Good VR Podcast

VR can be extremely isolating. Developers toil away for days, weeks or months at their desks with little contact. Often, the VR software they develop doesn’t help. The experience they’re building can isolate a person in a universe occupied by exactly one person for dozens or even hundreds of hours. Sometimes this solitude can be part of the charm and lure of good VR. Half-Life: Alyx, for example,...

Kluge CEO Arturo Perez joined the Good VR Podcast from his home in Marina Del Rey, California for an in-depth conversation about everything from competition with Beat Saber and the coming addition of Dua Lipa to Synth Riders to layoffs and the overall reduced state of the current VR market. “When Beat Saber dropped out of PSVR 2, we released a song ‘We Are The Champions’ the same day,” Perez said....

In 2014 while she was still in college, artist Ashley Pinnick asked her mom to meet someone at a 7-Eleven to pick up an Oculus Rift DK2 for her from a Craigslist ad. As she hooked the headset up to her Mac, back before Oculus stopped supporting that platform, Pinnick quickly found her last year of college work shifting to realizing her art in VR. “I kind of ended up just falling into it out of cur...

JoyReign and JDun, aka Shika Duncan and Jeremy Duncan, each wore an Apple Vision Pro to record an episode of the Good VR podcast from their home in Louisiana. Across an hour-long conversation, the VR evangelists talked about how they met, their discovery of Horizon Worlds, their regular co-watching of movies in headsets and their belief that Apple is building to a more affordable product than the...

Gravity Sketch co-founder Oluwaseyi Sosanya joined the Good VR podcast from London for a 50-minute conversation covering their path into VR and spatial computing. We cover the founding story, investors, headcount, an overview of the product and come back to advice he has for others looking to develop and build in this space. “Stay patient and be practical,” Sosanya said. “Spatial computing is so e...

Thomas Van Bouwel is the solo developer behind Cubism and Laser Dance . I recommend each of his projects as some of the best of VR. Laser Dance is pure wish fulfillment in mixed reality, resizing itself to your physical environment and deploying a laser maze built to your dimensions. The project is still in early access while Cubism, first launched in 2020, is a kind of spatial toy that can sit in...

Avi Bar-Zeev worked on a lot of mixed reality over 35 years with projects that impacted Disney, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. For just over an hour in a recent podcast recording session, Bar-Zeev first walks through his storied work history and then weaves around the language of mixing realities as well as the privacy policies that keep him from interacting with companies like Meta. "I don...

Mark Schramm’s living room has an astonishing number of VR headsets on display and ready to use. Schramm is the director of engineering at Doug North Cook ’s Creature. Along his wall you call see his entire path in immersive media from his time in university before making the Quest port of SUPERHOT VR to developing the first-of-its-kind mixed reality game Starship Home for the Quest 3. Be sure to...

Golf+ is the provider of wish fulfillment in VR headsets for a large number of golfers that are “just looking to find ways to play more golf.” The app launched in 2020 exclusively on the Quest platform and, over the last six years, has built up to more than 50 paid downloadable courses and a subscription program to access all of them. This year, Golf+ expands to PC VR and the Steam Frame headset....

I dug into my archives and pulled out a couple audio files recorded on my iPhone carrying the date November 13, 2012 on the file names. That appears to be the date of my first full-length interview with Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and CEO of Oculus. A few weeks later my first major article about Oculus appeared on the front page of the business section of the Orange County Register in California...

Doug North Cook is the most important developer working in virtual reality today. In defense of my labeling, which drew critique from North Cook himself when I uttered my belief to him, let me walk you backward in time from the present day company he’s founded called Creature. Creature lists on its website partner studios including Thomas Van Bouwel ( Cubism and Laser Dance ), Funktronic Labs ( Th...