AltspaceVR
Virtual reality social platform
AltspaceVR was a social Virtual reality (VR) platform founded in 2013 by Eric Romo and launched in May 2015. In 2017 it was acquired by Microsoft and became part of the Mixed Reality division (alongside notable products like HoloLens and HoloLens 2) within the Cloud and AI group. Some elements of the platform appear in Microsoft Mesh. The owner of SideQuest has bought the rights to AltSpace, and plans to relaunch the VR world in late 2026.
The platform largely consisted of user-generated spaces called "worlds", which could be visited by other users. Individuals could gather, talk, collaborate, and be co-present in small to large groups.
The platform was regularly home to a wide variety of live virtual events from VR church and LGBTQI+ meetups to large business conferences and magic shows.
In January 2023, Microsoft announced on the AltspaceVR Homepage that the service would be shutting down on March 10, 2023.
In July 2026, Shane Harris, the founder/CEO of SideQuest VR, made a Reddit post announcing that SideQuest had acquired the rights to the Altspace name, and that they will be releasing a "spiritual successor" of the app in the fall of 2026.
01Worlds
AltspaceVR was organised in spaces called "worlds", which could be found and accessed via a floating menu or via in-world "teleporters". Some large worlds, such as the "Campfire", were built and maintained by official developers as places for users to meet and interact. As of May 2022, AltVR removed all developer-maintained worlds.
Altspace's internal menus included a list of "featured" user-defined worlds and a real-time list of the most "popular" worlds, arranged by the number of users currently visiting each world. Other menus listed current and planned "events", which took place inside official or user-generated worlds.
In 2020 AltspaceVR hosted BRCvr, a Burning Man event.
02Supported hardware
AltspaceVR supported several VR headsets:
- SteamVR devices (HTC Vive, Valve Index...)
- Oculus Rift/Rift-S via Oculus Store
- Oculus Quest/Quest 2 (as a standalone app, or via Oculus Link)
- Windows Mixed Reality devices
- Samsung Gear VR (discontinued mid-2020)
- Oculus Go (discontinued 2020)
- Google Daydream (discontinued 2019)
The platform was available as a traditional desktop application for Mac and Windows, and had a non-VR Android app until 2019.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “AltspaceVR”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Altspace-VR.webm by Orangeboxes2, CC BY-SA 4.0
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