Our Kickstarter was funded! Continue supporting the Virtual Worlds Museum™ through our Sponsor Page.
A community comes home.
AltspaceVR is back. One of social VR's best loved gathering places, shut down on March 10, 2023, returns in a brand new build from SideQuest VR, the team led by CEO Shane Harris. Their Early Access launch was Friday, October 23, 2026.
The new AltspaceVR is a social platform for virtual reality, a place where people meet inside shared 3D spaces instead of scrolling past each other. Put on a headset or open it on a screen, and you are in a room with other people: voices around you, avatars turning to look when you speak. Explore worlds built by the community, join groups with their own feeds, threads and calendars, and follow a living schedule of events, from comedy sets and open mics to meditation circles, talks, screenings and dance floors that run till morning.
AltspaceVR was founded in 2013 and first opened to the public in 2015. Microsoft acquired it in 2017 and ran it for more than five years before shutting it down on March 10, 2023, a loss its community felt deeply. The Virtual Worlds Museum documented AltspaceVR in our Sunset Worlds exhibit, because for years it looked like another home that was gone for good.
In July 2026, Shane Harris of SideQuest acquired the rights to the Altspace name and announced it would bring the platform back as a spiritual successor, modeled on the 2016 to 2017 era that so many people remember. The team includes former Altspace staff and longtime community members, and the original robot avatars have been modernized with their original concept designer, alongside support for custom avatars. A community soft launch began on October 20, 2026, ahead of the public Early Access launch.
The core experience is live at launch: shared multiplayer worlds, avatars, spatial voice chat and community events, playable in VR and in desktop mode, with no headset required on desktop and Android. During Early Access, which the team estimates at roughly 6 to 12 months, the systems around that core keep growing: friends and messaging, groups, world and event discovery, progression, moderation and safety tools, and more tools for world builders and event hosts. AltspaceVR is free to play, and SideQuest says it currently plans to keep it free after Early Access ends.
AltspaceVR runs on Meta Quest, Pico, Android and Windows PC, including compatible SteamVR and OpenXR headsets.
Meta Quest: https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/altspacevr/2432735420542711/
Steam (free to play, Early Access): https://store.steampowered.com/app/5289710/AltspaceVR/
Official site and Windows beta download: https://altvr.app/download
Creator SDK and docs for world builders: https://altvr.app/download/creator-sdk
World building is open to the community through a creator SDK for Unity (Unity 6000.3.21f1). Builders create in Unity, upload with the Altspace Builder, and share their worlds on the platform's Everything page, with support from the team and community on Discord.
The Museum has a home in the new AltspaceVR. Our hub world, called "museum," hosts our Open Source Exhibit, with kiosks for Hubs Foundation, OpenSimulator, Overte, Relm, BasisVR, the Virtual Worlds Museum and the Teleportal. Inside you will also find a portal to our Teleportal app on Meta Quest, so a visit that starts in AltspaceVR can keep travelling on to other virtual worlds. The Teleportal is free on the Meta Quest Store.
AltspaceVR's return is the story the Museum exists for: platforms may close, but communities fight to endure, and sometimes they come back. Come wander, learn and hang out with us there.
Thank you for visiting the Virtual Worlds Museum
AltspaceVR-Sunrise
page! If you’re the platform owner and would like us to make updates to this page, please reach out to: info[at}virtualworlds.museum. If you’re a world builder who wants to help us create a museum hub on this platform, we’d be happy to hear from you as well. We welcome feedback and/or help and look forward to hearing from you.