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In December 2016, a reporter interviewing Seattle startup Pluto VR put on an HTC Vive and met the company’s founders as avatars inside virtual reality. The group then opened Google Earth VR and kept talking as they explored. That demonstration captured Pluto’s idea: a communications layer that could make people feel present together across VR applications, rather than confining them to one virtual meeting room.
A conversation that moved from the room into VR
Pluto VR was founded in Seattle in 2015 by PopCap Games co-founder John Vechey, Forest Gibson, Jared Cheshier and Jonathan Geibel. When GeekWire visited the company in December 2016, the startup had 14 employees and its product was still in alpha.
The demonstration began with the reporter putting on an HTC Vive headset. Three avatars appeared in the virtual environment. The participants launched Google Earth VR, and Pluto’s avatars remained visible over the other application while the group discussed what it was seeing. The interview then crossed back into the physical room, where the reporter met the same people in person. That shift—from talking through avatars to standing together—made the company’s premise tangible: VR could supply a shared setting and social cues that a voice call alone does not.
The demo showed conversation while exploring Google Earth VR. It did not establish that Pluto worked with every VR application, nor did it demonstrate detailed, lifelike telepresence.
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The problem Pluto wanted to solve
Ordinary communication tools carry speech, text or images, but they do not necessarily make remote participants feel as if they occupy the same place. Pluto’s founders pointed to eye contact, body language, facial expression, physical proximity and shared visual context as parts of being together that conventional calls leave out.
In practice, shared context meant being able to point or gesture, look at the same virtual landscape and talk about it while remaining inside the experience. Even simplified avatars could show where someone was looking or moving and signal that another person was present. The goal was a design ambition, not proof that the technology reproduced the full experience of face-to-face interaction.
One service, three levels of ambition
Pluto’s 2016 vision combined a communications environment with a more ambitious platform idea:
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- A standalone communications service: a control panel for finding or contacting people, making calls and managing how they appeared. A call did not necessarily have to put another person’s avatar into the scene.
- An overlay: avatars and communication could sit on top of another VR application, as they did in the Google Earth VR demonstration.
- A platform layer: the longer-term ambition was for other VR applications to recognize or integrate Pluto, so a social connection could persist across different experiences.
The third idea was strategically distinct from building another destination world. Pluto’s leadership contrasted its approach with AltspaceVR, a social VR service of the period that centered interaction in its own environment. That was Pluto’s characterization, not a definitive judgment about the wider market. The company was aiming for communication that followed users elsewhere, but the 2016 demo did not prove broad third-party integration.
What users could control—and what the avatars conveyed
The 2016 report described controls for creating or selecting an avatar, making calls, muting microphones, adjusting another person’s opacity and choosing whether other people remained visible. Those settings addressed practical social boundaries: someone might want to hear a companion but reduce visual distraction, or hide avatars temporarily without necessarily ending a conversation.
The avatars were deliberately limited by the tracking available in the demo. Pluto tracked head or face position and hand movement through the headset controllers. It did not reproduce detailed facial expressions, eye movement or eyebrow motion. The experience therefore depended on voice, gestures and spatial context—not photorealistic faces or full-body tracking.
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Where the concept could be useful
Pluto’s demonstrated use was talking while exploring Google Earth VR. The founders also described possible scenarios such as watching sports with remote friends in a virtual living room, coordinating in multiplayer games, chatting during loading screens, and maintaining a private conversation while using a social VR application. Extending the idea into augmented reality was another future-facing possibility.
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The hard parts were architectural—and social
A persistent communications service had to work amid fragmented VR hardware and software. Overlays were immature, and third-party integrations would require technical support or cooperation from application developers. A service could be compelling in principle yet of little use if a user’s friends did not have compatible equipment or use Pluto too.
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There were also immediate interface trade-offs. A floating avatar can add social cues, but it can obstruct scenery or interface elements. The later Steam listing documented that SteamVR overlays lacked depth: avatars could appear on top of other applications regardless of their apparent position in the scene. Opacity adjustment and the option to hide avatars were workarounds, not true depth-aware rendering. The listing also noted performance problems around opening or closing the dashboard and switching applications.
More broadly, VR communication adds friction compared with a phone or desktop call: users need compatible hardware, setup, a network connection and contacts on the same service. A contact system also needs meaningful privacy controls—such as muting, hiding and limits on who can initiate calls—because persistent presence is not welcome in every setting.
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In 2016, Pluto was alpha software, and the founders had not settled on monetization. That uncertainty mattered because the product’s value depended on a network of users: it would be more useful when friends, collaborators and developers adopted it. At the same time, supporting multiple applications and hardware configurations could be technically demanding. A free or unfinished communications layer would still need a sustainable way to fund development and maintenance.
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What happened after the alpha
A later product named Pluto reached Steam on February 22, 2018, as a free-to-play, VR-only Early Access application. The Steam description presented it as software running alongside SteamVR applications. Its documented features included voice chat between VR and supported iOS devices, contact management, signaling readiness by waving, private one-to-one or group conversations, multiplayer coordination and conversations during loading screens. These are features of the later listing, not a record of everything present in the 2016 alpha.
“Cross-platform” needs care here: the listing’s specific example was voice communication between VR and supported iOS devices, not universal compatibility across headsets, operating systems or applications. Steam’s historical requirements listed Windows 10, a 64-bit processor and operating system, SteamVR, a VR headset with tracked-controller support, 500 MB of storage and broadband internet. Minimum hardware was listed as an Intel i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350 equivalent processor and an NVIDIA GTX 1080 or AMD RX 5700 equivalent graphics card. Those are old listing requirements, not a reliable guide to compatibility with current systems.
The available storefront evidence points to a stale product, not a confirmed corporate shutdown. As of the retrieved Steam listing, Steam warned that the developer had not updated the application for more than six years; it remained labeled Early Access. The listing showed 44% positive reviews from 81 reviews at the time of the research snapshot. Neither that dated review signal nor the maintenance warning establishes whether the software can be installed, whether its services still work, or whether it supports modern VR hardware.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsPluto VR later pursued a separate project called PlutoSphere, a cloud-based PC VR effort for Meta Quest users. UploadVR reported that PlutoSphere shut down after difficulties involving Meta platform access, customer growth and cloud-bandwidth costs. That is relevant company history, but PlutoSphere was not the communications product profiled in 2016; its reported closure should not be treated as proof that the original product or company formally shut down.
What Pluto’s first look means in retrospect
Pluto identified a real design problem: communication inside VR can benefit from shared surroundings, gestures and a sense of another person’s location, while users may want to carry conversations between applications. But the ambition depended on difficult conditions—comfortable and capable hardware, reliable overlays, developer cooperation, enough users to create a useful social network and a durable business model.
The 2016 demo was an early illustration of that promise, not a finished platform. The later Steam release shows the concept advancing into a documented product, while its long-stale Early Access status cautions against treating Pluto as a dependable current communications tool. The lasting significance is the question it posed: could social presence travel with users through VR, rather than requiring them to travel to one social world?
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