XREAL's Two Eyewear Types: 'Glasses With Apps Versus Glasses That Connect To Your Device That Has Apps'

10 Questions For Ian Hamilton & Good Virtual Reality

Welcome to Good Virtual Reality and I’m so glad you’re here. My name is Ian Hamilton. I’m the owner of this website, goodvirtualreality.com, and I’m a journalist. My work here is driven by my human curiosity as well as the direct connections I make to people out there who believe in what they do with their whole heart. Some weeks ago a subscriber sent me the following message using the chat features of Substack: “You’ve interviewed so many developers, builders, journalists, and people working inside XR, but I realized I have not heard your own VR story in the same full way. As someone who loves VR, XR, and the whole emerging medium, I would love to hear an episode where the community gets to interview you.” What followed from my reader Christopher were 10 extremely engaging questions I’ve had on the back-burner of my brain: * What was the first VR experience that made you realize this medium was not just another gaming peripheral, but something larger? * When you first became a VR journalist, what did you think VR was going to become — and how has reality surprised you? * What was the biggest story you covered at UploadVR that changed how you understood the industry? * What is one VR demo, headset reveal, developer interview, or convention moment that still lives in your memory because it felt like seeing the future early? * What did working on VR Download teach you about explaining VR to people who are not inside the industry? * Do you have any funny or human behind-the-scenes stories from VR Download — technical disasters, awkward live moments, accidental comedy, spilled drinks, broken headsets, anything listeners never got to hear? * What are some of your favorite positive memories of working with David Heaney or the UploadVR team during the best years of the show? * What is something people misunderstand about VR journalism from the outside? * What technology, company, headset, game, or developer did you initially underestimate — and later realize was much more important than you thought? * After everything you’ve seen, what do you now believe “good virtual reality” actually means? I’ve answered these questions, plus one bonus question, over a podcast lasting 1 hour and 10 minutes. If you enjoy this podcast and have more questions that have been sparked by my answers, send me an email to editor@goodvirtualreality.com, and I’ll address them in a future episode. Please consider becoming a subscriber on Substack to support my work directly and receive most podcast episodes before everyone else. You can also simply donate any amount via Stripe to support my work here at Good Virtual Reality. https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800 [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

XREAL's Two Eyewear Types: 'Glasses With Apps Versus Glasses That Connect To Your Device That Has Apps'

At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I tried the XREAL Aura glasses running Android XR. The device brings into focus Google’s ambitions to power two completely different architectures for spatial computing eyewear using the same operating system. The two approaches are: * VR headsets like Samsung Galaxy XR with wide field of view optics featuring opaque displays passing AR through from the external cameras. * AR glasses like XREAL Aura with smaller field of view for directly optical see through and adjustable lenses that can darken for more immersive VR-like moments. One of the top priorities for my time at AWE was identifying how VR-like Aura actually is and what the path might look like ahead for XREAL as it continues iterating quickly. I only used Aura for a few minutes and they are still months away from release. Aura features a split architecture which puts processing in a phone-like puck you wear on your side that can also take in a display and power from other devices. XREAL is shipping a lot in the optical see-through (OST) category, including a tier of lower-cost devices not running Android XR. “We have a pretty robust roadmap that goes across a lot of things…I expect to use Android XR for future devices as well…we’re gonna keep going down the wearable display path, and we’ll also keep going down the spatial computing path,” XREAL General Manager of North America Ralph Jodice says on the Good VR Podcast. “The easier way to think of it is glasses with apps versus glasses that connect to your device that has apps.” I enjoyed darkening the opacity of the display and seeing my hands reskinned for Demeo, for example, but I also didn’t spend enough time with Aura or interact with enough content to say anything definitive here. Still, I learned a lot from the experience and the conversation with Jodice helps frame how XREAL’s strategy positions the company. “I don’t think people will stop buying TVs or stop buying laptops and start only buying AR glasses,” Jodice says. “But I do believe they will reach for their AR glasses when that other screen is not available.” Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Alvin Wang Graylin On HTC Competing With Meta

At Augmented World Expo in Long Beach I met with Alvin Wang Graylin [https://substack.com/@awgraylin] for an in-depth discussion looking back at the last decade of attempts to create a mass market for consumer VR headsets. He left HTC in 2025 after joining the organization in 2016, a few months before the launch of the PC-based Vive headset powered by Valve’s SteamVR technology. That means he had a front row seat to the effect of Meta’s competitive strategies, from funding VR developers to acquiring them to undercutting HTC’s consumer headsets on price. “These are things that are just not healthy for the industry, and nobody was really making money,” Graylin said. If the VR market suffers from a “chicken and egg” problem in that consumers won’t buy headsets because developers won’t make content and developers won’t make content because there are no consumers to buy them, then Graylin’s perspective suggests Meta’s aggressive approach over this decade made it practically impossible for anyone else to help grow the ecosystem that would allow chickens and eggs to flourish. “ I think everything about our product was better at the time,” he said of the HTC Vive. “We just didn't have the budgets there. They really underpriced us, that was their kind of key competitive advantage is that they were essentially losing money, and they were willing to lose a lot of money per device to sell. We were probably twice their price, we were still matching or in some cases selling more than they were into markets, and particularly for B2B markets. So after I think about a year, we started to ship more B2B because they started to price down lower than our cost.” Our discussion covered the space between headsets and glasses as well as the differing benefits of see-through and opaque optics. I contend VR headsets slimming down into glasses sizes with lighter weights will help them replace laptops and desktops while progressively accessing larger markets with the added benefits of immersive content. Graylin, meanwhile, praises the architectural benefit of see-through optics allowing glasses to function as prescription eyewear if they run out of power. We spoke for around 48 minutes by the pool at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach recorded on my iPhone. I passed the audio through Adobe Podcasts and edited it down in Descript to just over 30 minutes. This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Mark Drummond From Encounter Dinosaurs In Apple Vision Pro To Pixi Garden on iPhone

A new free app called Pixi Garden [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixi-garden/id6550889582] available on iPhone brings eye contact and interaction to cat and robot characters sent through messages. The co-founder and CEO behind the project, Mark Drummond, sat for a conversation on the Good VR Podcast to talk about his path to develop these bite-size interactions after working on the impactful Encounter Dinosaurs experience on the Apple Vision Pro as well as Siri before that. “We created the character intelligence team and worked with a variety of Hollywood studios to do that,” Drummond said. “We worked with Disney and Marvel. We worked with Kevin Feige on the Marvel Universe, and we worked with John Favreau on a variety of things. The one that shipped there was the Encounter Dinosaurs app. So we learned a few, I think, interesting things in the character intelligence team working with these Hollywood studios. It’s pretty easy to do AR, but most AR is just sort of an animated idle position overlay on the real world. And one of the things that we learned is that if IP characters’ backstories come to life in such a way that the characters pay attention, then things feel present. It feels present. So it needs to react to sounds as you think would be appropriate, react to movement, the introduction of objects, the disappearance of objects. Like as a person, if there’s a cup on the table, and then you look away and you look back and the cup is gone. That empty table is really interesting to you because there was a cup there. But from a traditional sort of machine learning perspective, it’s just empty table. Why are you excited? Well, I’m excited because there was a cup that is no longer there. So that style of paying attention brings these characters to life, makes them feel present.” Our conversation covers the Encounter Dinosaurs project and why he’s decided to start with these short-form interactions on iPhone. We spoke for around 40 minutes on the recording platform Riverside edited down to just under 25 minutes. This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Grant Hinkson's Connectome Calms With Eye & Hand Tracking On Vision Pro Or Quest

My first time in Connectome I spent nearly an hour just calmly connecting the dots and making quiet discoveries to reveal hidden shapes in the space around me. Developer Grant Hinkson describes the project as “an immersive art experience” rather than a game and I hosted him on the Good VR Podcast to discuss the unusually meditative work. “I started with f… Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]