Episode
The Biggest Problem To Solve For Mass Market VR Is Colocating People & Media
- Podcast
- Good VR Podcast
- Published
- Apr 10, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3009
- Processing state
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Summary
VR can be extremely isolating. Developers toil away for days, weeks or months at their desks with little contact. Often, the VR software they develop doesn’t help. The experience they’re building can isolate a person in a universe occupied by exactly one person for dozens or even hundreds of hours. Sometimes this solitude can be part of the charm and lure of good VR. Half-Life: Alyx, for example, completes its transportation to City 17 by taking people there totally unbothered by anything or anyone else. More often than not, though, the headset needs to come off fully for a momentary interaction with someone in the physical world looking to ask a question or see how they’re doing. Only the Apple Vision Pro currently features system-wide people detection, for example, allowing the wearer to set the conditions when someone present in the same physical space can pop into a virtual environment. And still, this solution only solves half the problem. It brings people together but doesn’t give them a shared understanding of the digital environment. Why can’t a person point their iPhone or Android at someone in a headset and make a request to join a shared reality? “My ultimate vision of VR…is copresent, multiplayer, whatever you want to call it by default,” said Owlchemy Labs head Andrew Eiche in an interview about his game Dimensional Double Shift, which opens its next dimension next month . “It’s not a metaverse. I think that’s where we keep getting hung up is like you push [players] the wrong way. You push them into a product….no, the operating system is copresent. So I can join you, Ian, in the default space. And then you go, ‘Hey, let’s jump into Dimensional Double Shift.’ And you open Dimensional Double Shift and it knows that it’s on my headset and we go together into…