Good VR Podcast

Ian Hamilton
  • 5.0 (10)
  • Technology

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. 32m ago

    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 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

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

  2. 1h ago

    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 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

  3. 5d ago

    Agile Lens Develops Stage Presence Where Theatre And Architecture Intersect (Alex Coulombe)

    Theatre and architecture share a lot in common and Alex Coulombe can be found wherever they intersect. Coulombe is the head of New York-based team Agile Lens and he recently joined the Good VR Podcast for a discussion about the space. After discussions with groups Ferryman Collective and Tender Claws, each of which has done some pioneering work in VR theatre, it was time to check in with Coulombe to understand the things holding back these kinds of experiences as well as the path ahead. “I’d like to imagine you could have a show, let’s say kind of like in a black box theater style — something a little bit more minimal — that is happening on a stage. And if you don’t want to put on any devices, that’s fine. You’re gonna watch some very talented performers tell you a good story,” Coulombe explains. “Now, on site, if you put on a device, whether they’re glasses or a full mixed reality headset, you then get this extra world, this extra spectacle, these extra characters that can show up.” A previous episode of the podcast with Coulombe joined by Steve Lukas covered the fundamental problem of colocating media with people in VR headsets. Agile Lens software Floor Tour and Stage Presence include solutions so that people can walk around a blueprint on the floor or host a performance. Coulombe encourages people interested in exploring these apps to email info@agilelens.com. “I still find it incredibly fun and nothing brings me more pleasure than getting access to some new VR hardware or software and just getting to play in that sandbox and figure out what are the new affordances that we can do,” Coulombe says. “What are some of the improvements that have been made, what are the new capabilities that are possible to further immerse myself in a world that doesn’t actually exist?” 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

    Agile Lens Develops Stage Presence Where Theatre And Architecture Intersect (Alex Coulombe)

  4. Sep 7

    Gracia Captures Realistic Volumetric Scenes With Gaussian Splats (Logan Lemmon And Kazii Botashev)

    The most impressive demo I tried at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach earlier this year was a set of scenes captured by Gracia. The scenes use Gaussian splatting to deliver volumetric video that far surpasses anything else I’ve seen in the space. The scenes ran on Apple Vision Pro in passthrough mode so I was looking around at the bustling convention center show floor with a musical performer inserted at 1:1 scale anchored to the floor. Vision Pro’s leading display resolution combined with Gracia’s impressive representation made it hard for my brain to discern who in front of me was physically present and who was being teleported in as the moving Gaussian splat. Lead Gracia researcher Kazii Botashev joined from Kazakhstan with the U.S.-based head of partnerships Logan Lemmon in Venice to speak on the Good VR Podcast covering the rise of Gaussian splatting. It’s currently the leading technology for representing a scene volumetrically and our conversation covers their popularization from around 2023 to the question of how they might reduce the technical overhead of using a hundred or more cameras in making these scenes. “The main rule is that [the] bigger [the] number of cameras is, [the] better quality that you can achieve,” Botashev said. “So the general direction that all the research currently working on is decreasing number of cameras.” Lemmon suggested that the first impacts of 4DGS, the shorthand term for Gaussian splats that move over time, are likely to be felt across visual effects. Gracia recently worked with Muse and lead singer Matt Bellamy to capture him and represent him using the tech for a music video. “The VFX world is just now starting to understand Gaussian splatting,” Lemmon said. “You can capture a 4D sequence and you can process it with us, and then you can slice that sequence into PLYs, which are very, very large point cloud files that you can have interpreted by Nuke or Maya or any sort of 3D software. We just recently worked with the band Muse and the lead singer Matt Bellamy… our partners over at Radiant Images and us, we produced this music video alongside some really wonderful people out of Kazakhstan. The result was a 2D render of Matt Bellamy in a music video, but creators had full three-dimensional control over where the camera was placed, the animation of each of the points of his point cloud. They could explode him, they could zoom into his head, they could place him anywhere in the scene at a very high quality in this very stylized look. So we’re seeing more and more use cases for VFX, and we’re going to start seeing virtual production as well become a major vertical for 4DGS utilization.” You can donate any amount via Stripe to support the work of 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

    Gracia Captures Realistic Volumetric Scenes With Gaussian Splats (Logan Lemmon And Kazii Botashev)

  5. Sep 4

    Supernatural Health Makes Fitness ‘Taste Like Ice Cream And Work Like Broccoli’ (Leanne Pedante)

    Supernatural’s original head of fitness Leanne Pedante is one of VR’s first stars. Her face greets athletes who find themselves in virtual reality and her voice accompanies them on a fitness journey through the sweaty ups and downs of rigorous movement. Many members of the Supernatural service credit her and fellow coaches with helping them make behavioral and even identity shifts leading to dramatically different lives. Their hearts broke in January this year when Meta laid her off along with most of the staff at Supernatural, a studio it acquired just a few years earlier, causing a reset of the VR industry from pioneers in video like Felix & Paul to game studios like Schell Games. Supernatural Health launches this fall on the Quest store as an independent entity again and Pedante, her fellow coaches, and the original founders of the company are set to restart anew their path into VR fitness. While technically they compete with the likes of Sam Cole at FitXR, the two services along with other fitness-focused experiences offered in VR see more ground to gain together reaching people worldwide who aren’t going to the physical gym anytime soon. “When I initially beta tested it, I was like, my god, this is amazing. But I really didn’t predict that it was gonna reach the demographics of the people that it reached,” Pedante said on the Good VR Podcast. “I didn’t think that it would kind of have this incredible [adoption] by older folks which was a total shock to me.” As January 1 approaches, another year over, a whole wave of people will be donning new VR headsets with resolutions in mind to start the year building new habits. It’s a bit of a mantra at Supernatural, Pedante explained, that the aim of their service is to make something that “tastes like ice cream and works like broccoli.” “We wanna be the best at delivering this distinct thing that we have had person after person after person tell us for the past six years, which is I have never enjoyed working out as much as I do doing this thing,” Pedante explained. “When we talk about building a fitness habit, it’s easy to diminish it to be like any other habit. But the reality is like if I get myself to floss my teeth every day, which I’m still working on, but like if I’ve managed to master the habit of flossing every day, it doesn’t really change my self-perception. I don’t have some like revelatory identity experience of like ‘I’m now a person who flosses their teeth.’ But when you go from feeling like someone who has never been able to exercise, never enjoyed movement, never felt your body as the source of power, and then you shift into being a person who looks forward to the movement, who doesn’t cower from a physical challenge. That is a major identity shift. And Supernatural consistently delivers that to people.” You can donate any amount via Stripe to support the work of 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

    Supernatural Health Makes Fitness ‘Taste Like Ice Cream And Work Like Broccoli’ (Leanne Pedante)

  6. Sep 2

    Jamie Feltham Focuses On The Best Immersive Gaming With The VR Games Showcase

    The latest VR Games Showcase came and went with a series of announcements including two big projects from Flat2VR Studios, System Shock 2 and High On Life, alongside other eye-catching work like Spirit Ritual. The show was put together by Jamie Feltham and Zeena Al-Obaidi, the latest in a series they put together spotlighting immersive VR gaming in the style of Nintendo Direct. I’ve worked with both of them in the past and catching up with Jamie gave us a space to talk about the path from the DK1 in 2013 to Quest 3 in 2023 and now to Steam Frame in 2026 and next to VR glasses and the potential of a Quest 4, perhaps, in 2028. “My major hope would be that Meta compares notes with Valve…and then when we’re finally talking, hopefully, about the Quest 4, likely 2028,” Feltham said. “It all comes down to platform holders continuing to show the faith and keep producing hardware and keep supporting, to some degree, content. I think we’re gonna end up with something, hopefully in the early 2030s, where we’re all looking at something that is like a healthy ecosystem.” 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

  7. Aug 30

    MuhMow Roller Skates And Swings From The Ceiling In VRChat

    A skateboarder who suffered a painful injury found a new activity to keep himself active — roller skating through VRChat. During a year of layoffs or closure for many of the content companies that provided many their first VR experiences, VRChat is seeing record numbers and people like MuhMow are discovering its vibe. He converted a second floor office into a mini roller rink he glides around wearing a Meta Quest Pro and Vive Ultimate Trackers. Years after he forced himself to stop skateboarding he’s recaptured the feeling of being out at the skate park and doing tricks in front of a small crowd. “If you set your mind to something you can do it,” he says on the Good VR Podcast. “One thing that people are afraid of is failing. And with skateboarding or roller skating, part of the sport is you need to fall to progress. What matters is getting back up and trying again…. You just gotta keep progressing. People are scared of dancing because you might look dumb. Everyone’s gonna look dumb, you’re just starting out. It took me forever to make myself look cool in my videos.” He’s found an avatar he feels at home inside and he works with collaborators to add roller skates to the feet. He moved everything he could out of the office to avoid collisions and wears battery packs to go the distance. His longest session in VR lasted around eight hours. “If I’m in a lobby and I have below 20 FPS, I cannot skate because I’m moving too much,” he says. “I think the most I get is 40-50.” You can donate any amount via Stripe to support the work of 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

  8. Aug 28

    Tens Of Thousands Use Meta Glasses For Vision Assistance, With Be My Eyes Founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg

    Meta finds itself in its latest media firestorm with reports of people harassing others while capturing videos with AI glasses. In response, Meta says it’ll effectively de-platform its own hardware product from people tampering with the device to remove the white recording notification light. Reportedly, the company sent out cease-and-desist letters to groups offering that modification as a service. The founder of Be My Eyes, Hans Jørgen Wiberg, expresses both anger and sadness about people using the glasses this way because he’s a member of a group with a very different use for Meta’s glasses. Tens of thousands of people who are blind or have low vision use the Meta glasses to make video calls to sighted volunteers around the world. The volunteers look through the camera on the glasses and answer questions about what they see. “Even my wife said, don’t wear those glasses if you don’t use them. And I was like, ‘Okay.’ Two weeks ago I would never think about not wearing them,” Wiberg said. “Now I put them in my pocket and then when I need them, I take them out and put them on…I should not have to do that. That is simply wrong.” I connected with Wiberg in Denmark using the podcasting platform Riverside to record a conversation about Be My Eyes. I recommend pairing this conversation with the recent one talking with CNET gadget expert Scott Stein in which he advised not accusing strangers of being perverts for simply wearing the glasses. The two conversations make for a deep dive into the way social norms are being changed by Meta’s glasses. I personally stopped wearing Meta glasses in public due to their ability to make others uncomfortable. During the conversation with Wiberg I shared the fact that, when I did wear them, I very quickly started practicing a new bit of social etiquette by placing them on the top of my head when entering a public restroom. Wiberg suggests similar etiquette would apply to blind people facing the need for a public restroom. Simply asking someone there for assistance or feeling the way around the room should be the standard, he says. The example highlights a difficult reality about computerized glasses. There’s a future where a locally running AI assistant can successfully answer the request “help me find the restroom” with zero Internet access. In such a scenario would a white light be needed at all when locally analyzing what’s seen by the glasses’ sensors against the device’s training, successfully directing a person step by step to a urinal or toilet without the Internet? Such an automated use would be very similar to the simple sensors already present in the bathroom for identifying when someone puts their hands under a faucet or automatically flushing a toilet when they leave the stall. What I’m highlighting here is one of the reasons I lost interest in Meta’s glasses. Meta changed the entire product category from being centered on the cameras to being centered on artificial intelligence. Instead of personally taking photos and videos of my walks through Central Park, I had the feeling of capturing imagery to train Meta’s AI. Once AI is trained properly, there may be a future where these kinds of camera glasses don’t allow users to capture videos and photos at all to avoid any misuse by individuals, while simultaneously allowing uses like the path to the bathroom provided through offline automation. In this hypothetical future, when automation takes the place of an interaction between two people grounded in empathy, what do humans lose? “I have never done anything wrong and I have no intentions of doing something wrong. Of course, also blind people can do stupid stuff,” Wiberg says. “That’s not what I’m saying. But at least we have a very good reason to use those glasses to understand our surroundings and we should never think twice about putting those glasses on. But I totally understand why people don’t want to be approached by people who maybe don’t even know what a white cane is, or anything like that, and just see the glasses and say, hey, ‘what are you doing?’” 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

    Tens Of Thousands Use Meta Glasses For Vision Assistance, With Be My Eyes Founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg
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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
    60
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ian Hamilton
  • Show Website
    Good VR Podcast

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