Alex Coulombe and I played pickleball together recently.
We each opened Pickle Pro from Resolution Games in our Apple headsets, and I clicked the share icon next to its window. Coulombe clicked accept, and we soon had a pickleball court overlaid on the ground between us. After centering the court and switching sides, we played a full match together.
That’s just part of the backdrop behind Coulombe’s “XR is Having a Moment” commentary for his YouTube channel talking over video of our play session, embedded below.
Earlier this year, I put together a puzzle in Jigsaw Night in much the same way, joined in Quest headsets by the app maker Steve Lukas and CNET writer Scott Stein aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
“It’s largely overlooked how monumental it is that we finally have solid automatic co-location technology in affordable VR,” Lukas wrote to me over direct message this week. “If enough developers seize on it properly, this moment in time may actually be our real ‘ground floor’ for ubiquitous mixed reality.”
The invisible anchoring systems making these colocated experiences “just work” have been in development by Apple and Meta for years. We’ve gone from an impressive makeshift arena-scale multiplayer experience in 2018 at Oculus Connect to tools in 2025 that enable people like Coulombe and his partners to build experiences that sell real estate. It required manual alignment, but I’ve even gotten this kind of colocated experience working in the app Figmin XR between Vision Pro and Quest.
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We’re a long way from people in any VR headset sharing the same digital universe easily, but what developers are starting to do already between the same headsets feels like magic.
“There’s a lot of work we’ve put into using Antilatency and Optitrack and Meta Shared Spatial Anchors to get people to be in VR headsets and to feel like they are in the same place looking at the same content and having the real world align with that,” Coulombe says in the video. “And Apple went ahead and in VisionOS 26, they just made this work.”
Pickle Pro is sold for $7.99 on the Apple App Store, while Home Sports on Meta Quest sells for $19.99. Both titles have colocation features from Resolution Games, and the studio states it’s making this a priority with its games.
“We’ve also invested heavily in colocation with Spatial Ops, where multiplayer is designed for colocation. We have tons of videos of players playing colocated with friends in the most amazing locations, which is so fun to see,” wrote Mathieu Castelli, Resolution Games Chief Creative Officer, over email.
“Sure colocation can be a rare thing, but when you have friends with their headsets, it really feels like a miss to not have colocation, so we’ve really been making that a priority with our games. Even Battlemarked, which is launching later this month, will have colocation.”
