Hey everyone! Please accept my welcome to /r/virtualreality, a common ground for discussion relating to Virtual Reality and Virtual Worlds. Due to the recent acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook we have received an influx of new users looking to broaden their virtual horizons. I'm sorry that you've arrived under duress, and hope that your interest in virtual reality persists through this event. In the meantime, we have a few matters of housekeeping to address:

Subreddit Template

Due to popular demand, we've temporarily disabled our custom subreddit template. The template featured a dark theme that drew inspiration from older Virtual Reality Motifs, and can still be viewed at /r/VRCSS. At the time, we were intentionally looking for something that would suggest the presense of VR in the subreddit, and older virtual reality motifs emerged as a unifying root across the various platforms and technologies. There was a several-month long process to select a designer and get input from the community before the template went live. /u/Tsssss rose to the occasion under some, in retrospect, rather oppressive constraints and designed a template that gave many that sense of VR that we were looking for.

A year later, it seems that it is time once again to begin discussing our template and -- more specifically -- how we expect a forum for virtual reality to present itself. Please reply to this thread with your comments and suggestions for a future template, and we'll assess this initial feedback in the coming days. Detailed suggestions of what works for you and what doesn't, as well specific examples of what you would like to see, would really help us out.

For the time being, I think we will leave the subreddit template disabled. We may clean up some of the template-specific leftovers, but otherwise it'll be the default so that we have a neutral ground to discuss changes. To those who have been with us for so long and those who, like me, really liked the old template... please be patient and accomodating to our new neighbors as we work through this.

Subreddit Content

We style ourselves as a common ground for discussion relating to Virtual Reality and Virtual Worlds, and that is something that I do not want to budge on -- it is foundational to the subreddit. We want you to be able to come here in times of trouble, and don't necessarily mind if you disappear off to a more specific VR-related subreddit if you've found a home there.

With that in mind, I have the following requests:

• Please don't make Oculus supporters feel unwelcome here. Shocking as it may be, some people don't/won't see the Facebook Acquisition as a showstopper. We can (and should) discuss the merits of this without mass downvoting and open hostility of those opinions.
• Please don't flood the front page with memes in lieu of discussion/news content. I never thought I would need to ask this of /r/virtualreality, we usually only get a few quality posts per week. But they are quality! We have many users here from all facets -- people in the industry, academics/researchers, hobbyists... and they've all been able to come here to discuss advances in virtual reality. Please join us in this! I'm not against memes or even low-quality content, but if it begins interfering with the mission of the subreddit then I think we will need to corral them in some way. Perhaps a thread to group them, so they can be posted as comments? I'm open to suggestions on this.
• Please review our Submission Guidelines.
• Please share your content! We're mainly about news and discussion here, but we're also curious in what you're up to in virtual reality and it is certainly welcome here.

TL;DR: Welcome! Please be a good neighbor.