Voices of VR

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#1668: Snap Co-Founders Community Q&A about Specs 2026 Launch Plan Oct 26, 2025

Show notes

The snap co-founders of CEO Evan Spiegel and CTO Bobby Murphy typically have a community-driven Q&A after their Lensfest Keynote where they field over a dozen questions from Lensfest attendees. I'm including this in my coverage again this year as it's a really great set of questions about their consumer release of Specs AR glasses next year, some of their thinking about the role of AI at Snap, and reflections of their 10 years of working with AR lenses going back to the vomiting rainbows facial filter released in 2015. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1667: Kickoff of Snap Lensfest 2025 Coverage & SnapOS 2.0 Announcements Oct 26, 2025

Show notes

This interview with Spectacles Community Manager Jesse McCulloch kicks off my coverage of Snap's Developer Conference called Lensfest. Snap is gearing up for a consumer release of their Snap Specs AR glasses some time next year, and they've been busy frequently updating their underlying operating system and platform tools like Lens Studio. There were no new announcements or reveals about the details of the Snap Specs that have been shared yet, but I did cover the biggest announcements at Lensfest throughout this series and in this interview with McCulloch. I also had a chance to interview five different Snap employees exploring different aspects of their AR strategy, and I also interviewed some AR developers in from the Snap ecosystem. Snap brought me down to also cover the 25-hour Lensathon, and I had a chance to be a judge for the 10 different Spectacles-based hackathon projects, and so I'll be featuring the top 3 finalists in the series. I also interviewed the AR game developers from DB Creations, as well as the latest AI assistant, guided tour demo from Niantic Spatial. Here is a list of the 11 episodes and nearly 7 hours of coverage from Snap's Lensfest: #1667: Kickoff of Snap Lensfest 2025 Coverage & SnapOS 2.0 Announcements #1668: Snap Co-Founders Community Q&A about Specs 2026 Launch Plan #1669: Snap's Resh Sidhu on the Future of AR Commerce & Developer-Centered Innovation #1670: Snapchat's Embodied Gaming Innovations with AR Developer Relations Head #1671: Reflecting on Snap's AR Platform & Developer Tools Past and Future with Terek Judi #1672: Niantic Spatial's Project Jade Demo Shows Latest Location-Aware, AI Tour Guide Innovations #1673: Snap Lensfest Announcement Reflections from AR Gaming Studio DB Creations #1674: 3rd Place Spectacles Lensathon Team: Fireside Tales Collaborative Storytelling with GenAI #1675: 2nd Place Spectacles Lensathon Team: CartDB Barcode-Scanning Nutrition App #1676: 1st Place Spectacles Lensathon Team: Decisionator Object-Detection AI Decision-Maker #1677: Snap's AR Developer Relations Plan for 2026 Specs Consumer Launch with Joe Darko This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1666: VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor on Exploring Various UGC Monetization Strategies Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with VRChat co-founder and CEO Graham Gaylor at Meta Connect 2025 where we talk about the various different monetization strategies that VRChat has been exploring with their user-generated content platform. VRChat announced layoffs for 30% of their employees back on June 12, 2024, and so this is the first time I've had a chance to interview any of the VRChat executives since then. I used to have a pretty consistent streak of interviewing either VRChat leaders or employees at various VR conferences running from 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, but after the pandemic they were not giving as many public interviews. I did however recently cover the VRChat Avatar Marketplace as well as a conversation with VRChat's new Trust and Safety lead Jun Young Ro about his plans to overhaul and modernize VRChat's Trust and Safety processes, especially as users like Harry X were pointing out some gaps in their moderation processes. I had a chance to chat with Gaylor about some of the early decisions in VRChat for making custom avatars easily uploadable since version 0.3.5 on March 16, 2014 when co-founder Jesse Joudrey made his first public contributions to the project. Joudrey elaborated on his vision of what he considered to be "one of the corner stones of virtual reality and any cyberpunk offshoot... Customization. I don't want any limit on who or what I can be in virtual reality." I had dug up these dates and posts in the write up for episode #1408 where I went down a deep rabbit hole of tracing down some of the origin story for VRChat. Gaylor had actually passed along some early emails and documentation of the early days of VRChat for that write-up. The decision to make avatars completely customizable has been part of the magic and success of VRChat. But centralized and controlled identity has traditionally been one of the core pathways for monetization. In a conversation with VRChat community members after the June 2024 layoffs, qDot told me, "You cannot put the asset genie back in the bottle for VRChat. They can't just come up with an asset system that works this sort of centrally-regulated way now. Everyone is used to throwing these assets around, selling them on Gumroad, selling them on Booth." So I had a chance to talk with Gaylor about his paradox of customizable identity being both the secret sauce of VRChat, but also the clearest traditional path for monetization. You can see more context in the rough transcript below. This also happens to wrap up my coverage of Meta Connect 2025, and here's a recap of the different stories and coverage if you'd like to dig into more details of other things that were announced this year. #1652: Kick-off of Meta Connect Coverage with Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Insights from Norm Chan #1653: XR Analyst Anshel Sag on Meta's AI Glasses Strategy #1654: CNET's Scott Stein's Reflections on Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Implications #1655: Meta Horizon Studio News and Virtual Fashion with Paige Dansinger #1656: Kiira Benz Part 1: "Runnin'" Large-Scale Volumetric Music Video (2019) #1657: Kiira Benz Part 2: "Finding Pandora X" Bringing Immersive Theatre to VRChat (2020) #1658: Kiira Benz Part 3: Immersive Storytelling Career Retrospective (2025) #1659: VR Gaming Career Retrospective of Chicken Waffle's Finn Staber #1660: Enabling JavaScript-Based Native App XR Pipelines with NativeScript, React Native, and Node API with Matt Hargett #1661: State of VR Gaming with Jasmine Uniza's Impact Realities and Flat2VR Studios #1662: Meta Connect Highlights & Meta Horizon News with JDun and JoyReign #1663: ShapesXR Updates & Neural Band Design Implications of Transforming Your Hand into a Mouse #1664: Resolution Games CEO on Apple Vision Pro Launch + Gaze & Pinch HCI Mechanic in Game Room (2024) #1665: Resolution Games' "Battlemarked" Blends Mixed Reality Social Features with Demeo and D&D Gameplay #1666: VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor on Exploring Various UGC Monetization Strategies This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1665: Resolution Games’ “Battlemarked” Blends Mixed Reality Social Features with Demeo and D&D Gameplay Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with Gustav Stenmark at Meta Connect 2025 talking about their latest game Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, which enables some pretty interested co-located mixed reality social features, but also enables individual players to have their own mixed reality or VR POV. You can cee more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1664: Resolution Games CEO on Apple Vision Pro Launch + Gaze & Pinch HCI Mechanic in “Game Room” (2024) Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with Resolution Games CEO Tommy Palm soon after the Apple Vision Pro launch last year where we talk the in the Game Room game commissioned by Apple as well as the exploration of the relatively new gaze and pinch mechanic that's enabled with the eye-tracking of the Apple Vision Pro. After seeing the Neural Band at Meta Connect, then I'm reminded about how ultimately the gaze and pinch mechanic is a lot more efficient and more optimized for quickly selecting items in a fully volumetric context. Meta's Neural Band announced at Meta Connect in the context of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses is only within a 2D context in a head-lock HUD display screen, and so operating the Neural Band feels a lot like what it feels like to navigate TV menus with a TV controller, but rather than a controller, then your thumb and side of your index finger are being transformed into a two-axis D-pad. Again, the ultimate form factor is likely going to come back to gaze and pinch, but that will require shipping with eye tracking. And so this unpublished conversation with Tommy Palm takes on a new context as we reflect upon the latest HCI innovations that were announced at Meta Connect and where the ultimate form factor may be headed. Resolution Games also has quite a history of launching games on newly XR devices, and so this conversation with Palm is also within that spirit, and we'll be diving into Battlemarked within the next conversation You can also see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1663: ShapesXR Updates & Neural Band Design Implications of Transforming Your Hand into a Mouse Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with Michael Markman at Meta Connect 2025 talking about all of the latest updates to the VR design and prototyping tool of ShapesXR, and then we start to dive into some of his hot takes after getting a chance to try out the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and associated Neural Band. He sees that the neural band is essentially transforming your hand into a mouse that is providing a simplified navigation system (probably closer to a D-pad on a TV remote), but the index-finger-to-thumb serves as a functional left click and middle-finger-to-thumb serves as a functional right click, which has been enough to build the foundation of most modern HCI for computer software for the last 57 years since The Mother of All Demos debuted the mouse in 1968. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1662: Meta Connect Highlights & Meta Horizon News with JDun and JoyReign Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with JoyReign and JDun talking about all of the latest announcements from Meta Connect 2025 focusing a lot on the biggest news from Meta Horizon including their new Studio and Engine. We also talk a bit about the other VR demos that were being shown at Meta Connect, and what they're the most excited about coming out of Meta Connect 2025. JoyReign also talks about developing the VR game Crystal Frenzy within Horizon Worlds, and which parts of GenAI she found to be the most helpful. They also won the Amplifier Award at the Meta Horizon Creator Summit that was being held ahead of Connect. We also chat a bit about how Meta was also promoting different mobile phone games on their Horizon platform including Super Strike, Battle Kin, Shovel Up, Smash Golf early access, and Bumble Dudes. You can also see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1661: State of VR Gaming with Jasmine Uniza’s Impact Realities and Flat2VR Studios Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with Jasmine Uniza at Meta Connect 2025 where we talk about her journey from being a robotics engineer for the Mars Rover to doing a career pivot into the VR games industry with the founding of Impact Reality marketing firm for games as well as Flat2VR Studios that is porting popular 2D games into VR. We also reflect upon the current state of VR gaming with Meta and their store curation strategies and emphasis on free-to-play games, while focusing on premium VR games. You can see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1660: Enabling JavaScript-Based Native App XR Pipelines with NativeScript, React Native, and Node API with Matt Hargett Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with Rebecker Specialties' founder Matt Hargett at Meta Connect 2025 about alternative open source and open standards, JavaScript-based pipelines for developing XR applications that he's been working on including React Native for VisionOS, as well as working with NativeScript for VisionOS, and also working to bringing Node API support for React Native. Also be sure to check out his git visualizer Factotum, which is an app that is using some of these alternative production pipelines. Hargett also mentions a couple of recent React Universe Conf talks covering this work including Hermes + Node API: A Match Made in Heaven and Bringing Node-API to React Native. You can also see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

#1659: VR Gaming Career Retrospective of Chicken Waffle’s Finn Staber Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

I did an interview with Finn Staber at Meta Connect 2025 reflecting about on his journey into VR from co-founding The Wave VR to then forming Chicken Waffle to developing the games of Baby Hands, Cowbots and Aliens, Shadow of Valhalla, Blazer League, and MarsXR. We also reflect on the current state of VR gaming with Meta, and some of the feedback he's been providing to them from the perspective of an independent, third-party game developer. You can see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

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