According to The Verge, Atlas Obscura is planning to launch a WebXR-based social 3D experience called the Obscura Society in early 2026. This virtual lounge, powered by HTC’s Viverse platform, will let community members hang out using 3D avatars, have voice chats, and explore places from the site’s catalog of over 32,000 strange locations. The company’s chief content officer Doug Baldinger says the goal is accessibility, after earlier bets on affordable VR headsets like Samsung’s Gear VR and Meta’s Oculus Go fizzled out due to hardware limitations and consumer disinterest. The new platform will be embedded directly into the Atlas Obscura website, requiring no account, and is expected to draw most users from desktop and mobile. The project involves New Canvas studio and is partially funded through HTC’s creator funds, and it will feature an AI-powered virtual bartender serving up facts from the site’s database.
The platform pivot
Here’s the thing: Atlas Obscura’s journey here is a perfect microcosm of the broader immersive tech saga. They got excited about VR a decade ago, bet on the cheap, accessible hardware of the day (Gear VR, Oculus Go), and got burned. It just wasn’t good enough. Without six degrees of freedom, it felt more like a 360-degree photo booth than actually being somewhere. And let’s be real, most of those headsets became expensive paperweights within a month.
So their shift to HTC’s Viverse for this new project is fascinating. They openly admit they didn’t know much about it at first. But it won because of that crucial, boring-sounding feature: no account required. That’s the killer app for accessibility. Meta’s Horizon Worlds or even VRChat have walls—you need an account, you need the app. Viverse can be embedded like a YouTube video. You click a link on an article about Cat Island and bam, you’re in a 3D lounge talking about it. That’s a radically lower barrier.
Not a metaverse, a 3D web
I think the terminology here is key. HTC’s Viverse head of growth explicitly says they avoid the word “metaverse” because it implies one giant, interconnected world. Instead, he likens their spaces to YouTube embeds—discrete 3D web entities. That’s a smarter framing. It’s less daunting. It’s about enhancing a specific website community, not asking people to move their digital lives to a new universe.
And the device-agnostic approach is the only one that makes sense for a mass audience right now. Viverse says they see equal usage from desktop, mobile, and VR, and that more Meta headset users are on their platform than HTC Vive users. That tells you everything. The future, at least for the next few years, is multiplatform. It has to be. Trying to force everyone into a VR headset is a recipe for the same dust-gathering failure they saw before. For more on the challenges of headset-centric thinking, this critique of the Vision Pro’s isolation hits on similar themes.
The AI elephant in the virtual room
Now, about that AI bartender. It’s a neat idea—a conversational interface to the site’s massive trove of weird facts. But Baldinger admits AI is “a point of contention” at Atlas Obscura. And for good reason. The company recently had staff cuts and internal strife over the CEO’s AI plans, as reported by Breaker and Semafor. For a brand built on human-curated obscurity, automating discovery feels… risky. Can an AI truly convey the quirky, human stories behind these places? They’re betting it can foster connection, but it’s a tightrope walk.
A new kind of third place
So what’s the big picture? New Canvas is framing these lounges as “third places” for the metaverse era. Not a game, not work, just a place to hang with like-minded people. That’s the real bet. It’s that people want low-stakes, shared curiosity. A virtual pub where the conversation is always about the world’s hidden wonders, with a portal right there to jump into a deeper VR experience if you want.
Basically, Atlas Obscura is giving up on VR as *the* destination. Instead, they’re using the 3D web as a new kind of social hub—a lobby that can lead to deeper immersion for some, but is welcoming to all. It’s a pragmatic, interesting pivot. Will it work? Who knows. But after the VR false starts, betting on the open web feels like the right move. You can check out their current Quest app, Android XR version, or Steam release to see where they’ve been. The future, though, is at a browser tab near you.
