Virtual Reality Trivia
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49 free Virtual Reality trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Virtual reality has been 'five years away' for sixty years. A 1960s cinematographer built a cabinet that blew wind and smells at you, a Harvard professor hung a headset from the ceiling, and every decade since has produced a headset that was going to change everything. These 49 questions follow that story: the early prototypes and the people who named the field, the crowdfunded headset that started the modern wave, the consoles and companies that joined in, the games that actually made people keep a headset on, why the thing makes you queasy, and the novels, films and social worlds that imagined it first. It suits a tech-minded pub quiz, a classroom unit on emerging technology, or anyone who has ever lost an afternoon inside a headset. Every answer carries an explanation and a source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country opened the first embassy inside the virtual world Second Life, on its Diplomacy Island?
The Maldives
The Maldives beat Sweden to it: the Maldives' embassy on Diplomacy Island let visitors quiz a computer-generated ambassador about visas and trade. Sweden's Swedish Institute opened the second in May 2007.
Q 02The word 'metaverse' was coined in which 1992 novel, whose hacker hero delivers pizza for the Mafia?
Snow Crash
Snow Crash calls its hero Hiro Protagonist and pictures the Metaverse as one Street circling a black planet; in 2021 the coinage gave Facebook its new name, Meta Platforms.
Q 03Which author sued to have his name removed from the 1992 VR film The Lawnmower Man?
Stephen King
Stephen King's 1975 story was about a Pan-worshipping satyr who mows lawns, nothing like the film, and New Line kept his name on the video box anyway. The picture had been marketed as Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man.
Q 04The Quest 2 headset launched in 2020 requiring users to log in with what, a rule dropped after a backlash?
A Facebook account
A Facebook account was mandatory until Meta's 2022 'Meta account' system let owners unhook their headsets from Facebook logins. Some users had found their headsets unusable after their Facebook account was suspended.
Q 05Apple's Vision Pro launched without handheld controllers; a wearer selects an item by looking at it and doing what?
Pinching two fingers
Pinching two fingers together is the click: dragging the pinched fingers drags a window and flicking the wrist scrolls. An outward screen called EyeSight shows the wearer's eyes to bystanders.
Q 06Morton Heilig's Sensorama of 1962 blew wind and city smells at viewers riding what through New York?
A motorcycle
A motorcycle ride through New York came with fan-made wind and the noise and smell of the street, one of five short films Heilig made for the machine. He patented it in 1962 but never found the money to go further.
Q 07Which VPL Research founder popularised the term 'virtual reality' in the late 1980s while selling the first VR gloves?
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier co-founded VPL Research in the mid-1980s, the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves; despite the head start it filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and Sun Microsystems later bought all its patents.
Q 08Beat Saber, the rhythm game of slicing neon blocks with two sabers, comes from a studio based in which city?
Prague
Prague studio Beat Games was bought by Oculus's parent company in November 2019 and kept operating there under Oculus Studios. Czech composer Jaroslav Beck talked his way into writing the soundtrack after seeing early prototypes.
Q 09Sega's official reason for scrapping its never-released Genesis headset, Sega VR, was that the effect was too what?
Realistic
Too realistic, Sega said, so players might move about and hurt themselves; Sega of America boss Tom Kalinske instead blamed reports of motion sickness and severe headaches. At least four games were in progress when it died.
Q 10Which game company partnered with HTC on the Vive headset, whose base stations sweep rooms with infrared lasers?
Valve
Valve's base stations are nicknamed 'lighthouses' because their spinning lasers sweep the play area with timed pulses that the headset and wand controllers use to fix their position. The consumer Vive shipped in April 2016.
Q 11Oculus raised nearly ten times its $250,000 goal for the Rift in 2012 on which crowdfunding site?
Kickstarter
Kickstarter backers pledged about $2.4 million, and in 2016 Oculus thanked them: everyone who had pledged $275 or more, roughly 7,500 people, was sent a free consumer Rift.
Q 12Half-Life: Alyx, the 2020 VR prequel, sends Alyx Vance against the Combine in which occupied location?
City 17
City 17 is where Alyx sets out to seize a Combine superweapon, five years before Half-Life 2; it was the first Half-Life game since Episode Two left the story on a cliffhanger in 2007.
Q 13In Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), black-market clips of other people's memories are recorded by which device?
SQUID
Q 21In the 2018 VR adventure Moss, the player watches over a tiny hero named Quill, who is what kind of animal?
A mouse
A mouse named Quill sets out to rescue her uncle from the fire-breathing snake Sarffog, with the player cast as a giant 'Reader' turning the pages of her storybook. Developer Polyarc followed it with Moss: Book II in 2022.
Q 22Job Simulator, bundled with the HTC Vive at its 2016 launch, is set in a job museum run by what?
Robots with monitor faces
Robots with monitor faces, floating CRTs, run the museum of the '2050 Archives' where humans relive old jobs; Owlchemy Labs said it was only the second made-for-VR title to pass a million copies.
Q 23Guerrilla Games and Firesprite co-developed which PS VR2 launch exclusive, set in the world of Aloy?
SQUID stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, the name of a real sensor sensitive enough to detect extremely weak magnetic fields; in the film it records sensations straight from the wearer's cerebral cortex.
Q 14Which 1982 film's villain, the Master Control Program, began life as a humble chess program?
Tron
Tron's Master Control Program was written as a chess program by Dr. Walter Gibbs, then annexed by executive Ed Dillinger and left to grow into a tyrant; David Warner, who played Dillinger, voiced it uncredited.
Q 15Sensory conflict theory blames VR sickness on the eyes disagreeing with which organ?
The inner ear
The inner ear tells the brain the body is sitting still while the eyes report running and jumping, and the clash brings on nausea; graphics that lag behind a head turn can set off the same quarrel.
Q 16The term 'augmented reality' is attributed to researcher Thomas Caudell, who worked in 1990 for which aircraft maker?
Boeing
Boeing gave the term its first job: Caudell coined it in 1990 while designing a display to help workers visualise an aircraft's intricate systems, and BMW and Volkswagen later put AR on their own assembly lines.
Q 17The CAVE, a VR room named partly for Plato's allegory, shows its 3D imagery where?
On its walls
On its walls and floor: projectors surround viewers in 3D glasses with the scene, and sensors follow the wearer's head and redraw it, so they can walk around objects that seem to hang in mid-air.
Q 18The Virtuality arcade pods of 1991, with their headsets and multiplayer deathmatches, came from which country?
United Kingdom
United Kingdom firm W Industries grew out of Jonathan Waldern's research at Leicester Polytechnic; its signature game Dactyl Nightmare had a pterodactyl swoop down and snatch players mid-deathmatch. Each pod ran on an Amiga 3000.
Q 19In the shooter Superhot, a VR showpiece, time advances only when the player does what?
Moves
Moves is the word the tagline turns on, 'Time Moves Only When You Move': stand still and bullets all but hang in the air, so every dodge can be planned; the VR version was rebuilt with its own set of levels.
Q 20Gorilla Tag's avatars, officially nicknamed 'monkes', are gorillas missing which body part?
Legs
Legs are missing: creator Kerestell 'Lemming' Smith's arm-pushing locomotion reminded a friend of a gorilla, so the avatars became legless 'monkes'. It went into early access on Quest and SteamVR in 2021.
Horizon Call of the Mountain
Horizon Call of the Mountain casts not Aloy but Ryas, a disgraced former Shadow Carja soldier who is offered a royal pardon for finding what is enraging the machines; it launched with the headset in February 2023.
Q 24Which technique, enabled by eye tracking in PS VR2 and Vision Pro, draws full detail only where the wearer is looking?
Foveated rendering
Foveated rendering copies the eye's fovea, sharp at the gaze point and cheap in the periphery; a 'fixed' variant skips eye tracking and just assumes you look at the centre. Vive Pro Eye and Quest Pro use it too.
Q 25Adding which ability turns a three-degrees-of-freedom headset into a six-degrees-of-freedom one?
Tracking position in space
Tracking position in space adds moving forward, sideways and up to the three rotations of pitch, yaw and roll, so a wearer can lean and walk; the 2019 Oculus Quest could do it and the Oculus Go could not.
Q 26Which artefact, named after a household fixture, describes the visible grid of gaps between pixels in early headsets?
Screen-door effect
Screen-door effect describes the fine black lines between pixels, like looking through the mesh of an insect screen, which is why headset makers chase ever higher pixel density. Projectors show it too at low resolutions.
Q 27Which author coined the word 'cyberspace' in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome?
William Gibson
William Gibson later admitted he chose 'cyberspace' because it sounded like an effective buzzword, 'evocative and essentially meaningless'; his 1984 novel Neuromancer carried it into everyday speech.
Q 28Which landmark stood behind Mark Zuckerberg's mocked 2022 avatar selfie, posted for a social-VR launch in France?
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower and Spain's Sagrada Família were rendered so crudely that Twitter compared the image unfavourably with Second Life and Twisted Metal. The post announced Meta's social VR app's arrival in France and Spain on 16 August 2022.
Q 29Which Ethereum-based virtual world saw a plot of its land sell for nearly $2.5 million in November 2021?
Decentraland
Decentraland parcels had sold for about $20 at its 2017 launch, paid in its MANA token; in October 2022 a tracker counted as few as 38 users transacting in a day, a figure the platform disputed with a claim of 8,000 daily visitors.
Q 30Which publisher won a $500 million jury verdict against Oculus in 2017, claiming code in the Rift was its property?
ZeniMax Media
ZeniMax Media won its award in early 2017 even though the jury found no stolen trade secrets, only a broken non-disclosure agreement and copyright breaches; a judge later halved the sum and the two sides settled in 2018.