More Than a Game: How VR Reshaped Anton Orlov's Work, Health and Creative Life

Anton Orlov spent eight hours inside a virtual reality headset the first time he ever tried one — almost no breaks, trying out equipment on-site at a game studio he was visiting for work. He walked out in love with the technology. Then he went home and couldn't justify buying his own.

That gap — between fascination and ownership — stretched for a few years. Orlov, a senior software developer at X-Team, followed every new release, tested headsets at conferences and watched the indie VR scene develop from a distance. When he finally picked up an Oculus Rift in January 2019, it set off a chain of changes he hadn't anticipated: in how he moves, how he creates and how he thinks about what VR can actually do for people.

In this story, Orlov traces his path from early VR enthusiast to multi-device owner, walks through the apps and games that shaped his experience and makes the case for why VR's most meaningful benefits have little to do with gaming at all.

From Conference Booths to a 3-Headset Setup

Orlov's interest in VR predated the first commercial headsets. He was following the media around the technology long before the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive launched, and when those devices arrived he was working at a local gaming media website. A visit to a game studio gave him his first real session — eight hours across every headset they had. "I totally fell in love with it," he says. "I still couldn't justify buying a headset, though."

By the time he did buy one, the market had moved on considerably. Today Orlov owns three devices: the original Oculus Rift, a Valve Index and an Oculus Quest. He kept the Rift even after upgrading to the Index because the Index doesn't run Oculus-exclusive titles — and there are many of those, most of them worth playing. In practice, though, the Rift sits mostly unused. "The Index is such an incredible upgrade in terms of fidelity and immersion," he says.

The Quest occupies a different category entirely. Unlike the Index or Rift, it is a self-contained device with no PC tether required and an active modding community around it. With some effort, Orlov says, you can run the original Half-Life or Quake directly on a Quest — an amazing experience, he says. He uses the Quest and the Index roughly equally. If he had to keep only one, he'd choose the Index for its experience quality, but he's unambiguous about his affection for the Quest: "It's an amazing toy to play with if you're willing to dive a bit deeper than what the Oculus Store offers you."

His favorite game varies by criteria. For pure fun and polish, he points to Stormland — "fun, beautiful and very polished," with a story he enjoyed. For time spent and replayability, the answer is closer to a tie between Beat Saber and Pistol Whip. Both are rhythm games, and both, he says, make you feel remarkable. Both also run on the Quest, which matters when that's the device he has handy.

The Apps That Changed What VR Meant to Him

Games brought Orlov into VR, but it was software in less obvious categories that kept deepening his relationship with the medium.

For anyone using SteamVR with a Valve Index, his top non-game recommendation is OVR Toolkit. It pulls your desktop windows into the VR space, letting you stay connected while inside a headset — browsing, communicating or even working while inhabiting a shared virtual room through something like VRChat or Bigscreen. "I know people who work in VR," Orlov says, describing a style of remote collaboration that he considers genuinely practical.

For designers and developers building VR content, he singles out Microsoft Maquette, a prototyping tool that lets you place and arrange objects at scale inside a virtual environment. Scale, he notes, is difficult to assess on a flat monitor. Having it as a visceral, spatial reality changes the design process.

But the app with the most personal impact was VRChat — which he describes, accurately, as "the best-known and weirdest one of all." He is candid that he wouldn't send a new VR user there first. The platform is "absolutely mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time." Yet for anyone interested in game development and excited about VR, he calls it the best available platform to actually show work to an audience: "Instead of making something to publish on your ArtStation for ten other people to see, you can make a VRChat world and, with some luck, get tens of thousands of visits in a couple of months."

VRChat also introduced him to a hobby he hadn't expected to develop: 3D modeling and lighting of virtual environments, built in Blender and Unity. The community of world-builders inside VRChat kept pulling him back to both tools every day after work. "I don't think I would ever have improved as much as I did otherwise," he says. "So this one has a special place in my heart. Weird, sometimes scary and even questionable, but special nonetheless."

Then there is the physical side. Orlov's average VR session runs four to five hours and burns somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 calories — a figure that arrived not through a fitness plan but simply as a byproduct of playing rhythm games and moving. He says he feels meaningfully better about himself and his body than he did a year earlier, and the change happened largely on its own. It also shifted his tolerance for standing: he has since bought a standing desk because, after hours of VR play, sitting for long stretches started to feel like the unusual choice.

Where VR Is Headed — and the Stigma It Still Has to Shake

When Orlov thinks about what has improved most in VR over recent years, he lands on a single word: presence. Not any one feature, but the accumulation of advances — higher frame rates, better resolution, full-body tracking, more convincing object interaction — that together produce the sensation of actually being somewhere. Current hardware can run at 144 frames per second with a resolution that doesn't suffer from pixelation or blurring at arm's length. Boneworks, played on a Valve Index, is the example he reaches for: the experience, he says, feels "pretty surreal" given how recent the first Oculus Rift prototypes were.

He's careful to note, though, that every current headset still feels like first-generation hardware. No device on the market yet represents a clear generational leap — which makes recommending VR to newcomers genuinely complicated.

For the near future, he expects the biggest advances to come in input and feedback: Oculus hand tracking, VR gloves and similar technologies are improving every year, and Orlov hopes they will become consumer-friendly enough to enable more realistic interaction. Better input, he believes, is the unlock that makes the next wave of VR experiences possible.

What excites him most, though, is simpler than hardware specs. More people are starting to engage with VR — and the Oculus Quest, specifically, has helped make that happen by offering a genuinely good experience in an approachable package. The remaining obstacle is the stigma: the persistent belief that VR causes nausea or discomfort. Orlov hopes the coming years chip away at that assumption, so users approach VR-based experiences with the same openness they bring to any other game.

For someone who once spent eight consecutive hours trying headsets on-site at a game studio just to understand what the technology felt like, the goal is straightforward: he wants more people to find out for themselves.

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