Sock Puppet Superstar Developer 'Just Following The Fun'

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]

Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza From Trombone Champ To FlatOut 4 In VR

The team at Flat2VR Studios ask themselves “why is this in VR?” When they are able to answer that question CEO Jasmine Uniza says they’ll often make a demo to show a prospective partner why their game should get the full Flat2VR treatment. “Make great games and have fucking fun,” Uniza says is Flat2VR’s motto. “You have to tell me why this deserves a spot in VR and why I should pick it over any other experiences.” She spoke about how Flat2VR started as a modding community and marketing effort to become a multi-faceted studio developing and publishing VR games over the course of about four years, with their most recent release FlatOut 4: Total Insanity carrying a mostly positive rating on Steam with support for racing wheels and pedals. She hints during the Good VR Podcast that more racing games are planned and they are already building games for VR that won’t release until 2028. We spoke for just under an hour on the Riverside recording platform and I cut the conversation to around 40 minutes for audio platforms and 27 minutes for video. 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]

PROJECT MIX VR Bartending Game On More Than 130,000 Steam Wishlists

In PROJECT MIX the player embodies a bartender making drinks for patrons in an “alternate-history 90s Hong Kong” and after their workday they come home to their apartment, to a cat that can smoke cigarettes, as part of a story that takes place over 12 days. The anime-inspired narrative adventure is made for mature audiences and scheduled for release on Steam in 2027. While many developers building for consumer VR markets are targeting kids on Quest headsets, PROJECT MIX [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2439770/PROJECT_MIX/] has become the most wishlisted game in PC VR by targeting adults instead. “There is strong sexual language, but any sexual content will be implied and not shown explicitly,” the mature content description for PROJECT MIX explains. “Expect lots of suggestive and risque fan service elements though. There is alcohol drinking and bartending in the game. There is also smoking, but that is optional.” New Zealand-based developer Yuewei Zhang at PROJECT MIX studio PLECTRUM SOFT joined the Good VR Podcast for a conversation about the effort. He shared that, like Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/guy-godin-good-vr-podcast], he hasn’t received a Steam Frame developer kit despite more than 130,000 people putting the VR-only game on their Steam wishlists.  “I'm just really drawn to the sort of the romance and the fantasy of the smokiness of going to, say, a late-night underground bar in, like, say, Hong Kong or Tokyo or Shanghai,” Zhang said. “In New Zealand, we're not exactly known for the city of great skylines and tall skyscrapers, but since I grew up in relatively more rural areas, my mind naturally romanticized the idea of these neon lights and these smoky underground bars, the metropolitan life. So I just wanted to put that all in a video game.” We talked for roughly 45 minutes about his inspirations and independent approach on the recording platform Riverside and I cut the conversation to 31 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]