Shane Harris of SideQuest has officially acquired the rights to the name of the defunct social platform AltspaceVR, with plans to relaunch it this fall.
The previously Microsoft-owned application was shut down in March 2023.
Harris detailed the plans in a post on Reddit:
My name is Shane, and I’m the CEO of SideQuest. We recently acquired the rights to the Altspace name and we have the motivation, experience and backing to bring it back in all it’s glory. This will be a brand new Altspace, but it will truly be a spiritual successor to the Altspace we know and love and capture what made it great. Let’s dive in to how I will pull this off.
Later this year we will re-launch Altspace with a lot of the features and functionality that it had around 2016-2017. I have assembled an elite team of previous Altspace staffers as well as some of the most prolific OG players and we are already hard at work figuring out all the important stuff like how it will work, what we will prioritize and understanding what needs to happen to make it great.
Harris would go on to say he has been working with multiple members of the original Altspace team, including the original concept designer to modernize Altspace’s original robot avatars and the new Altspace will support custom avatars as well.
Harris previously released a space-making interface for Altspace called Shane’s Editor that proved to be popular with users until the platform moved away from web-based development. He then reworked and submitted it as a standalone application for the original Oculus Quest 1. Meta rejected that submission, prompting Harris to create SideQuest, an alternative platform for Quest developers to promote their apps in lieu of Meta’s then heavily curated storefront and install them via sideloading.
Altspace was founded by developer Eric Romo and launched in May 2015. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2017 and integrated into its Mixed Reality group alongside products like the HoloLens. Altspace was shut down in March 2023 as part of one of Microsoft’s many rounds of mass layoffs.
Watch AltspaceVR’s Final Moment As It Goes Offline
“This is sadly where we say goodbye.” Watch the final moments of AltspaceVR.
SideQuest has hosted millions of users over the years and later incorporated Meta’s App Lab Early Access program into its platform. By the time Meta revised the Horizon store as a more ‘open’ platform in 2024 and did away with App Lab entirely, SideQuest had already branched into other avenues, including its own social VR platform, Banter, and a partnership with the Khronos Group to help drive the adoption of OpenXR.
All that said, and despite millions and millions of capital raised over the years, SideQuest was not immune to VR’s ever-shifting landscape and saw layoffs in February 2025.
Harris has promised to share regular updates in the coming weeks and months. We’ll monitor Altspace’s revival and share any new information as it comes.
