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. Oct 21

    Braving The Long VR Winter In Meta VR Glasses & Steam Frame With The Verge’s Sean Hollister

    I finally became a paid subscriber to The Verge after reading a thoughtful piece titled “Can VR glasses save VR?” based on Sean Hollister’s time with the Meta VR Glasses at the recent developer conference. Here’s the bit that pushed me over the edge as Hollister breaks down the difference between transparent AR optics and VR optics with passthrough video: Virtual objects can seem ghostly unless you activate electrochromic lenses, which turn the clear lenses dark at the push of a button, blocking your view of the world. Even then, you can see games, movies, and virtual desktops far better in a VR headset, where virtual light and real light don’t have to compete. You see the real world through what’s called “passthrough vision” — a live camera feed — with virtual objects realistically appearing at the correct depth and blocking real-life objects behind them. This breakdown highlights a conclusion I’ve held closely for a long time about the race to make computerized eyewear. Fundamentally, optics that are transparent show the physical world in higher fidelity at the cost of virtual content appearing ghostly. Meanwhile, opaque optics for virtual reality experiences deliver higher fidelity content at the cost of the physical world appearing dramatically lower fidelity than what your eyes can see directly, using what Hollister calls “passthrough vision”. “I would not say it was always a given that it would move faster, it would get better quickly enough, more quickly, than transparent optics would get better,” Hollister said on the Good VR Podcast. This simple sentence outlines why Magic Leap was able to raise billions for its AR headsets and Microsoft shipped multiple HoloLens generations before that optical pathway faltered. Ultimately, Snap’s Specs at $2200 and Meta VR Glasses at $1300 emerge as the latest examples of these opposing optical paths, with the XREAL Aura powered by Android XR emerging as an intriguing in-between solution. I believe the micro‑OLED panels found in the Meta VR Glasses and Apple Vision Pro put VR on the path to benefitting from economies of scale that will, over time, enable VR to ship with less weight on the head, lower prices, and with the visual quality necessary to jump past our 4K televisions. “3D movies have been a revelation for me on headsets,” Hollister said on the podcast. “Disney’s Moana where…you’re in a normal 2D theater or watching it on your big screen OLED TV, the colors are beautiful. The waters part to let baby Moana scoop up the heart of Te Fiti on the beach. The ocean has entrusted her with this precious jewel that she needs to restore. And so the water scoops out of the way and it’s like there’s this wall of water surrounding her. And that’s really cool, very cool CG. And then you see the same scene in 3D and you’re like, this is not a wall of water. This is a block of water. This is a three-dimensional prism made of water. It is the ocean with life swimming inside of it. And you can see the life swimming…and the depth of that. And this is a kids’ movie that I was really tired of my kids making me watch over and over again. And I’m experiencing it again like I’m seeing it for the first time. And it is incredible.” I recorded a video version of this podcast with Sean Hollister which I’m publishing first to paid YouTube members. In the weeks since recording this episode, I’ve gotten my personal Recreation Room into camera-ready shape and am readying to produce more video content overall. My first paid member happens to also be the person who wrote for Good Virtual Reality about using Vision Pro as a sleep aid, so I’ve published the video version first for him and I encourage you to become a member on YouTube to see it early as well as to receive my upcoming video reports first. I’ve got audio-only chats with Voices of VR’s Kent Bye, Walkabout art director Don Carson, and more coming first in the days ahead to paid subscribers on Substack. As always, thank you for the support. This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

  2. Oct 9

    Emmy Award Winning VRChat Theater With Uncanny Alley: A New Day's Brendan A Bradley

    The Ferryman Collective and Virtual Worlds Company just won an Emmy for their production of Uncanny Alley: A New Day performed inside VRChat. The Good VR Podcast hosted the Ferryman Collective’s Deirdre V. Lyons and Stephen Butchko in the weeks before the awards ceremony and now I’ve spoken with Brendan A. Bradley, who performed as nine different characters in Uncanny Alley: A New Day. “When the metaverse became a company and not a community, that was fundamentally a problem. Because then I can’t go off and build my nerdy theater, and someone else can’t go off and build their business and their interest, and someone can’t start an architecture firm and someone else can’t start a library,” Bradley said on The Good VR Podcast. “Because we’re not building a community and a protocol for everyone to build on top of. We’re trying to limit a storefront of what then goes on the shelves and what doesn’t go on the shelves…that need to transact can often disrupt the techniques that make for best practices, especially in an emerging market and an emerging industry.” Bradley began making VR Theatre in 2020 with Jettison in Mozilla Hubs which was nominated for the Producer Guild of America’s Innovation Award alongside Tender Claws’ run of The Tempest in VR, Alex Coulombe at Agile Lens and the Ferryman Collective’s early work in VRChat. Overall, he’s focused on fostering an ongoing collaborative community of best practices for live performance in XR. “I think that it is always extremely exciting when outsiders value the work that we’re doing…ever. It has been very, very difficult to get people to understand the why of virtual reality. And so the award itself, I think, is a helpful marketing tool…My parents know what an Emmy is. They do not know what an Auggie is. They were very proud of me for both. But they can tell their friends about an Emmy. They couldn’t tell their friends about an Auggie.” Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

  3. Sep 25

    Meta VR Glasses Hands-On Demo Impressions From Scott Stein, Norman Chan & Alex Coulombe

    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. You can listen to a previous conversation with Coulombe discussing his focus, as well as episodes with Stein covering the conversation around “pervert glasses” and with Chan for a podcast recorded in a pair of Steam Frames. During the conversation, which is edited down to 1 hour and 12 minutes from a recording in Riverside, we talked about their favorite moments so far from their time in Meta VR Glasses with segments discussing the prospect of protective lens caps, holograms, live sports, games, stereoscopic video, the future of Apple Vision Pro, and the broader future of virtual reality. It’s been a busy couple of weeks with slimmer and lighter devices kicking off a new era for virtual reality. Typically I pull out a couple of notable quotes from my podcast for people who don’t have time to listen to the whole conversation but I feel like this is one you really need to listen to in its full context with the nuance each of these guests brings to the conversation from a limited time testing the hardware. For more from recent Good Virtual Reality: * Steam Frame Review * Meta VR Glasses Change The Conversation * Seniors Socialize In VRChat * Andrew Eiche On AI & The Path To 1 Billion In VR * Tipatat Chennavasin Invests In The Dream Of VR * Steam Frame Arcturus Vision Camera You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality. 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

    Meta VR Glasses Hands-On Demo Impressions From Scott Stein, Norman Chan & Alex Coulombe

  4. Sep 22

    Seniors Socialize And Hop Worlds In VRChat As Part Of Thrive Pavilion (Linda Fisher)

    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 Worlds and finally to VRChat today. “I bought five Oculus Gos. And my mother was like 90 at the time. She was in a nursing home. And I would bring the Go to her and put it on her head and we would go into Wander,” Fisher said. “I would take her to places we went to on vacation where she used to go with her company in Florida and to me that was the most mind-blowing thing about VR and the Go was Wander.” There’s a full schedule of activities listed on the Thrive website and anyone age 50+ can join for free. “There’s a lot of challenges for older adults in terms of being out in the world and doing stuff. And we have members who are caregivers for spouses that have immune system issues or are in a long-term care facility. They’re not getting out that much either,” Fisher explained. “But these people have a whole lifetime of experiences. A lot of them are into photography or pottery or crafting. And so our average user has something to offer the group, and the group has something to offer them — intelligent people who have had positions where they were in authority, they ran things, so now they organize. We have these event coordinators who are really spot on…and they can organize people and the average participant is somebody who just wants to have fun. We just get together and play like kids. Like we did when we were twelve. You don’t have to worry about you’re too fat or you’ve got diabetes or you’re in a wheelchair. You’re just enjoying yourself.” 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

    Seniors Socialize And Hop Worlds In VRChat As Part Of Thrive Pavilion (Linda Fisher)

  5. Sep 16

    Norman Chan Tested VR From DK1 To Steam Frame

    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. Norm has had the Steam Frame since late August while mine arrived on Friday and we’ve each dropped our initial thoughts out onto our respective audiences with Tested’s one-hour-plus video being the most thorough breakdown of the hardware available right now. As Valve readies to ship out the Frame to buyers and Arcturus Industries prepares to give it color passthrough, Meta is preparing what should be the announcement of its next-generation VR glasses. It’s a big time for technological change with some folks likely to experience whiplash as they realize VR is rising from the ashes of 2026 like a phoenix with more comfortable eyewear than ever before transporting people into simulated spaces. Listen now to the conversation with Norm as we cover his first VR experience, his favorite moment of presence, and the persistent belief in this medium. “It still feels like such a frontier,” he said. “But there’s so much technology and so much research and so much effort that’s put into even the experiences that we have that make what we see possible, and feel comfortable and natural. And we take some of that for granted … we’re just discovering these formats and … these trillion-dollar companies are still putting money into it.” September is turning into an incredibly busy month for VR & AR, but I’ve extended an open invitation to Norm as well as CNET’s Scott Stein for a conversation after Meta Connect as we try to digest everything that’s changing in technology. 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

    Norman Chan Tested VR From DK1 To Steam Frame

  6. Sep 14

    Owlchemy’s Andrew Eiche On Steam Frame, AI, Voice Interaction & The Future Of 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. Owlchemy made Job Simulator and its most recent project Dimensional Double Shift launched in early access in 2024 with a bold statement about the importance of both multiplayer and hand tracking to spending extended time in virtual reality. On both Android XR and Meta Quest devices, the game could only be played with other people and your hands in the open air. From today, though, controller support is being added to coincide with the launch of Steam Frame from Valve and minutes before connecting with Eiche for our podcast I tested out an intriguing demo of multiplayer without the other human players. “The goal was to create an uncompromising version of multiplayer where you as the single player-player feel very similar to the way that you felt when you were playing multiplayer in, like, a safe synthetic environment,” Eiche said. “A lot of this came from thinking back to playing Unreal Tournament back in the day and being able to set up bot matches with whatever rules I wanted and not having to worry about other people complaining. And then you get to go in the multiplayer match and really test your skills or really like flex that muscle. And so I wanted a similar thing for VR and, especially with VR still in the earlier days, getting people’s schedules together, getting people to play at the same time and getting everybody in that environment can be difficult and playing with randos can be scary. So single player stands as like a third pillar.” Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review To fulfill customer orders, I was able to ask the bots for ingredients using my voice and they’d hand them over to me. The feature was far from perfect but there’s still a long way to go in the development of this single-player mode, which is planned for release sometime next year as Owlchemy works to “tame this thing.” I encourage you to listen to my earlier conversation with Devin Reimer at AstroBeam who licensed some of the tech he built from when he was at Owlchemy to make Stellar Cafe. That game has some similarities to Dimensional Double Shift — both are now working at the cutting edge of voice interaction with bots - but the two titles also play very differently. With the context that the founding of Good Virtual Reality has some relationship to a disagreement over the use of A.I. and with accelerating experimental modding of classic games into VR with assistance from agents, my conversation with Eiche ends up revealing an incredibly nuanced take from him over the value of game designers and the future of game development. “AI is never going to be able to tune a game without a human in the loop because games are built for humans,” Eiche said. “You’ll even hear like the super prompter people … eventually just stop telling the machine to adjust it and tell it to give you a bunch of knobs. So you can adjust it and get the game feel. So my recommendation is two things that are gonna win the day. It’s knowing game design and it’s building things that are fundamentally very difficult to write up in a single prompt.” 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

    Owlchemy’s Andrew Eiche On Steam Frame, AI, Voice Interaction & The Future Of Virtual Reality

  7. Sep 14

    Tipatat Chennavasin Invests In The Dream Of VR

    You can easily find Tipatat Chennavasin at events where new VR technology is being featured because he’s usually wearing a bright Pokémon shirt that makes him easy to spot in the crowd. As co-founder and general partner at The Venture Reality Fund he invests in technologies he believes may become key pieces of the slowly maturing virtual reality industry, like Gracia’s volumetric captures. Across a 35-minute conversation recorded from Steam Frame at my home in New York connected to Chennavasin’s place in California we discussed the path to 1 billion people in headsets and the value of both teleportation and virtual assistants. “Once we have the experiences that can live up to the hype, then I think we’ll get to the billion people,” Chennavasin said. “And given what we’re seeing with the technology and where AI is headed — I think at least with the super assistant — probably within you know three-ish years, maybe sooner. And I think for the holodeck for it to run real time, not just be something that’s a proof of concept in a lab, but something that that actually like you know people could have access to at a relatively affordable price. I think that’s probably maybe five to eight years.” The conversation touched on similar discussions covered with Andrew Eiche at Owlchemy Labs and Devin Reimer at AstroBeam, two conversations I encourage you to pair with this one. I also brought up the words of Meta top researcher Michael Abrash as we face the era of VR glasses beginning in 2027. Notably, my conversation with Chennavasin was the very first thing I tested in the standalone Steam Frame headset from Valve. I recorded it using Riverside connecting our video call in the Chrome browser which I downloaded in Linux. I used an external microphone connected to the headset through a USB hub; there was no separate PC involved. The setup allowed me to put the microphone closer to my face because I was able to position the virtual window for managing settings in a spot behind the microphone that would have been impossible if I was trying to keep an eye on a physical monitor. I also edited the recording to 30 minutes using the Steam Frame controller as a mouse and working standalone in Chrome. This podcast was exclusively published first to paid Good Virtual Reality subscribers during a huge day of VR news coinciding with the official launch of Valve’s Steam Frame. Thank you tremendously for your support as we enter a new era. This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access. 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 Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe

    Tipatat Chennavasin Invests In The Dream Of VR

  8. Sep 14

    Steam Frame Color Passthrough Accessory From Arcturus Shoots 5K 60FPS Spatial Video (Jeffrey Powers)

    Steam Frame passthrough quality can be dramatically upgraded with an accessory from Arcturus built over the course of a lengthy partnership with Valve. The add-on also captures higher quality spatial video than Apple Vision Pro. The Arcturus Vision Camera sells for $149 and snaps into the port in the nose area of Steam Frame to immediately upgrade the headset’s passthrough with high-resolution stereo color. Good Virtual Reality spoke with Arcturus CEO Jeffrey Powers for a 21-minute podcast covering the launch features and long-term potential for the device. Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review Spatial Video Capture & 3D Gaussian Splatting From Steam Frame The company offers companion software on PCs for processing captured content into 3D Gaussian Splatting, effectively pulling reconstructions from recorded video. A pair of apps in Steam Frame enable spatial capture as well as viewing the Gaussian splats. Arcturus Vision Camera can also record pose information as a kind of stabilization system during playback for more comfortable viewing of spatial captures. Powers talks about how increasingly efficient on-device algorithms can do depth estimation, leading us to discuss whether there’s value in headsets including an additional depth sensor. The conversation ends up being a valuable introduction to the state of the art in spatial video and computer vision. Apple Vision Pro, for instance, captures spatial video at just 30 frames per second while the Arcturus add-on can record stereo video to internal storage or the removable microSD card at 60 frames per second in 5K resolution as well as even higher frame rates at reduced resolutions. The accessory’s debut alongside Steam Frame suggests Valve made a shrewd design decision to reduce cost and weight in the headset by including camera sensors tuned specifically for positional tracking. Simultaneously, Valve partnered with Arcturus to extend the headset’s capabilities substantially for the subset of buyers interested in these features. The Arcturus Vision Camera weighs under 10 grams. “It should be one of the best devices in the world for recording spatial memories,” Powers says on the Good VR Podcast. “We just went through a house remodel and it took a really long time and one of the things that I was luckily able to do with early versions of our camera was shoot footage and stills of the interior just by walking around. I just walked around and I’m just recording all these frames and then processing that into a 3D reconstruction…I now have these 3D replicas of my house while it was under construction. And so I can go back and see what was in the walls.” I viewed and captured some stereo video with the Arcturus Vision Camera in headset and I was very impressed by the scale of arms in the scene matching my own arms held out in front of me. The stabilized viewing mode that moves stereo video around you using the pose information during capture is also extremely impressive and now my preferred way to view this type of media. The IPD of the camera’s lenses is very near the average distance between the eyes of adult humans. Below is video from Cubism, a game that utilizes passthrough on Steam Frame and also shows how the add-on switches from monochrome to color on the fly. You can watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube with some clips provided by Arcturus showing the passthrough quality and video player. Below is a 60 FPS test video I shot in Central Park at dusk my first day with Steam Frame. I converted it on Mac using Arcturus’ Vision Sync into various formats for playback. * Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Quest Format * Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Vision Pro Format * Good Virtual Reality Arcturus Test Side By Side Format 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 Read The Good Virtual Reality Steam Frame Review 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
    66
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ian Hamilton
  • Show Website
    Good VR Podcast

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