by Christine Hobbi
On Friday, October 31, ENGAGE goes dark. The platform announced its services will shut down on that date and go offline, after parent company ENGAGE XR Holdings moved toward a court-approved liquidation following the loss of expected contract income from its largest customer.
For XR Women, this one stings. Sixty of our 286 events took place in ENGAGE. It was our formal stage for speaker series, academic lectures, and showcases, where we welcomed computer graphics pioneer Carolina Cruz-Neira and mixed reality designer Nicole Lazzaro. It’s also where we built our Spatial Computing Business Showcase: an expo floor of nine women-led companies, each booth featuring a volumetric recording of its founder’s avatar so visitors from anywhere could drop in on their own time.
We’ve been here before. When AltspaceVR closed in 2023, we lost our first home and learned that a community isn’t a platform. We spread out across ENGAGE, Spatial, Frame VR, and Nowhere, and kept meeting every week.
That lesson is now our strategy. Our anchor is Frame VR, which runs in an ordinary web browser, no headset required. It holds the XR Women Museum, our gallery exhibitions, and the new XR Women History Park, a permanent record of our milestones, honorees, and speakers. Workshops and roundtables continue in Virbela, and VRChat hosts sessions that call for live theater or dance.
For anyone building community in virtual worlds, three takeaways:
Export now. Recordings, assets, slides. Liquidations rarely come with a tidy goodbye.
Keep a browser-based home. When a vendor disappears, your people still need a front door.
Own your history. That’s exactly why XR Women is building a History Park.
Thank you to the ENGAGE team for years of stages and expo halls, and to everyone who spoke, exhibited, or showed up as an avatar at those 60 events. Those moments happened, and they’re part of our story.
And here’s a twist: Altspace is coming back. SideQuest’s CEO, Shane Harris, has acquired the rights to the name and plans to relaunch it this fall as a spiritual successor to the original, though no launch date has been set. Our first home may soon reopen, so watch our newsletter and Slack for news about XR Women groups and events there.
Our next chapter is already underway, including the 2027 XR Women Awards on the main stage at AWE. Same community. New rooms. See you there.
