Rec Room's End 'Surreal' To Shawn Whiting After 8 Years Building Community

Cirrus Selling Luxury Personal Aircraft Using Apple Vision Pro

An app called Let’s Go Fly is available free today as part of Cirrus Aircraft’s pitch to sell personal airplanes starting with Apple Vision Pro demos. The sales team at Cirrus now carry Vision Pro headsets to show potential buyers the short immersive film made with Blackmagic immersive cameras, with the project representing a new sales tool to help in selling luxury personal aircraft. Cirrus’ sales personnel are all pilots themselves and will fly to local airports to meet with potential buyers and show off planes, which can cost over a million dollars to buy [https://cirrusaircraft.com/price-list/]. Potential customers and aviation fans can now wear the headset to get a good look at the aircraft in 3D as it appears on the ground, in the cockpit and in flight from the outside with views captured by the immersive cameras. “If you can actually give somebody a real experience that creates an emotional impact, they start to understand…[this] is a thing that people do every single day,” said Cirrus Media Development Director Anthony Bottini on the Good VR Podcast. “We have this huge amount of people out there in the world that could afford to and do have the right mission to be able to do this, but they’ve just never been inspired. Or we’ve never contacted them the right way. And so where we’re coming from as an airplane sales organization, is we’re kind of limited to the airport, many times the first point of contact that a potential customer will have with our aircraft, or with our experience, is looking through a barbed wire fence on the edge of an airport, and that’s not a great way to start a conversation. And so what we’ve done here is we’ve deployed Vision Pros across our global sales team with this app that includes an immersive film and everything else. And we’re hoping what we’ve just given them is the ability to bring a strong, impactful, emotional flying experience outside of the airport for the first time ever.” Bottini spoke with me for about 20 minutes for the podcast about their early attempts to move people to have that emotional experience. I’ve tried the Let’s Go Fly [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lets-go-fly/id6757612693] app and the immersive film delivers an experience reminiscent of Soarin’ Over California while conveying the vibe of flying a Cirrus plane. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Devin Reimer Explores VR Input From Hands In Job Simulator To Voice In Stellar Cafe

AstroBeam’s Stellar Cafe [https://www.meta.com/experiences/stellar-cafe/23951924494476537/] is buried in Meta’s Quest ecosystem underneath the Horizon Worlds slop and a whole bunch of casual shooters, but it does something new and innovative with virtual reality that demands attention. It’s a game that can be played entirely with voice input. Across three days of interactions with more than half a dozen robots, you’ll find yourself feeling a lot of emotions because, as AstroBeam founder Devin Reimer says on the Good VR Podcast, “it triggers different parts of your brain, the speech part of things that we just haven’t had a chance to experience in interactive media before.” Reimer is one of the founders of Owlchemy Labs as well, so our discussion covers his path from being electrocuted by early wired Vive controllers to forgetting where he was physically located. He spent so much time developing a VR game in one spot before jumping on a plane and picking up the work elsewhere that he connected VR to the physical realm tethered to a specific locale. From putting work up on Oculus Share and adding hand tracking to Job Simulator to back at the cutting edge of development with voice input, Reimer’s conversation with me was just over an hour recorded and edited to 54 minutes with Riverside for the Good VR Podcast. “We built so many tools over like two plus years to actually allow you to make games with this because it is so difficult,” Reimer says. “We can’t be like, if the user says this, then do this….We can’t do that at all. So we have to think through what the character’s motivations are, what their goals are, all of that stuff, and then test a whole bunch. We learned all a whole bunch of stuff about how to build good characters….That very first character took us five months to build. It was like so hard to build. And then some of the ones in day three, I built one in four days because it was like, okay, I understand all the gotchas. We had built all the tech and stuff like that. And so with the next game, that we’re working on now, it’s like, okay, we have all that. Now, how do we bring this up and make this something bigger and more dynamic?” 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 Hail Mary Quest Adaptation Arrives Late 2026

The statuesque Weeping Angels of Doctor Who only move when they aren’t observed by a living being. When the episode Blink aired in 2007, the creatures became iconic lore and, roughly a decade later, three creators working with the HTC Vive pitched the BBC and Doctor Who rights holders with a demo they made centered on the terrifying creatures. They formed the studio Maze Theory to build the project and now, nearly another decade later, they’ve adapted the Thief series to VR after tackling adaptations of Peaky Blinders and Doctor Who to immersive headsets. Maze Theory’s next project is slated for release in 2026 for the Quest headset — an adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. Players are promised a personal connection with Rocky as they step into the virtual shoes of Ryland Grace across both mixed and virtual reality. “One of the things we’re trying to get across is that feeling of one-to-one interaction and being able to problem solve and companionship with Rocky,” said Chief Creative Officer Russ Harding during the Good VR Podcast. “We really want to build on that feeling that you get from the film, that companionship that sits between Ryland Grace and Rocky.” We talked for about an hour using Riverside and I cut down the conversation to 44 minutes as we covered the journey. Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Access podcast episodes first as a paid subscriber at goodvirtualreality.com [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/] or donate [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our reporting. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Rec Room's End 'Surreal' To Shawn Whiting After 8 Years Building Community

From June 1, 2026 a place that’s been the foundation of VR for many ceases to be. The end of Rec Room is still “surreal” for one of VR’s “OG” supporters and a core member of the team building the project for more than eight years. “There can’t be a world without Rec Room,” Shawn Whiting said on the Good VR Podcast. “It doesn’t seem real.” From his memories playing Dreadhalls to co-founding Convrge to the spike in Rec Room players seen through the COVID pandemic, Whiting talks through a journey more than a decade in the making. “The mood in the community is super somber, it’s sad,” Whiting said. “You can go to rec.net and export all your photos and, of course, you start looking through all of them and you’re like, ‘man this photo was taken in 2016 or 17’ and you’re looking at all the early games in the first rooms people were creating and it gets very nostalgic. It’s definitely an emotional time and people are starting up archiving projects so people are going in and taking a bunch of video and downloading the rooms and scanning the rooms and turning them into gaussian splat things that can be revisited.” The conversation between Whiting and I is one of the deepest I’ve been able to bring to the Good VR Podcast as he’s able to speak about his time at the company in a way founders and CEOs can’t. As an early member of the team managing the space between founders and a growing team of engineers and designers, his role saw him attempting to navigate decisions made at a level above his pay grade. Meaning that of all people I could speak with about the closure of Rec Room, Whiting worked there long enough and at a high enough level to both understand the community dynamics and forces affecting its failure, while also not operating in a position where he’d need to deflect or defend any of the chosen paths. Put another way, the discussion is about as candid as can possibly be. “Imagine you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off Rec Room, like some people were, and then you get the news that the thing’s shutting down,” Whiting said. “That’s like world shattering for you, right? You’re like, ‘f**k, I have to pack all my rooms up and now bring them over to VRChat or some other platform and try to establish myself there.’ It’s never going to be the same.” We spoke for 1 hour and 22 minutes on the podcasting platform Riverside and I edited the discussion down to 1 hour and 10 minutes. Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Access podcast episodes first as a paid subscriber at goodvirtualreality.com [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com] or donate [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our reporting. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sock Puppet Superstar Developer 'Just Following The Fun'

After his passion project unexpectedly went viral, developer Brandon Montell rushed to put together wishlist pages for Sock Puppet Superstar. You can wishlist the game now on Steam [https://store.steampowered.com/app/4454510/Sock_Puppet_Superstar/] and the Quest store [https://www.meta.com/experiences/sock-puppet-superstar/26292615863707429/]. “Anytime I do something that makes myself chuckle a little bit, I am just like, "Okay, that has to go in the game,” Montell says on the Good VR Podcast. “It was not a business market-driven decision to start working on it, and if it had been, I probably wouldn't have started working on it. But it was just starting as this passion project. I just felt really passionate about learning to make music in different ways in 3D space. So I was following the fun, and I feel like even though there might be some market headwind, I feel like it's no less fun to do stuff in VR and to tinker with it.” Montell’s episode of the podcast lasts around 26 minutes edited with Riverside and he shows through his replies exactly how Good VR is discovered. Someone with a bit of passion for an idea follows the fun and then shares it with the world. “This project is the fusion of three of my interests, because I've always loved coding, and that's why I majored in computer science. I also love graphics and animation, And I also have at times been a hobbyist animator. I collected instruments and would try to learn new instruments,” Montell said. “So in a lot of ways, a VR animated music game is the fusion of those three things, of being able to code it, do the art and animation, and figure out the music side of things. I think all of those things are definitely coalescing in this project…I'm having fun making it, so hopefully other people will have fun playing it.” Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]