Show Notes
Sonya Haskins was Hasko7 to the Echo Arena community, a supportive figure who would help people however she could. These days she’s Head of Programming for the Augmented World Expo, helping organize its latest conference June 15-18 in Long Beach, California. She recently moved to the city after spending much of her life in the southern United States. From purchasing an Oculus Rift in 2017 after a demo at Best Buy to now, she’s transformed almost everything about her life. She sat for just over an hour for the Good VR Podcast with me using the Riverside podcasting platform. I edited down our talk to just around 52 minutes covering her journey over this time. When Meta killed Echo Arena in 2023, its closure struck a blow to her identity, with her name attached to a place that formed the foundation of a new persona she found in virtual reality. “When the game started to shut down,” Haskins says on the Good VR Podcast. “I actually was thinking wow, now who am I? Because nobody ever calls me Sonya. I’m divorced now. All my friends are gamers who call me Hasko7.” In her family it is tradition to purchase one’s own headstone so that loved ones aren’t burdened with the task. She shares over our conversation that she recently bought hers and, when people pass by her stone in the ground one day, they’ll see her name, the dates marking her lifetime, as well as the disk of Echo Arena. “Echo Arena was a life-changing experience for me,” she says. “I began to meet people outside of my traditional social circle and society that I was used to and met people from around the world, became friends with them, talked with them. It became a community where you would put a headset on and suddenly you’re in this immersive world with a bunch of other robots and you could play these games and be competitive, but it was so much more than that and, to me, Echo Arena is a great example of the beauty of immersive reality, which is you can be somewhere else and do something else and try on different personalities or different looks and different attitudes and see what you want to be in life or what you want to explore, and so that’s what that game was to me - it really gave me the freedom and the permission and the opportunity to be able to say you know is it okay to do something or be something other than a stay-at-home mom.” The transcript for this podcast is auto-generated.
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I finally became a paid subscriber to The Verge after reading a thoughtful piece titled “Can VR glasses save VR?” based on Sean Hollister’s time with the Meta VR Glasses at the recent developer conference. Here’s the bit that pushed me over the edge as Hollister breaks down the difference between transparent AR optics and VR optics with passthrough video: Virtual objects can seem ghostly unless you activate electrochromic lenses, which turn the clear lenses dark at the push of a button, blocking your view of the world. Even then, you can see games, movies, and virtual desktops far better in a VR headset, where virtual light and real light don’t have to compete. You see the real world through what’s called “passthrough vision” — a live camera feed — with virtual objects realistically appearing at the correct depth and blocking real-life objects behind them. This breakdown highlights a conclusion I’ve held closely for a long time about the race to make computerized eyewear. Fundamentally, optics that are transparent show the physical world in higher fidelity at the cost of virtual content appearing ghostly. Meanwhile, opaque optics for virtual reality experiences deliver higher fidelity content at the cost of the physical world appearing dramatically lower fidelity than what your eyes can see directly, using what Hollister calls “passthrough vision”. “I would not say it was always a given that it would move faster, it would get better quickly enough, more quickly, than transparent optics would get better,” Hollister said on the Good VR Podcast. This simple sentence outlines why Magic Leap was able to raise billions for its AR headsets and Microsoft shipped multiple HoloLens generations before that optical pathway faltered. Ultimately, Snap’s Specs at $2200 and Meta VR Glasses at $1300 emerge as the latest examples of these opposing optical paths, with the XREAL Aura powered by Android XR emerging as an intriguing in-between solution. I believe the micro‑OLED panels found in the Meta VR Glasses and Apple Vision Pro put VR on the path to benefitting from economies of scale that will, over time, enable VR to ship with less weight on the head, lower prices, and with the visual quality necessary to jump past our 4K televisions. “3D movies have been a revelation for me on headsets,” Hollister said on the podcast. “Disney’s Moana where…you’re in a normal 2D theater or watching it on your big screen OLED TV, the colors are beautiful. The waters part to let baby Moana scoop up the heart of Te Fiti on the beach. The ocean has entrusted her with this precious jewel that she needs to restore. And so the water scoops out of the way and it’s like there’s this wall of water surrounding her. And that’s really cool, very cool CG. And then you see the same scene in 3D and you’re like, this is not a wall of water. This is a block of water. This is a three-dimensional prism made of water. It is the ocean with life swimming inside of it. And you can see the life swimming…and the depth of that. And this is a kids’ movie that I was really tired of my kids making me watch over and over again. And I’m experiencing it again like I’m seeing it for the first time. And it is incredible.” I recorded a video version of this podcast with Sean Hollister which I’m publishing first to paid YouTube members. In the weeks since recording this episode, I’ve gotten my personal Recreation Room into camera-ready shape and am readying to produce more video content overall. My first paid member happens to also be the person who wrote for Good Virtual Reality about using Vision Pro as a sleep aid, so I’ve published the video version first for him and I encourage you to become a member on YouTube to see it early as well as to receive my upcoming video reports first. I’ve got audio-only chats with Voices of VR’s Kent Bye, Walkabout art director Don Carson, and more coming first in the days ahead to paid subscribers on Substack. As always, thank you for the support.
The Ferryman Collective and Virtual Worlds Company just won an Emmy for their production of Uncanny Alley: A New Day performed inside VRChat. The Good VR Podcast hosted the Ferryman Collective’s Deirdre V. Lyons and Stephen Butchko in the weeks before the awards ceremony and now I’ve spoken with Brendan A. Bradley, who performed as nine different characters in Uncanny Alley: A New Day. “When the metaverse became a company and not a community, that was fundamentally a problem. Because then I can’t go off and build my nerdy theater, and someone else can’t go off and build their business and their interest, and someone can’t start an architecture firm and someone else can’t start a library,” Bradley said on The Good VR Podcast. “Because we’re not building a community and a protocol for everyone to build on top of. We’re trying to limit a storefront of what then goes on the shelves and what doesn’t go on the shelves…that need to transact can often disrupt the techniques that make for best practices, especially in an emerging market and an emerging industry.” Bradley began making VR Theatre in 2020 with Jettison in Mozilla Hubs which was nominated for the Producer Guild of America’s Innovation Award alongside Tender Claws’ run of The Tempest in VR, Alex Coulombe at Agile Lens and the Ferryman Collective’s early work in VRChat. Overall, he’s focused on fostering an ongoing collaborative community of best practices for live performance in XR. “I think that it is always extremely exciting when outsiders value the work that we’re doing…ever. It has been very, very difficult to get people to understand the why of virtual reality. And so the award itself, I think, is a helpful marketing tool…My parents know what an Emmy is. They do not know what an Auggie is. They were very proud of me for both. But they can tell their friends about an Emmy. They couldn’t tell their friends about an Auggie.”
Three experts joined the Good VR Podcast to discuss their time demoing Meta VR Glasses. Be sure to read and watch Scott Stein at CNET and Norman Chan at Tested for their unique perspectives going hands-on with Meta VR Glasses drawing from decades of experience with consumer technology. The third guest, Alex Coulombe, runs Agile Lens where they work at the intersection of architecture and theatre. You can listen to a previous conversation with Coulombe discussing his focus, as well as episodes with Stein covering the conversation around “pervert glasses” and with Chan for a podcast recorded in a pair of Steam Frames. During the conversation, which is edited down to 1 hour and 12 minutes from a recording in Riverside, we talked about their favorite moments so far from their time in Meta VR Glasses with segments discussing the prospect of protective lens caps, holograms, live sports, games, stereoscopic video, the future of Apple Vision Pro, and the broader future of virtual reality. It’s been a busy couple of weeks with slimmer and lighter devices kicking off a new era for virtual reality. Typically I pull out a couple of notable quotes from my podcast for people who don’t have time to listen to the whole conversation but I feel like this is one you really need to listen to in its full context with the nuance each of these guests brings to the conversation from a limited time testing the hardware. For more from recent Good Virtual Reality: * Steam Frame Review * Meta VR Glasses Change The Conversation * Seniors Socialize In VRChat * Andrew Eiche On AI & The Path To 1 Billion In VR * Tipatat Chennavasin Invests In The Dream Of VR * Steam Frame Arcturus Vision Camera You can donate any amount via Stripe to support my work at Good Virtual Reality. Thank you to my paid Substack subscribers for supporting independent journalism. https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800
A private group operating mainly in VRChat sees hundreds of senior citizens socializing in virtual reality. I spoke with Linda Fisher, one of the organizers of Thrive Pavilion, for a discussion about how older adults are using social VR. We chatted about her experience from Bulletin Board Systems in the 1980s to Oculus Go in 2018 to AltSpace and Horizon Worlds and finally to VRChat today. “I bought five Oculus Gos. And my mother was like 90 at the time. She was in a nursing home. And I would bring the Go to her and put it on her head and we would go into Wander,” Fisher said. “I would take her to places we went to on vacation where she used to go with her company in Florida and to me that was the most mind-blowing thing about VR and the Go was Wander.” There’s a full schedule of activities listed on the Thrive website and anyone age 50+ can join for free. “There’s a lot of challenges for older adults in terms of being out in the world and doing stuff. And we have members who are caregivers for spouses that have immune system issues or are in a long-term care facility. They’re not getting out that much either,” Fisher explained. “But these people have a whole lifetime of experiences. A lot of them are into photography or pottery or crafting. And so our average user has something to offer the group, and the group has something to offer them — intelligent people who have had positions where they were in authority, they ran things, so now they organize. We have these event coordinators who are really spot on…and they can organize people and the average participant is somebody who just wants to have fun. We just get together and play like kids. Like we did when we were twelve. You don’t have to worry about you’re too fat or you’ve got diabetes or you’re in a wheelchair. You’re just enjoying yourself.” 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
Norman Chan, better known as Norm from Tested, is perhaps the most trusted expert with his videos covering modern consumer hardware. He’s also among a handful of journalists who believed in VR before Mark Zuckerberg showed up to buy Oculus. On Tuesday, we connected from my Steam Frame in New York to his in California using Riverside for a conversation about the latest in virtual reality. Norm has had the Steam Frame since late August while mine arrived on Friday and we’ve each dropped our initial thoughts out onto our respective audiences with Tested’s one-hour-plus video being the most thorough breakdown of the hardware available right now. As Valve readies to ship out the Frame to buyers and Arcturus Industries prepares to give it color passthrough, Meta is preparing what should be the announcement of its next-generation VR glasses. It’s a big time for technological change with some folks likely to experience whiplash as they realize VR is rising from the ashes of 2026 like a phoenix with more comfortable eyewear than ever before transporting people into simulated spaces. Listen now to the conversation with Norm as we cover his first VR experience, his favorite moment of presence, and the persistent belief in this medium. “It still feels like such a frontier,” he said. “But there’s so much technology and so much research and so much effort that’s put into even the experiences that we have that make what we see possible, and feel comfortable and natural. And we take some of that for granted … we’re just discovering these formats and … these trillion-dollar companies are still putting money into it.” September is turning into an incredibly busy month for VR & AR, but I’ve extended an open invitation to Norm as well as CNET’s Scott Stein for a conversation after Meta Connect as we try to digest everything that’s changing in technology. 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