Pluto VR

Pluto VR
Information
Industry	Virtual reality, social VR, cloud VR streaming
Founder	John Vechey, Forest Gibson, Jared Cheshier, Jonathan Geibel
Headquarters	Seattle, Washington, United States
Notable Personnel	Jared Cheshier (co-founder and CEO), Forest Gibson (co-founder)
Products	Pluto, PlutoSphere

Pluto VR (also written PlutoVR) is a Seattle virtual reality software company that developed Pluto, a communication application that ran alongside other SteamVR applications, and PlutoSphere, a cloud streaming service for Meta Quest headsets. The company was announced in February 2015 by John Vechey, a co-founder of the casual game studio PopCap Games, together with Forest Gibson, Jared Cheshier and Jonathan Geibel.

Unlike Social VR platforms such as AltspaceVR and VRChat, where users enter a shared virtual space, Pluto was designed as a layer that kept a call and the participants' avatars with the user while they moved between different VR applications. The company raised a US$13.9 million Series A round in 2017, contributed to the OpenXR overlay extension, and hosted a 2019 W3C workshop on accessibility in immersive web standards. In March 2024 it announced that it was shutting down PlutoSphere, discontinuing its products, downsizing its team and beginning to wind down operations.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Founding, team backgrounds, Series A, Pluto Steam release and features, W3C workshop, OpenXR overlay credit, Monado sponsorship, PlutoSphere launch details and 2024 shutdown checked against all 16 cited sources. About review dates.

History

Founding (2015)

Vechey left PopCap, which Electronic Arts had acquired, to start Pluto VR. He told GamesBeat in February 2015 that he had been inspired to pursue VR after hearing Palmer Luckey speak at the DICE Summit the year before, and that he was funding the Seattle company himself at that stage. His co-founders came from different backgrounds. Jonathan Geibel had spent 14 years as director of technology at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he led a high-performance computing team. Jared Cheshier had been a partner at a Seattle development firm that built AR and VR projects for clients and had also worked at Microsoft and Valve. Forest Gibson had worked in VR, marketing, video and crowdfunding.

At launch the company said it would not make games, at least at first. Its stated focus was communication and collaboration in VR and augmented reality, beginning with tools for collaboration and learning such as virtual whiteboards and conference calls, and it said it would support several VR and AR platforms. In a 2020 interview on the Voices of VR podcast, Gibson described Impossible Object as "our previous company that morphed into Pluto later".

Pluto VR was one of the studios Oculus named in its September 2015 announcement of the talk program for Oculus Connect 2, alongside ILM, Owlchemy Labs and Minority Media. The company's session there was Stories and Learnings from the Forefront of Virtual Shared Presence.

Series A and the Pluto alpha (2017)

In April 2017 Pluto VR raised US$13.9 million in a Series A round led by Maveron, with Madrona Venture Group, Trilogy Equity Partners and individual investors also taking part. UploadVR reported that the money would go toward hiring more staff, continued development and rolling the software out to more users for testing; an alpha was open to sign-ups. UploadVR described the overlay with the example of one person playing Arizona Sunshine while talking to and seeing the avatar of another person playing Superhot. Users could also meet inside the same application, such as Google Earth VR.

Steam Early Access (2018)

Pluto was released as a free Early Access application on Steam on 22 February 2018, with Pluto VR listed as developer and publisher. Digital Trends reported that it worked with the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality headsets alongside existing SteamVR games. The publication reported that Vechey did not like the "Skype of VR" label some outlets had used: "We're not big fans of the 'this for that,'" he said.

Standards work (2019-2021)

Pluto VR hosted the W3C Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards, held in Seattle on 5 and 6 November 2019. W3C's report lists PlutoVR first among the hosts, together with Maveron, We Make Reality, Virtual World Society and the Seattle Immersive Technology Association; Google, Twitch and Samsung Internet sponsored the event.

Jared Cheshier of Pluto VR is one of the listed contributors to XR_EXTX_overlay, an OpenXR extension that lets a separate application create an "overlay session" whose content the runtime composites on top of the main OpenXR application. The other listed contributors are from LunarG and Epic Games. Collabora said in November 2020 that its work on native overlay support in the open source Monado OpenXR runtime had been sponsored by Pluto VR. In the December 2020 Voices of VR interview, Cheshier said the company was a member of both the W3C and the Khronos Group.

PlutoSphere (2021-2024)

In February 2021 the company announced PlutoSphere, a service for running high-end SteamVR content on standalone headsets such as the Oculus Quest by streaming it from cloud computers. UploadVR reported that Pluto was testing several cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, and planned to distribute the client through SideQuest because Facebook did not allow VR streaming apps on the Oculus Store.

PlutoSphere launched in early access on SideQuest in February 2022 for the Oculus Quest and Meta Quest 2. In 2024 UploadVR wrote that the company's inability to publish on the Quest Store or App Lab had kept it from using Quest in-app payments. Co-founder and CEO Jared Cheshier told UploadVR that the lack of official distribution "hampered our marketing strategies, restricted our growth and prevented us from fulfilling our usage obligations". The company had committed to a level of usage with an Amazon Web Services reseller and, without enough customers, faced an eight-figure bandwidth bill. It said it had spent more than a year trying to renegotiate that commitment before reaching an impasse.

On 5 March 2024 UploadVR reported that PlutoSphere had stopped selling tokens and that existing tokens were expected to remain usable for about 30 days. The company's statement said it was shutting the service down "imminently", discontinuing its products, downsizing its team and beginning to wind down operations. As of October 2026 the Steam store still lists Pluto as a free Early Access application and states that the developers' last update was more than six years earlier.

Products

Product	Released	Platform	Description
Pluto	22 February 2018 (Steam Early Access)	SteamVR on Windows PCs	Free cross-application voice and avatar communication app; avatars shown as floating heads and hands
PlutoSphere	February 2022 (early access on SideQuest)	Oculus Quest, Meta Quest 2	Cloud PC VR streaming service paid for with tokens; shut down in 2024

Pluto

Pluto was set up from a desktop interface, where users created an account, configured an avatar and added contacts by username. Incoming calls appeared there as a dialog to answer before putting on the headset. In VR, contacts appeared as floating heads and hands, and voice chat was positional, so a voice seemed to come from the speaker's avatar. Avatars stayed with the user when they switched applications; Road to VR's Ben Lang tested this while moving between Tilt Brush and Climbey. Pluto had its own menu in the SteamVR dashboard for hiding avatars while keeping the call active and for inviting others, and a key binding sent a screenshot of the user's view to the people in the call. Digital Trends noted that the app had no public rooms or meeting spaces; it was meant for talking with people the user already knew.

Participants could not see each other's virtual environments at the 2018 launch. The company had experimented with passing objects between applications: Road to VR reported that a Pluto employee sent Lang a Tilt Brush painting that he could open in his own copy of the program. On its Steam page, Pluto VR listed cross-platform support, sharing the user's VR view and faster connections among its Early Access plans.

PlutoSphere

PlutoSphere gave each user a remote cloud PC with Steam pre-installed, on which other Windows applications could also be installed. Users could play games they already owned from Steam, the Epic Games Store or the Oculus PC app, and the virtual rig was wiped at the end of each session, so games had to be downloaded again. Road to VR listed the virtual rig as an Intel Xeon Platinum 8259CL processor at 2.50 GHz, an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU and 32 GB of RAM. MIXED reported that the service was built on NVIDIA CloudXR and used Amazon Web Services. The recommended setup was a 50 Mbps internet connection and a Wi-Fi 6 router on the 5 GHz band.

Early access users received a limited amount of free time each day and could buy more with tokens. Gibson estimated the cost at roughly US$1 to US$3 per hour, depending on how many tokens were bought at once. When UploadVR's David Heaney tried a demonstration in 2021 that ran on an Amazon Web Services instance in Ireland, he wrote that latency felt essentially identical to Virtual Desktop on a local network with a PC.

See also

• Social VR
• Telepresence
• OpenXR
• NVIDIA CloudXR
• Virtual Desktop