Engage XR sunsets, AltspaceVR sunrises, and Immersive X invites us to Reclaim the Future

By Julian Reyes

On Saturday, October 31, 2026, ENGAGE XR went offline. After more than a decade, a platform that hosted classrooms, workplaces, concerts, gatherings, and so much more... went dark. For the people who built their work and their communities inside it, the loss is immense. The Engage community gathered in multiple worlds memorializing that loss; we thank VR Filmmaker Carlos Austin for helping our community video archive the emotional events. I was fortunate enough to sit in with XR News, the Foremother's Cafe, Infinity Island, and The Mindwise Garden.

Overview

• What ENGAGE was
• XR Voices on the closure
• Experiences
• Sunset announcements
• The Spotllight conversations
• Altspace VR
• IMMERSIVE X, November 10 to 12, 2026
• Thank you, and the invitation
• References

What ENGAGE was

ENGAGE began in Waterford, Ireland, in 2014, as Immersive VR Education, founded by David and Sandra Whelan. The showcase titles Apollo 11 VR and Titanic VR introduced many people to the company: Apollo 11 VR grew out of a successful 2015 Kickstarter and became an award-winning early seller, and Titanic VR followed. The company listed on London's AIM market in March 2018, and the ENGAGE platform itself launched commercially in 2019.

ENGAGE Link arrived on November 7, 2022, as a persistent, publicly explorable corporate metaverse, with plazas for enterprise, education, and creativity, and client-built metaworlds linked from them. Fourteen launch partners joined it, including Lenovo, KPMG US, KIA, and Fatboy Slim. Meta Immersive Learning funded VictoryXR to build ten digital-twin metaversity campuses on ENGAGE, among them Morehouse College and the University of Kansas School of Nursing. By 2024 the company reported around 18,000 licensed users, and its School of AI, conversations with AI historical figures, had rolled out to education clients. At Bett 2025 it launched a K-12 education package with Meta and OptimaED, bundling the Apollo 11, Titanic, and Shuttle Commander titles with the School of AI and a library of models and field trips.

Caitlin Krause and Chris Madsen led a VR meditation, farewell, and world hop in Engage to memorialize the occasion. Alongside Carlos Austin, Tom Furness, Ben Erwin, Karen Alexander, Steve Lewis, Juliana Loh, Artist3D, Mada de Leeuw, and other seasoned world builders.

• 2014: David and Sandra Whelan founded Immersive VR Education in Waterford, Ireland.
• March 2016: The platform launched publicly in early access as Lecture VR.
• August 2016: The platform was renamed ENGAGE, as confirmed in a contemporary UploadVR article⁠.
• December 2018: ENGAGE 1.0 received its full commercial release.
• November 2021: The parent company, previously VR Education Holdings PLC, changed its name to ENGAGE XR Holdings PLC.

XR Voices on the closure:

Evo Heyning on September 30th, 2026. RE: The Spotlight Video Series:‍

"Chasing Sunsets to interview worldbuilders as their worlds are disappearing around them has been one of the most challenging works of digital preservation, as we meet with creators at the tender moment their creations are being sent back to the digital sandbox. We explore what shape their communities will take moving forward and work with studios and builders to preserve those works and reclaim the futures they want to create, often bringing them to new portals and worlds."

Educators in VR, in an editorial by Lorelle VanFossen on September 4, 2026:

‍"The news that ENGAGE XR is entering liquidation is difficult for the many educators, students, institutions, creators, and organizations that have built learning communities in its virtual spaces."

SkarredGhost, writing in The Ghost Howls on September 7, 2026:‍

"Engage has been one of the most relevant social platforms in VR, especially for enterprise and the education sectors."

He recalled the Fatboy Slim concert, community funerals, workshops, and the Vive Ecosystem Conference in ENGAGE.

Andreas Reimer of RAUM, writing on LinkedIn in September 2026:

‍"We were competitors. Today that's beside the point... The market didn't reject the idea. One company ran out of runway. Those are different things."

The AI XR Podcast, in its September 4, 2026 episode on the closure, called ENGAGE

‍"one of the last two open-world VR platforms" shutting down.

Chris Madsen:‍

"There was nothing quite like ENGAGE. With its focus on professional, enterprise, and educational markets, ENGAGE was developed and refined over more than a decade to empower people to create and deliver immersive content without requiring a technical background. This was revolutionary at a time when most non-developers were largely relegated to being passive consumers of virtual experiences. The magic of ENGAGE was that anybody could become a creator. It transformed the journey from imagination to experience into something that could happen in minutes, sometimes even seconds. Think it. Experience it. Or, as my friend Jeremy Bailenson so aptly titled his book, Experience on Demand. Perhaps ENGAGE's greatest innovation wasn't its virtual environments, but how effortlessly it allowed people to bring their imaginations together inside them. ENGAGE didn't simply transport people to another place. It gave them the tools to shape that place, together, in real time. It was a Swiss Army knife of remarkable creative tools, instantly accessible, even during live events. This spontaneity was part of what made the platform so extraordinary and allowed its community to flourish. For educators, it meant piloting a spacecraft full of students through the solar system. For enterprise, it meant hosting a red-carpet product launch in a giant stadium or conducting a media-rich corporate meeting aboard a catamaran in the Mediterranean. For health and wellness, it could mean frolicking with zebras and fairies beneath a giant oak tree. The question I always loved asking was: What would you want to share, create, or experience if the practical constraints of the physical world no longer stood in your way? In the end, what I cherish most isn't the technology itself, remarkable as it was. It's the relationships we built through shared experiences. And wow, what extraordinary experiences those have been!"

Caitlin Krause October 30th, 2026

‍“I started designing experiences in ENGAGE in 2018, years before the pandemic made physical separation a global reality. I saw something extraordinary in that relatively early social collaborative technology: the possibility of bringing people together across geography, identity, and culture to experience something that simply couldn't happen in the physical world. And it was all very real and relevant. What I discovered was that imagination came alive. We could defy gravity, transform environments, debate and dialogue, and create entirely new conditions for learning, connection, collaboration, and wellbeing. ENGAGE became my creative laboratory for a conviction that continues to shape my work: wonder changes what we notice, what we believe is possible, and how we relate to one another. I design wonder for those who want in. And ENGAGE gave me a place to invite people to experiment boldly and to discover what happens when human imagination ignites.

There are many experiences I will remember, and in the coming years they might become throwbacks we share with one another as a form of nostalgia or belonging: Were you at the Fatboy Slim concert? Did you ride a whale on the moon? How did it feel to share a winter wonder dance party? What about the tree that grew slowly as I delivered my keynote, the audience slowly flooded as the tide rose? These times are unforgettable and fantastical, leaving an impact. I view the closing of ENGAGE as a significant loss, and the entire XR industry can take notes from this. We are futurists who look at the growth of immersive technology. Here is a platform that helped us build that future. ENGAGE gave educators, artists, researchers, and organizations a place to push beyond the limitations of conventional communication and experience what context and embodied presence across perceived limits of distance could actually mean. It helped demonstrate that immersive technology could expand human possibility, opening pathways to empathy, collaboration, creativity, and collective imagination. I'm most grateful for the humans who connected in these spaces, to the visionaries who built ENGAGE, and the remarkable nature of community. We are saying goodbye to a space that made this kind of experimentation possible. Building on the legacy of ENGAGE involves protecting the creative capacity to take risks, and expanding the possibility of the future we're designing.”

Experiences

The experiences that drew people in were the ones that felt like places, not demos. The ENGAGE Link plazas gave companies and schools a persistent address in VR, somewhere to return to rather than a one-off event link. The metaversity campuses gave students a campus to attend when their physical one was far away. The School of AI let a student ask questions of a historical figure face to face. Educators in VR, who had met in ENGAGE since 2019, ran classes, research presentations, and global gatherings there. People will also remember the concerts, including Fatboy Slim's, the workshops, the Vive Ecosystem Conference, and the community gatherings, from celebrations to funerals, that made ENGAGE feel like a place rather than a product. During the pandemic years, when offices and classrooms closed, ENGAGE hosted corporate events and remote education for people who could not be in the same room.

Sunset announcements

The announcements came in two parts. In September, the company announced it would proceed with a court-approved liquidation after its largest customer said it would take no further licences. Weeks later, a notice on the ENGAGE site announced that platform services would end on October 31. No export, content retrieval, refund, or migration guidance was announced with it, and that silence is the part builders are still living with.

I have written about this pattern before in As Virtual Worlds Close, Communities in Rec Room, Meta's Horizon Worlds, and Others Create Ways to Survive, published by Road to VR on May 29, 2026, where I followed communities that refused to disappear when their worlds did.

At least Rec Room offered a clear timeline of their closing and offered instructions to world builders on how to download their worlds. Our team recorded Spotlight Videos in Rec Room before it closed with Ink Overflow, Freckleberry, BVR, and SLAT: https://www.youtube.com/@Teleportal_TV

The Spotlight conversations

The Spotlight Video Series is the Virtual Worlds Museum's interview series with the builders and communities who keep virtual worlds alive. [Link]

Evo Heyning, Carlos Austin, and I recorded Engage Spotlight conversations before sunsetting with:

• Helen Lundström Erwin (The Foremothers Cafe)
  The Foremothers Cafe is a Swedish American women's history museum and cultural center in virtual reality, set in Lund, Sweden in 1918 and modeled on Hanna's cafe in Helen Lundström Erwin's novel Sour Milk in Sheep's Wool, where women gathered after closing to advocate for suffrage and equal rights. Inside, visitors found a period bakery with large airy windows, a counter with a kerosene lamp and a display case, a separate scullery for baking, a kitchen sofa, and tables dressed with cornflowers, poppies and daisies, plus a mural showing a horse and buggy beside early automobiles. People gathered there for a monthly Community Discussion Series begun in September 2022, a weekly Thursday fika of coffee and something sweet, and live Lucia concerts and interactive Midsommar celebrations that drew visitors from places such as Kenya, the Netherlands, Malta and the United States. Helen Lundström Erwin, a historical novelist, was its founder and director, and she built the world with Cause + Christi from her own drawings and historical detail so readers could step into a setting from her book.
• Chris Madsen (Engage XR), served as Senior Sales Engineer at ENGAGE XR, partnering with educators and institutions to deliver XR-powered training, collaboration, education and events. He came to that role after 20 years in behavioral health administration and programming and a turn to VR in 2013, and his earlier roles included Social VR Liaison for Road to VR, co-founder of Utah VR and the Silicon Slopes AR/VR chapter, and Director of VR at Morph 3D/Tafi. Inside ENGAGE itself, he was also credited as Experience Designer for Dragon Magic, an immersive art experience built for the platform.
• Jon Gress (The Metaverse Construction Company)
  Jon Gress is the CEO and co-founder of The Metaverse Construction Company LLC, which builds turn-key, fully immersive, real-time virtual environments for multi-user events, meetings, training, showrooms, enterprise, education, and entertainment. On ENGAGE XR, that work included playful, hands-on worlds such as a to-scale city with giant monsters, a buildable RED camera setup, and a realistic music video setting for students. He also founded The Metaverse Film School, a fully immersive film school on ENGAGE XR with virtual soundstages, multi-camera studios, motion capture, and green screens, and his company helped make possible Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer's December 7, 2022 State of Downtown address in the metaverse. Gress brings decades of motion picture, visual effects, and immersive media experience, and previously served as Academic Director for The Digital Animation and Visual Effects School at Universal Studios in Orlando.
• Juliana Loh
  Freedom Giants is one of two linked virtual reality worlds presented together as Dragon Magic, Freedom Giants, created for ENGAGE XR and hand painted by Juliana Loh in Google TiltBrush, with Mada de Leeuw optimizing the artwork for the platform and Chris Madsen also credited as a creator. Visitors walk inside the larger than life painted world, moving between viewpoints by teleportation while audio cues invite reflection on the artwork, in an experience presented as part art installation, part social VR space, part amusement park ride and part workshop. Across the pair, the journey moves from wishing upon new beginnings to the back and forth work of reaching a goal, and the festival descriptions present one world as reflection and self discovery and the other as celebration, action and exploration. Juliana Loh is a Vancouver based immersive artist, creative director and experiential architect whose work centers spatial storytelling, live VR painting and human centered design across XR, performance and public art. The paired work was shown at Raindance Immersive, FIVARS and VIFF Signals in 2023 and received the 2023 Passive Immersive Award at the AustXR Festival that year.
• Kurt Jackson (SN1XR),Kurt Jackson and Ambrose Cavalier built Infinity Island together in ENGAGE under SN1XR, with Jackson as the studio founder and Cavalier credited as the island developer. The world was introduced in late April 2026 as a vast self guided island for adventure, exploration and gathering, with mountains, canyons, gardens, harbors, ferries, caverns, amphitheaters, campfires and a central Grand Plaza. Once a month, its Island Will Glow nights lit the whole island, with fireworks at 9:30 PM Eastern and social time in the plaza. As ENGAGE closed, SN1XR said its parks were not closing, only changing how visitors reached them, and scheduled Infinity Island to become reachable through VRChat on November 5. That planned move kept the island's gathering life in view even as its ENGAGE home closed.
• Karen Alexander of XR Women
  Inside ENGAGE XR, Dongdaemun Design Plaza was an event location recreating the Seoul landmark, with curved, organic, sculptural architecture and seats arranged in front of a stage, plus one large screen and seating for 77. The real plaza in Seoul, designed by Zaha Hadid, serves as a multipurpose cultural platform for exhibitions, fashion shows, performances, and conferences, so the virtual version echoed a place built for audiences and presentation. Karen Alexander co-founded XR Women Global alongside Julie Smithson and Sophia Moshasha. They are a community of women in XR that meet weekly in virtual worlds to share work, build connections, and support visibility and opportunity for women in the field. In ENGAGE, XR Women opened a virtual exhibition hall in early 2024 featuring nine women-led XR businesses, with interactive booths and 3D recordings of the business leaders, and its ENGAGE events typically drew attendees from four to nine countries.
• Mada de Leeuw (PixeldustVR)
  Mada de Leeuw's Dreamscapes, presented through PixeldustVR, is a set of virtual worlds shaped by colour, atmosphere and dream logic, where visitors step inside the artwork and explore it from within. Described as a journey through imagination, perception, memory and consciousness, it uses portals to open into different inner worlds, including Illuminate, 1000 Nights, Sacred Sands, Candy Dreamscape and Shadowlane. Mada is a lifelong artist who began in sculpture and illustration before moving into digital art, and she describes VR as a way to build rather than only depict, inviting viewers into her imagination. Her earlier VR world work includes Dragon Magic, Freedom Giants, created with Juliana Loh and Chris Madsen for ENGAGE, where she handled development and production.
• Caitlin Krause (Digital Wellbeing). Caitlin Krause, founder of the MindWise consultancy and author of Digital Wellbeing, teaches digital wellbeing and XR at Stanford. She created collaborative social XR experiences fusing presence, storytelling, meditation, and social and emotional intelligence, including MindWise experiences on ENGAGE XR, and later served as Chief Wellness Officer at TRIPP. We visited the Midwise Garden, a beautiful meditation space with a peaceful koi pond and grounding natural setting. Her approach favors interaction that creates meaningful value over passive lectures, and a new literacy for thriving in connected spaces.

What set ENGAGE apart was not just its technology, but its people: a community that showed up for each other. They were the first platform to include a gateway to the Teleportal and were always supportive of Metatr@versal.

I plan to host future MetaTr@vestal portal crawls with the Teleportal, our free app on the Meta Quest that is a gateway between virtual worlds. Oour museum hub in ENGAGE carried visitors directly to our Teleportal app on the Quest, and onward to other worlds. It was the first such portal, and it proved the idea the Museum has always stood for: worlds should connect, and no single closure should cut us off from each other.

Thanks to Steve Van Loon, we have also created web versions and are currently developing versions in SteamVR and WebXR.

The second gateway to the Teleportal was created in BurnerSphere by Doug Jacobson and Athena Demos. We are very grateful to them for placing a gateway to the Teleportal in a shipping container, behind their Playa Info booth in center camp.

AltspaceVR

Before ENGAGE closed, we recreated the museum hub built in AltspaceVR. It went live there in October, with its own portal to the Teleportal live as well, our 3rd portal!

In the same month ENGAGE closed, AltspaceVR saw its sunrise, its relaunch under the leadership of Shane Harris of SideQuest, after Microsoft closed the original AltspaceVR in March 2023. One world closed. Another returned. That is the pattern this community knows by heart: platforms may close, but communities fight to endure.

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. 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 on Friday, October 23, 2026.

The return found its people fast. AltspaceVR already counts thousands of followers on Discord, and already tens of thousands of hours of participation time. And it meets people where they are: you can enter in VR, on desktop, or on Android, with no headset required on desktop. During Early Access, 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.

The Museum has a home in the new AltspaceVR. Our hub world hosts our Open Source Exhibit, with kiosks for Hubs Foundation, OpenSimulator, Overte, Relm, BasisVR, the Virtual Worlds Museum and the Teleportal, and inside you will 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.

That is why this rebirth points directly to IMMERSIVE X, where the Museum is co-hosting three sessions, in three different worlds, through the same idea of connected travel.

IMMERSIVE X, November 10 to 12, 2026

IMMERSIVE X is a global XR festival held in VR, and its sixth edition runs November 10 to 12, 2026, under the theme Reclaim the Future. The Virtual Worlds Museum is an official sponsor, and IMMERSIVE X / Thomas Zorbach associate-produces the Spotlight Video Series. Our Museum hubs in VRChat, Second Life, and AltspaceVR will host festival talks and panels, and each of our three sessions takes up a different piece of the question this farewell raises: where do builders go next, and what lasts?

On Tuesday, November 10 at 8:00 PM CET, the Museum hub in VRChat hosts Building Sustainable Ecosystems: How Platforms Can Become Safe Harbors for XR Creators, a panel moderated by Evo Heyning (XR Guild, Realitycraft, XR Guide), with Yewnyx of BasisVR, Charlene Nichols, Jay Pilipovich, and Doug Reeder. After a year that claimed Rec Room, Spatial, Nowhere, and ENGAGE, this is the practical question for every creator deciding where to build next: what makes a platform a safe harbor rather than a temporary address? Come for the people who run platforms and the builders who depend on them, in the same room, talking about what sustainability actually requires.

On Thursday, November 12 at 6:00 PM CET, the Museum hub in Second Life hosts From Sunset to Second Life: What Virtual Worlds Teach Us About the Future. I will open and introduce the session, Wagner James Au (Author of Making a Metaverse that Matters and  has chronicled virtual worlds for over two decades) moderates, and Philip Rosedale presents. Rosedale built Second Life, which has endured since 2003 while wave after wave of other worlds closed. If you want to know what makes a world last, this is the session to attend: the founder of one of the longest-running social virtual worlds, in conversation about what sunset worlds teach the builders of the next ones.

On Thursday, November 12 at 7:00 PM CET, the Museum hub in AltspaceVR hosts The Teleportal Vision: Creating a Gateway to the Metaverse, a talk and live demo with Chris Madsen and me, 45 minutes, ending with a world hop. This is the session that carries that story onto a stage: ENGAGE as the first portal and historical anchor, BurnerSphere as the second, Altspace as the newest. Come and see the rebuilt hub and the gateway working, in the world where the Museum now lives. The platform changed. The gateway did not. Worlds close. Portals remain.

Thank you, and the invitation

First, love and recognition for ENGAGE itself: to the team who built it, the educators and builders who filled it, and everyone who showed up while it stood. You are the reason any of it lasted as long as it did.

And thank you for supporting the VirtualWorlds.Museum: our volunteers, who offer their time; our advisors, who guide the work; our sponsors, whose support keeps the preservation going; and everyone who backed our Kickstarter, whose support expanded the preservation archive, the Spotlight interviews, Teleportal TV as a public channel, and the Teleportal. You are the reason the work continues.

So this is not only a farewell. It is a call to arms. Builders, stay strong. Keep building, keep gathering, keep connecting. Explore the Teleportal for discovering worlds, it exists so that no single closure can cut us off from each other. Attend IMMERSIVE X. Support it if you can. Do not lose hope for the future. We are a strong and resilient community.

We do not wait for a platform to save us; we build the roads between worlds ourselves, and we keep them open for everyone who follows.
The immersive future is ours to reclaim.

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References

ENGAGE XR, "An Important Update from ENGAGE," engagevr.io (notice live October 23, 2026; page undated): platform services shutting down October 31, 2026. https://engagevr.io/

ENGAGE XR Holdings plc, "Suspension of Shares," RNS, September 1, 2026: largest customer taking no further licences, board determination to proceed with a court-approved liquidation.

ENGAGE XR Holdings plc, "Appointment of Liquidator," RNS, September 15, 2026.

Educators in VR, Lorelle VanFossen, "ENGAGE XR and the Future of Immersive Education," September 4, 2026. https://educatorsinvr.wordpress.com/tag/social-vr/

SkarredGhost, "The XR Week Peek," The Ghost Howls, September 7, 2026. https://skarredghost.com/2026/09/07/steam-frame-passthrough-color-ai/

Hypergrid Business, Maria Korolov, "Immersive education and training platform Engage XR shutting down," September 9, 2026. https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2026/09/immersive-education-and-training-platform-engage-xr-shutting-down/

UC Today, workplace XR round-up, September 11, 2026. https://uctoday.com/round-up-workplace-xrs-push-beyond-the-pilot

Auganix, Sam Sprigg, "Optima Partners With Arthur on AI-Powered Immersive Learning," September 4, 2026. https://www.auganix.org/vr-news-optima-arthur-immersive-learning-partnership/

Road to VR, "ENGAGE Launches 'Link' Metaverse Platform for Enterprise and Education," updated November 11, 2022. https://roadtovr.com/engage-link-metaverse-education-enterprise/

Voices of VR #1214, "History of Engage XR's Education and Communications Platform" (David Whelan interview). https://voicesofvr.com/1214-history-of-engage-xrs-education-communications-platform

Virtual Worlds Museum, "AltspaceVR Sunrise" exhibit page. https://www.virtualworlds.museum/exhibits/altspacevr-sunrise

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