Good VR Podcast

Ian Hamilton

Audio from people building toward good VR. Read more about Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com and support independent journalism directly. www.goodvirtualreality.com

  1. 2 days ago

    6 Months Of Presence In Good Virtual Reality

    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 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

    6 Months Of Presence In Good Virtual Reality

  2. 6 days ago

    Space Pirate Trainer Sold 1 Million Copies & Bundled In VR's Arena-Scale Pinnacle

    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 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

    Space Pirate Trainer Sold 1 Million Copies & Bundled In VR's Arena-Scale Pinnacle

  3. 29 Jul

    Raven Zachary On VR Versus AR Across Specs, Xreal, Vision Pro, HoloLens & Magic Leap

    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 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

    Raven Zachary On VR Versus AR Across Specs, Xreal, Vision Pro, HoloLens & Magic Leap

  4. 28 Jul

    Puzzling Places Developer Daniel Sproll On Cognitive Load, 3D Scanning & Steam Frame Comfort

    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 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

    Puzzling Places Developer Daniel Sproll On Cognitive Load, 3D Scanning & Steam Frame Comfort

  5. 25 Jul

    Iron Rebellion Developers Spent A Decade Building Toward MechWarrior In VR

    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. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

    Iron Rebellion Developers Spent A Decade Building Toward MechWarrior In VR

  6. 23 Jul

    Stereo Displays For Surgical Settings With HMDmd's Jamie Lockwood

    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.” Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

  7. 2 Jul

    Haptics 101: Motors For Touch With Ashley Huffman

    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 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

  8. 29 Jun

    Imaginations Mingle In The Freedom Of PCs With Resonite

    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 Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

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About

Audio from people building toward good VR. Read more about Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com and support independent journalism directly. www.goodvirtualreality.com

Information

  • Creator
    Ian Hamilton
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    44
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ian Hamilton
  • Show Website
    Good VR Podcast

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