What entices someone to visit a virtual museum rather than a physical one? ArtQuest VR might have an answer.

ArtQuest VR is a museum app allowing users to visit halls of paintings presented in true scale. Pulling from collections of famous museums around the world, visitors can enjoy exhibits arranged by artist, movement, or preset collection.

Inside The ArtQuest Museum

Opening ArtQuest VR directs you to your first gallery and presents a menu for exhibit navigation. The museum has options for choosing what art you want to see, gallery customization, and movement.

You can change the color and materials of the main wall, floor, and frames of the art you're looking at. Adjustments can be made to frame thickness with a drop-down menu for framing styles. There is also an option for a text-to-speech voice to narrate each painting's description and information with five different voices offered.

Moving around can either be done smoothly with the left joystick push or "blink" teleportation using the right joystick. The only turning option currently is snap turning. You can also use the menu to recalibrate your height so each painting is positioned at eye level.

Connecting With An Art Piece

I examined a painting by Wassily Kandinsky titled "Picture With A Black Arch".

The height offset feature in ArtQuest allows visitors to elevate their stance, as if borrowing a ladder to view paintings from a higher vantage. I floated upwards along the canvas and examined the painting. "Picture With A Black Arch" is awash with quick brushstrokes and geometric shapes. What made the artist paint this? What did the accompanying description of "musical counterpoint" mean here?

I pantomimed painting in the air along with the artist himself, tracing my hand over the dark outlines first. I'm a painter myself, so I recognized thick brushstrokes meant a pause, or applied pressure on the canvas. Thinner strokes meant a more delicate hand. Short, harsh, lines meant faster application, especially several in a group at once. These particular brushstrokes all lean left, indicating Kandinsky painted with his right hand. I traced the marks in the air while listening to my favorite orchestral music.

What I found were hand movements that seemed to dance in the air with purposeful direction. It felt just like someone directing an orchestra while painting on a canvas. Checking a Google cultural site later that listed more information about the artwork, I remain pretty convinced that's what Kandinsky was doing.

What Makes A Museum Attractive?

Virtual museums can be hard to build. You immediately discover the architecture surrounding the art relates to the pieces within. These digital spaces benefit from thoughtful immersive design. That means ambient sounds and building for how someone will walk around the space you've designed. How about a lobby to pause and reflect on what's been seen? Neither ambient audio nor lobby are present in ArtQuest VR, and I'd love to see these added.

The advantage of ArtQuest VR, though a bit lonely without other visitors and plain in presentation, is that I can go and see a near-entire collection of Van Gogh or Matisse, and I don't have to download gigabytes of information to do it nor compete with anyone else for the perfect spot. The app has the feel of a spatial website and a functioning museum with an exclusive collection of work.

ArtQuest VR's architecture is simple with a slight neoclassical style and descriptions that appear sourced from Wikipedia. The neoclassical architecture matches Wikipedia's site design, but it still feels like something is missing without the ambient sound. You simply pop into the gallery once the app is open. At least one art collection featured missing textures. As I browsed the contemporary art wing, a recent Banksy piece returned an ugly floating pink square to indicate the sourced artwork was no longer there. A picture featuring a mural by Shepard Fairey rotated itself in the wrong direction after sitting right-side-up for a few seconds.

I noted some additional bugs attempting to access my Quest menu and teleporting too far into the wall moving between galleries. The most notable issue, perhaps, is when paintings don't appear at high resolution until your face is practically centimeters from the artwork. Also, sometimes, there are duplicate paintings that appear in a gallery with no explanation why.

ArtQuest VR's Opportunity

It's a well-held myth that art is about perfection and not the journey it takes to get there. If this were true, museums wouldn't show the early work of artists they feature. Viewing famous paintings chronologically in an app such as ArtQuest VR can show how art is just as much about failure as it is about success. Each artist has their own story in how they reach that success, and it's up to each visitor to reflect on that and how they can adapt this lesson to their lives.

How can ArtQuest VR keep building on this? Every museum visitor is looking for something when they visit. Can VR bring them the very human effort of outdoing oneself through practice, improvement and sudden inspiration? That's not always present in the room with us in a physical museum. Seeing things from new angles is precisely VR's power, and there's an opportunity for an app like ArtQuest to help see more context around a specific piece of art each time someone walks through the front door.

Meta is rolling out the Conversation Focus feature to the Early Access program of its smart glasses in the US & Canada.

Announced at Connect 2025 back in September, Conversation Focus is an accessibility feature that amplifies the voice of the person in front of you.

It's the result of more than six years of research into “perceptual superpowers” at Meta. Unlike the hearing aid feature of devices like Apple's AirPods Pro 2, Meta's Conversation Focus is designed to be highly directional, amplifying only the voice directly in front of you.

Conversation Focus is available in Early Access on Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN glasses in the US and Canada.

To join the Early Access program, visit this URL in the US or Canada.

Once your glasses have the feature, you can activate it at any time using “Hey Meta, start conversation focus,” or (perhaps more practically) you can assign it as the long-press action for the touchpad on the side of the glasses.

My final moments at Valve headquarters for the reveal of Steam Frame last year were spent snapping the photos you see sprinkled throughout this article.

Right before that, overwhelmed by my desire to spend more time in Valve's upcoming headset, I uttered my final question to their engineers.

Can you explain to "an idiot who doesn't understand how the Internet works what the difference is between Flatpaks and APKs?"

"It's pretty much the same thing," a Valve representative answered. "Flatpak is for the Linux desktop. APK is for Android, but it's similar. It's a package that contains everything you need to run, that's gonna run in a sandbox that you can uninstall later. So it's an application package."

I quickly recapped for the Valve VR team my formative experience with Windows circa 1995 or 1996. I was granted access to a Windows PC my dad brought home from work and shown a games folder full of a bunch of fun and simple 2D games to play. I also was shown how to get into DOS, and what command to type to launch games like Doom. Soon I was looking up cheat codes online and I quickly filled up the storage inside the PC with more games to play. One day, to make more space, I simply dragged the game files to the recycle bin and hit empty.

I can't remember the exact sequence of events that followed but I remember a lot of crying accompanying intense fear of my father's return from work at 5 p.m. The actions of a 10-year-old adding and deleting games left our family PC, meant just for business and school, bootable only in safe mode.

"We have those two tiers on Steam Deck. People that want to go set the OS to read/write mode and change system files, they can do that. But for folks that are just distributing apps that are prepackaged between themselves – the flatpak distribution format, which is similar to the sandbox we run games in, is pretty safe. Like it guarantees that if you remove it, your system is in the same state [as] before you installed it. So it really aims to provide an initial way to engage with a device that is more like an appliance..."

Thirty years have passed since my first direct interactions with the Internet and personal computers. As a father now in the 2020s, I found myself over Christmas break explaining to my teenager the difference between a Mac and a Steam Deck, and why some games they love run on one system and not the other. Our conversation revealed a spectrum of openness in computing with different amounts of power for physics and graphics. Some developers haven't been paid to do the work to put a particular game on a specific system and make it run really well there.

I got that part across just fine. What I had trouble conveying is why openness and offline computing matter. I want an appliance that's both hard to break and easy to use, and I want a playground for everyone at least as big as the one I had to explore in 1995.

I believe Valve is trying to make that happen in SteamOS with Linux.

Openness & Offline Computing Make Playgrounds For Discovery

A kid's first computer is often an Internet-connected device like iPhone, iPad, Android, or a school-issued Chromebook, with all of them requiring an online account to operate. Caregivers prepare those accounts for the children and, over the last few years, platform companies providing online services have worked steadily to enable more stuff for kids and teens to do on these managed accounts.

After a very short time with the Steam Frame on my head I kicked off my shoes, reclined comfortably on a couch, and started searching the open Web using a browser in the Linux desktop with my voice. I have no idea what account was logged into the headset and it didn't matter – I was doing whatever I wanted inside SteamOS and Linux.

I didn't have time to try it at their offices, but the moment Valve sends out review units I'm going to click play on a great number of games in Steam loaded up on a 2 terabyte microSD card to see how they run.

As I create a mental picture of how much space I have to play inside Steam Frame in standalone, and before I connect the headset to another PC for what Valve itself describes as a streaming-first device, I'm going to open the Linux desktop and see what mischief I can manage. I'm looking to install apps like VLC for watching videos and Discord for chatting with friends, RetroArch for playing classic games, and Spotify for streaming music. That's a lot I expect to find right out of the box in Flathub, described as the "Linux App Store".

The key takeaway here is that I expect to install more stuff to the Steam Frame headset using Linux directly on day one than I did in four days with Android XR. And I expect to be able to install a lot more to the headset overall than I have been able to in years of ownership of Vision Pro or Quest. Am I going to install my own operating system? Probably not. But am I going to personally screw up my installation of Linux so bad the system is going to need to restore me to factory settings? After this many years messing with computers, that's probably my goal and I'm going to enjoy doing it.

Decades after my incident in 1990s Windows, as I was explaining what Mac and Steam Deck can do for a teenager, I found myself overwhelming them. My effort to make personal computing seem less daunting than it was for my forefathers was not going well. I told my eldest that if they break a Steam Deck by installing too many games and modding the system with software, I would be impressed.

Back in 2019, Facebook set up a call with me to discuss their "console-like curation strategy" for the Quest ecosystem, and today leadership at Meta has abandoned that strategy entirely for a policy of openness, as a great many developers struggle for sales inside of an ecosystem flush now with low quality projects. Meta seems to have meant for Horizon Worlds to be the floor of the Quest ecosystem, but requiring a Meta account and giving developers a cut of subscriptions is not providing stable footing to keep developers afloat, nor must-have reasons to put on a headset.

Now consider the game Valve is playing in comparison to that and the space their engineers are making for experimentation. Valve funded faceless developers worldwide to work on a series of key open source projects for the last decade forming the basis of SteamOS all trying to make it easier to play games with computers.

"A lot of what you're experiencing here when you wear that and play a game is gonna be powered by a ton of the open source work we've been doing for the last decade or so, just ranging from SteamOS itself, which has elements dating all the way from the first version of SteamOS in 2013," a Valve representative explained. "The way we're running desktop games in this, the way we're doing things like the graphics driver, it's all open source. Proton is all open source. That's been hundreds of people for a decade working on that stuff. And of course, SteamOS is based on Arch Linux. The desktop here is powered by Plasma, so it's KDE Plasma, which is one of the major two desktops available on Linux. For the better part of a decade, we've been actually working directly with Plasma developers and funding them so they can improve the desktop with just gaming use cases in mind."

"If folks on an experience that's more curated and more closed off are having a good experience, that's fine. But in general, we see people that are trying to experience a variety of games in different ways. There's a bunch of stuff that they might wanna do that we haven't thought of," the Valve representative said. "And what we always observe is that there's a ton of value that is usually distributed laterally in the community, where users between themselves will share stuff that will make the experience better. And that is only possible in an open platform. We don't want all the value in a platform like that to be flowing up and down through us, and for us to be determining what's a good experience or not on behalf of all those users that might have different opinions and different aspirations. So it's really important for us to keep that open because it creates those kinds of effects that eventually leads to a better experience. Also anyone that's using this stuff can also go and contribute patches and develop on it. And so we're excited to be able to have stuff get even better because people now want to contribute to it."

"In fact, a lot of the developers that are working on open source have started because they were users and they just want to improve a specific aspect and they go deep into it. The lines between user and developer has always been very blurry for us. We've always come from a world where some of our most popular game properties actually started out as mods. And modding on PC was always like a strong thing that we were always trying to support. Because so many good concepts and new game genres, free to play, MOBAs, all that stuff came through mods, initially, right? If you look at the history of video games–different genres, different ways to experience games, different peripherals–a lot of it came from PC because PC was an open platform where different companies could innovate in different ways, but also users could mod. And people that created closed off platforms based on some of those concepts, they're gonna take some of those concepts and kind of freeze them in time. And then PC's gonna keep moving forward because it's open and we have all this value. And we are just applying PC to VR, so it's nothing new for us. We've always applied PC to VR. Some folks have opted to like branch it off in different directions, but I think we're just doing the same thing as we've always been doing."