Rest in Virtual Peace, AltspaceVR: 2013 - 2023

I love VR. I’ve loved it for years, and I am excited to see what it still has to offer in the years and decades to come as an immersive, interactive digital medium. However, VR is still undergoing growing pains, and an occasional loss is inevitable. The latest casualty: AltspaceVR, one of the earliest social VR platforms, which is scheduled to close on March 10th of this year.

Odds are that many of you who see this post will have no idea what AltspaceVR is. With Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s Quest standalone VR headsets grabbing all the attention of mainstream media, platforms such as AltspaceVR inevitably fly under the radar and into obscurity. Then again, getting shut down by Microsoft may be the most press coverage AltspaceVR has ever gotten, even though it has already achieved in VR what Zuckerberg has been promising for his Meta VR platform but has yet to deliver. 

A Star Trek fan group meeting in AltspaceVR.

AltspaceVR started in 2013, making it one of the oldest social VR platforms to date. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2017 and has been used to host a variety of groups, events and user-created worlds. I didn’t start using AltspaceVR until 2019, when I got my first VR headset: the Oculus Go. The Oculus Go was the predecessor of Quest and even though it lacked six degrees of freedom (6DoF), it still allowed users to access AltspaceVR and participate in its activities. Looking back, this was quite an achievement for such a limited standalone VR headset and it should have been recognized as such; perhaps if it did, the subsequent mistakes Zuckerberg would go on to make with VR could have been avoided.

In my experience, AltspaceVR has been easy to use and has attracted a diverse array of users and interests. Users could create and upload their own content, allowing for the addition of many new environments within the platform for others to explore. Two groups that I follow--Educators in VR and the Virtual World Society--made AltspaceVR their virtual home for many years. Looking back, AltspaceVR was the ideal social platform for those who found platforms like VRChat to be too much of a niche community but also found Rec Room to be too oriented towards younger users.

One of the AltspaceVR worlds with near photorealistic models.

Yet for as much as AltspaceVR did right, it also did plenty of things wrong. I’ve heard complaints from other users about how the platform would frequently undergo changes that would result in the sudden disappearance of content they created. In my case, I was locked out of my account shortly after I got a tethered headset for my PC; I never found out why my account was locked, and the technical support staff that worked for AltspaceVR at the time provided no help to me to resolve the situation. Even though I was able to get back on the platform last year, I have heard from other former users that they experienced similar lockouts as well. Even after I got back on to AltspaceVR last year, I was still experiencing glitches that kept me from enjoying much of what the platform had to offer.

We may never know what specifically what led to the closing of AltspaceVR. I heard from someone who is close to the AltspaceVR team is that there are too many coding problems within the platform's foundation that it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up to adhere to current privacy and security standards. It also doesn't help that Microsoft's interest in VR has always been tepid; in fact, its closing of AltspaceVR coincides with the layoff of its team for Windows Mixed Reality (WMR), Microsoft’s platform for VR content. 

I'm sure many VR fans will remember AltspaceVR for what it accomplished, and I hope that both current and future social VR platforms will learn from AltspaceVR's mistakes. There are plenty of videos on YouTube about--and inside--the AltspaceVR platform (including one of a presentation I gave during a conference in 2020), so you can even see what this platform did even though it will cease to be in a few weeks.