Millions of people plan their weekends around visits to virtual reality.
Given the competitive nature of the immersive industry, hard total numbers are difficult to come by. Millions of people are wearing VR headsets and flying and driving alone, spending time in single-player offline virtual worlds, watching movies in virtual theaters, shooting at virtual gun ranges, bowling in virtual alleys, fishing in virtual ponds, and playing games in virtual apartments. Often, the designers of these digital spaces have no interest in tracking visitor usage of the spaces they create.
Our systems for tracking and monetizing our actions on the internet and on the planet are alien to a generation that has learned to entertain by distributing online space to those who want to escape from reality and unwind by playing headset sims for half a day. No matter how you look at it, these people, after a week in real life, just pack their bags and take advantage of their weekend freedom to head off to unknown places in VR.
When it comes to going online and interacting with other users, some of the most popular places for headsets, such as VRChat and Rec Room, also come in flat screen editions, so it’s difficult to determine how many people are traveling around wearing a VR headset at any given moment. And in some of these locations, servers have to constantly scale to accommodate the fluid interactions being delivered everywhere, with a constant flow of people coming in and out of headsets.
On New Year’s Eve, as calendars changed from 2025 to 2026 across the United States, nearly 150,000 people vacationed in the world of VRChat, setting concurrent user records with the majority using headsets. And last Saturday, January 10, 2026, at 10 a.m. Pacific, Another Axiom’s Planet of the Apes welcomed an extraterrestrial visitor and also broke its own record.
The moment when approximately 110,000 people logged in to Gorilla Tag at the same time.
Before the aliens arrived at Gorilla Tag, there was a long accumulation of lore that began with the sighting of a universally visible green dot in the sky. According to Another Axiom, more than 110,000 people simultaneously wore headsets to witness the moment a green comet crashed into Earth as a once-in-a-lifetime live event held exclusively in virtual reality. According to Another Axiom, more than 1 million unique users accessed the headset’s Gorilla tag between Friday and Sunday.
“Live events are the modern version of Must See TV,” writes Jake Jim, another Axiom chief marketing officer.
Virtual worlds are becoming important and trusted destinations for adults and teenagers, for countless people to party at midnight like it’s 2050 on VRChat, to gather to witness the gorilla tag comet in a few weeks, and for countless others to wander in and out of other virtual worlds. As Meta shifts its hiring focus again this week and conducts a round of layoffs, I put together this article in hopes of changing the broader narrative.
These stories should probably acknowledge a few things about VR.
VR has been around since before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook as a concept exploring the concept of presence and its relationship to concentration. To be specific, the Metaverse is science fiction and virtual reality is studied in science.
Authors Neal Stephenson wrote about the Metaverse in Snow Crash and William Gibson wrote about cyberdecks in Neuromancer, both seminal works of science fiction today. Meanwhile, for real-world VR headsets, researchers recently developed a user interface that allows a robot to actually deliver to the person wearing the headset without being disturbed by the virtual environment.
If VRChat and Gorilla Tags are cities, or public spaces, then virtual reality in 2026 is already regularly accommodating approximately 100,000 people in one location at a time. Although not everyone in each region is in the exact same room, those who go to these locations (usually on weekends) experience the same sense of togetherness that other generations from different centuries have felt together spotting Hale Bops in the sky, or singing karaoke and counting down to midnight in a happy room with friends.
“I think Gorilla Tag itself, and the VR ecosystem, relies on low-cost headsets sold in the toy aisle that are trusted by parents and child-friendly,” Jim said on the voice call. “The health of the ecosystem depends on the audience that spends money on the platform, and that audience is the younger audience, the Gorilla Tag audience.”
Last weekend, Apple livestreamed an entire Lakers game from some of its first Apple Immersive VR cameras, making Vision Pro owners feel closer than a courtside seat. Later this week, Walkabout will launch a new mini golf theme park that represents the creative output of dozens of artistic souls completing a full loop of VR as the engine of their creation. They use headsets to build courses together, more like chefs in the kitchen than architects drawing up blueprints, even if the result is architecture.
Former Oculus CTO and Meta technical advisor John Carmack once sat behind a triple-monitor setup to explain to VR enthusiasts what was to come in the next few years as Meta tried to force its way into creating the Metaverse.
“Starting to build a metaverse is not actually the best way to complete it…The metaverse is a honeypot trap for architectural astronauts,” he warned. “Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build a metaverse. … What I worry about is that we could end up with something that probably takes years and thousands of people and doesn’t contribute much to the way people actually use devices and hardware today … We need to focus on the actual product, not the technology, the architecture, or the effort.”
If you’d like to share something related to using VR, please send a message to 1-949-610-3857 or email ian@uploadvr.com.
