Episode
Puzzling Places Developer Daniel Sproll On Cognitive Load, 3D Scanning & Steam Frame Comfort
- Podcast
- Good VR Podcast
- Published
- Jul 28, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1967
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Summary
One of VR’s unique and delightfully meditative experiences started as an error on the PC when a 3D scan got shuffled into pieces. Daniel Sproll joined the Good VR Podcast from Realities.io in Germany to discuss the development of Puzzling Places. The game released first on SideQuest and the creators slowly stacked up a passionate community who find a sense of quiet comfort in Puzzling Places as a kind of meditation piecing together 3D scans. They rebuilt the game in Unity for Vision Pro and, on Steam , the title now runs both in VR and on flat screens. That makes the work a holistic study of the benefits of immersion, with Realities.io working from the early days of 3D scanning scenes with photogrammetry to developing an innovative well-loved VR game and finally to porting that experience back to flat screens. “We did a classical engineering mistake,” Sproll said. “We were thinking a lot about, look, we can capture and we can bring it into VR and that has to be worth something — that’s just a cool thing to do. But it turns out a 3D capture is worth very little without a reason why people should look at it. We spent a lot of time finding what are reasons for people to look at this stuff, why would people want to have a 3D capture? What would they do with it?” Before becoming a VR developer, Sproll was a cognitive scientist and a large chunk of our discussion centers on the idea of “cognitive load” and how that relates to the various modes of play available between total focus and multitasking. With Valve’s Steam Frame due this summer to change up the market, Puzzling Places may be one of the few games playable both in VR and on flat screens with significant resources spent on interaction design for both modes. “It’s one of the most comfortable headsets I’ve ever worn,”…