Grief, Joy, and a Cockroach: A Space Where Anything Could Happen
By Karen Alexander
On 1 September, ENGAGE XR Holdings announced that its board would proceed with a court-approved liquidation after losing its largest customer. What happens to the ENGAGE platform itself is a separate question, and one no one has answered yet. I agree with Lorelle VanFossen that we should take a wait-and-see approach rather than proclaim the platform’s death. Still, the news has prompted some reflection.
I have been going into ENGAGE since 2017, when I found my way to Steve Bambury's CPD in VR sessions — professional development for educators, conducted from inside VR. That is where I met Chris Madsen, an Engage team member and friend ever since, and where I presented on PGH in 360: Youth Perspectives, my project working with young Pittsburghers to make 360-degree videos about the issues that mattered to them.
In 2020, before XR Women existed, I brought Cassondra Eng, Dr. Mina Johnson-Glenberg, and Corinne Brenner together in a talk-show studio floating in space for a panel on how VR games contribute to learning.
When ENGAGE granted XR Women an enterprise license, the platform became one of our persistent homes. Celeste Lear was our first official speaker, on the Moon Stage. Robin Moulder and I furnished the crater outside with egg chairs, cocktail tables, and a dinosaur and called it the Crater Lounge, mostly because the tools let us. Our events there have routinely drawn registrants from four to nine countries.
Since then we’ve featured XR luminaries such as Jacki Morie, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Nicole Lazzaro, Caitlin Krause, Stephanie Riggs, and Judith Okonkwo. Judi Alston and Andy Campbell presented Revealed: Triptych, with Chloe the 3D animated canary along for company. Akilah Martinez, who works mostly in AR, brought her 3D creations into a VR environment so we could stand next to them. For Shemecka McNeil of Slice325, I arranged her slides around a verdant island so we could walk from one to the next instead of passively watching a deck.
In January 2024, Robin Moulder built the Spatial Computing Business Showcase with my assistance, featuring nine women-led businesses, interactive booths, and 3D avatar pitches. You can still visit by joining with Session ID MRGPL in Engage.
ENGAGE has hosted the wider community's traditions too. Ready Player Golf, the Academy of Immersive Arts & Sciences annual charity tournament funding programs for children with cancer, tees off from an ENGAGE clubhouse before players step through portals into Walkabout Mini Golf.
ENGAGE has held our grief. We gathered there in 2019 for Chris Long, who worked behind the scenes on every CPD in VR session, and again after Daniel Dyboski-Bryant died in 2024. In a service, Daniel's avatar walked among us before we boarded ships and sailed into the sky.
And it has fostered our joy. In her Foremothers Cafe environment, Helen Lundström Erwin's Swedish Lucia concert was sung live before a cathedral modeled on Lund's in gowns the ENGAGE team built just for the occasion. I am not a religious person, and I wept at Christine Hobbi’s rendition of O Holy Night.
Then there was Fatboy Slim's "Eat Sleep VR Repeat," where fifty of us spawned into a desert diner and I ended up flying a cockroach with Alvin Wang Graylin seated on the back.
Everything here happened because the technology the Engage team built made it possible. The space may be virtual, but these are real memories: real learning, real joy, real grief, real connections.
Thank you to Sandra Whelan, David Whelan, and everyone at ENGAGE for what they’ve made possible. I hope someone with the right intentions and deep enough pockets picks this up and keeps it going.
