AltSpaceVR will be re-launching as a new SocialVR platform this fall. Shane Harris, the founder of SideQuest is responsible.

Shane participated in a Q&A and goes into some details about how it came about, and how someone else attempted to jump on the opportunity before him. Leading to a delay in announcing the project.

Video: Alt-Space Reboot with Shane Harris & @Christian (concept artist)
Channel: BerryNiceCreative · Published: 2026-08-03 · Runtime: 2:00:35

Transcript below is from the video’s auto-captions. I did my best to clean it up.

[42:54] (question from chat: “How did you come at this direction to get all this back up?”)

[Shane Harris]
[42:57] I will tell you very honestly: there’s a guy called Danny Mac — last year, around March, he announced on social media that he was the CEO of Altspace and that he was rebirthing the platform.

[43:18] Danny actually hooked into something. Fair play to him, you know — he was able to identify that Microsoft had allowed, or willfully cancelled, the Altspace trademark, right? After they had sunset the platform, around a year later they cancelled their trademarks in the US, and he got on it, in all fairness to him.

[43:45] I was kind of monitoring that situation, as many of the people in this server, I’m sure, also were. And there were some early signs there that suggested there was a possibility that his motivations may not have been as genuine.

[44:02] And yeah, I think it was kind of a combination of how ambitious these plans were, with very little experience — and also there was a very early focus on crypto integration.

[44:22] I see everything in its own place. I think the technology behind crypto and Bitcoin and all this stuff — I think it’s amazing. It works really well. But it’s also got a high potential for abuse, right? And we’ve seen that at every level, right? Whether it’s Trump coin or Hawk coin or whatever it is, right? The idea of a pump and dump, where a lot of people can lose a lot of money — and in a lot of cases their life savings. Those are real issues.

[45:00] And it kind of resonated with me, because I, like many of you, I’ve got a pretty strong attachment to this brand. I spent many years feeling the presence of being there while all this was going on.

[45:14] So I jumped into action to see if there was something I could do to try to take over what he was doing, right? In all honesty — so that maybe I could try and better represent you guys, and all of us, as collective motivation for what this could be.

[45:39] Basically, about two or three weeks after he put in his trademark application — which was in March of last year — I put in mine in April of last year. And ever since then there’s been a little bit of back and forth there, in terms of his own progress on his trademark and my progress on mine.

[45:58] Which I’ll let you know — how this kind of stuff works, for context: his was kind of in line before me. And it was only actually about two weeks, a little over two weeks ago, that the final deadline for his trademark application — it actually expired and went into an abandoned state about two and a half months ago, and he had a two-month period within which he could revive it, which lapsed 17 days ago or something like that.

[46:31] So that’s the timing, right? That’s why we’re announcing this now. That’s why we’re really shifting into here and moving forward with this — because with his trademarks out of the way, mine is next in line.

[46:47] And that’s a long process, to be able to secure that. They have pretty long review periods, several months in between stages. So that is moving forward. We have a very, very strong position right now. And yeah, we’re basically first in line to inherit the Altspace trademark — which honestly is kind of crazy for me, in terms of coming full circle on all of this, right?

From here he goes further back, to where he started out building tools for Altspace world creators.

[47:33] Just to give you some more backstory of why this is all interesting, why it’s come full circle. So I started about 10 or 11 years ago. I was building tools for world creators using their SDK, as it was called at the time — but it became known as the old SDK, because they decided to change everything and go in a different direction.

[47:53] And at the time my tools were going to become redundant, and I made a decision: am I going to just let them become redundant, or will I try and do something else?

[48:09] So at the time I tried to build my own version of Altspace. It was called The Expanse at the time — some of you here may remember it. And I migrated all of my tools over so that you could use them for world building, right?

[48:25] Anybody here who’s familiar with the kit system, or the world builder in general, in Altspace in the later years — all of that was inspired by something I created called “Shane’s Editor”, which I’m kind of proud of, that fact. I definitely proved that it was a worthwhile effort to have tools like that, and that became the basis for Altspace to build out all of those tools later on.

[48:55] So it’s funny, right — so I spun it out into its own app. That app was submitted to Facebook at the time to get onto the Quest store, just months before the first Quest one had released. Meta rejected it.

[49:13] So that’s setback number two, right, in recent years. And the same thing again, same scenario: should I give up and abandon it all, or should I figure out another way? And it turns out that time I was super lucky, because I decided to create SideQuest.

[49:33] And yeah, here we are nearly seven years later — millions of users, millions of dollars in investment, and Google and other industry veterans backing what we’re doing. And the whole thing has led to where we are right now, because SideQuest has made it possible for me to make a bid to acquire the Altspace trademark, and to be able to bring Altspace back from the dead.

[49:59] So in a way, I owe everything I’ve got to Altspace. Had they not have made the decision to change direction all that long time ago, I wouldn’t have branched out, I wouldn’t have created SideQuest, and I wouldn’t be here today in a position to revive Altspace again.

[50:19] So yeah, in a way — don’t thank me, thank the original team at Altspace, you know.