Good Virtual Reality

Before reading today’s exclusive news from Good Virtual Reality, I encourage you to find your way to the Walkabout Mini Golf listing on Steam, the Quest Store, PlayStation Store, Pico, or even Google Play and buy a couple DLC courses to directly support the artists at Mighty Coconut building beautiful places to play in VR.

Until the Meta VR Glasses arrive in spring 2027, the Steam Frame doesn’t have a lot of competition as my daily driver VR headset. So I’ve been waiting for Zenni Optical to follow through on the promise of prescription lenses that “click securely into place” in Valve’s Steam Frame so I can have peace of mind with regular use. During my conversation with VR experts last week about the care of VR eyewear we talked about the similarities between the regular real-world use of headsets and cameras.

Three experts joined the Good VR Podcast to discuss their time demoing Meta VR Glasses. Be sure to read and watch Scott Stein at CNET and Norman Chan at Tested for their unique perspectives going hands-on with Meta VR Glasses drawing from decades of experience with consumer technology. The third guest, Alex Coulombe, runs Agile Lens where they work at the intersection of architecture and theatre.

Meta VR Glasses go inside a small bag to take you to a 3D movie on a high resolution screen, get the best seat in the house at a live sporting event, or play an immersive video game. Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth had three years to go to school on Vision Pro’s breakthrough software experience and even hired an Apple executive to help them right their ambitions in VR.

The release date trailer for Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades 2 reveals some new gameplay footage heading through the facility and game director Anton Hand confirmed robust plans for updates through 2027. The trailer shows the slow-motion mode and extraction mechanics that will see players loot items for gear and slowly improve their skills while driving deeper and deeper into the first “biome” of the game’s main mode, facility.

A private group operating mainly in VRChat sees hundreds of senior citizens socializing in virtual reality. I spoke with Linda Fisher, one of the organizers of Thrive Pavilion, for a discussion about how older adults are using social VR. We chatted about her experience from Bulletin Board Systems in the 1980s to Oculus Go in 2018 to AltSpace and Horizon …

Practically everyone in my circle of sources is on the waitlist for Steam Frame after Valve notified people they weren’t randomly selected. Here’s the email I received: You are on the waitlist for Steam Frame 1TB Kit When we did the one-time randomization of the list, your place in line ended up beyond the number of Steam Frames currently available for reservation.As we work our way through the reservation queue, some customers may cancel their reservations.

Evan Spiegel snapped his fingers to take a photo with the SPECS glasses at an event in California. 15 years after Snapchat’s start as an app for iPhone in 2011, the CEO’s demonstration promises the idea of bypassing phones with $10-$20 per month cellular service in a connected case for augmented reality glasses. The moment effectively demonstrates what Spiegel sees as a core social signal to take a photo and share it via chat in AR.

Norman Chan, better known as Norm from Tested, is perhaps the most trusted expert with his videos covering modern consumer hardware. He’s also among a handful of journalists who believed in VR before Mark Zuckerberg showed up to buy Oculus. On Tuesday, we connected from my Steam Frame in New York to his in California using Riverside for a conversation about the latest in virtual reality.

One of the first articles on Good Virtual Reality checked in with Owlchemy Labs head Andrew Eiche about the path to 1 billion people in VR headsets. VR glasses are incoming from Meta and the most comfortable VR headset I’ve ever worn is shipping from Valve, but prices are increasing for headsets from hundreds to thousands of dollars. It’s looking increasingly like VR’s path to sitting on 1 billion heads might happen sometime in the 2030s.