes and I edited the discussion down to 32 minutes. Listen now for a solid introduction to haptics in VR.Become a subscriber on Substack to support Good VR directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Imaginations Mingle In The Freedom Of PCs With Resonite 29.06.2026 15мин

  Tomáš Mariančík aka Frooxius is the singular mind behind Resonite — a PC-based VR service where people can create together in VR.He started up Resonite upon exit from Neos, a virtual universe that “exploded” a few years ago when one of the other people involved in the organization focused on introducing crypto concepts to the service.“It was hard,” Frooxius says on the Good VR Podcast. “One of the hardest things I ever did.”The fresh start of Resonite has done wonders for Mariančík’s mental health.“Being able to exist without a lot of the constant anxiety and fear and just kind of focus and be like, what I’m building is my own and nobody can take it from me,” Frooxius said. “It was hugely impactful on my mental health in general.”The developer identifies himself as a furry and joined the Good VR Podcast from the freedom of PC VR wearing a Vive Pro Eye with Project Babble facial tracker attached as well as Index controllers for finger tracking. The course of our conversation covers what furries are, what Resonite is, how the service sets itself apart from VRChat, and the unique power of VR as a medium.“Virtual reality is about putting people into your imagination and visiting imagination of other people,” Frooxius said. “To me VR is a medium that lets you take the imagination out of your head and make it into a world that you can share with others and where it can mingle with imagination of other people.”We spoke for about 46 minutes which I edited down to 21 minutes for video and almost 16 minutes for audio. The video version takes a trip to the Shadowed Cove world by Team VibeZ in Resonite.“The goal of Resonite is to give people as much control over the world they’re in as possible,” Frooxius said. “Let people shape the universe the virtual universe they inhabit. It’s almost like if you took VRChat and the Unity editor and smooshed them together into one thing….whatever you change you see the impact of it inside of VR instantly.”Become a subscriber on Substack to support my work directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  10 Questions For Ian Hamilton & Good Virtual Reality 24.06.2026 1ч 10мин

  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 editor@goodvirtualreality.com, 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.https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  XREAL's Two Eyewear Types: 'Glasses With Apps Versus Glasses That Connect To Your Device That Has Apps' 24.06.2026 18мин

  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.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Alvin Wang Graylin On HTC Competing With Meta 20.06.2026 30мин

  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.This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
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  Mark Drummond From Encounter Dinosaurs In Apple Vision Pro To Pixi Garden on iPhone 18.06.2026 24мин

  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.This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe