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50 free Virtual Reality trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 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 author Neal Stephenson named that hero Hiro Protagonist, and his Metaverse is a single Street running around a featureless black planet. Stephenson meant it as a successor to the Internet.
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 founded VPL Research in 1984, the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves; its EyePhone headset and Data Suit later appeared on screen in The Lawnmower Man. VPL went bankrupt in 1990.
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's 2012 Rift Kickstarter, whose $300 reward tier was the DK1 developer kit, reached what share of its target?
974%
974% of the target meant $2.4 million raised, and Palmer Luckey had built his first prototype at 17 in his parents' garage. Backers who pledged $275 or more were later gifted 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 seizes a Combine superweapon five years before Half-Life 2, ending a 13-year wait since Episode Two's 2007 cliffhanger. It won Best VR/AR at the 2020 Game Awards.
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, recording sensations straight from the wearer's cerebral cortex onto MiniDisc-like clips. It grossed just $17 million against a $42 million budget.
Q 14In Tron (1982), ENCOM's rogue Master Control Program began its existence as software for playing what?
Chess
Chess was the MCP's origin: Dr. Walter Gibbs wrote it, executive Ed Dillinger annexed it, and it grew into the rogue system that beams Kevin Flynn into the mainframe. David Warner voiced it uncredited while also playing Dillinger.
Q 15Which motion-sickness theory blames VR nausea on the eyes and inner ear sending clashing reports of movement?
Sensory conflict
Sensory conflict between the visual, vestibular and proprioceptive senses is the standard account; the rival postural instability idea blames poor posture adaptation. Neural mismatch adds that conflict alone is not enough.
Q 16The term 'augmented reality' is attributed to researcher Thomas Caudell, who worked in 1990 for which aircraft maker?
Boeing
Boeing was later joined by BMW and Volkswagen in putting AR on assembly lines to track process improvements. The earliest working AR systems followed in the early 1990s, starting with the Virtual Fixtures project.
Q 17The CAVE, a room whose walls are rear-projected with 3D imagery, takes its name partly from an allegory by whom?
Plato
Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic is the second meaning; the acronym itself is Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, invented by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel Sandin and Thomas DeFanti at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1992.
Q 18The 1991 Virtuality arcade pods, the first mass-produced networked VR machines, 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
'Time Moves Only When You Move' is the tagline, and the slowdown led critics to call Superhot the 'Braid of first-person shooters'. The rebuilt Superhot VR shipped for the Rift, Vive and Sony's headset.
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 seeking a royal pardon, and shipped with the headset on 22 February 2023. Sony sold slightly under 600,000 PS VR2 units in its first six weeks.
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 25A headset tracking only head rotation, not movement across the room, is said to have how many degrees of freedom?
Three
Three degrees of freedom covers pitch, yaw and roll, nodding 'yes', shaking 'no' and bobbling side to side; adding position in space makes six, which the 2019 Oculus Quest had and the Oculus Go did 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 27William Gibson coined 'cyberspace' in which 1982 short story, two years before his novel Neuromancer?
Burning Chrome
Burning Chrome described cyberspace as the 'mass consensual hallucination' of computer networks, a phrase Neuromancer turned into the furniture of cyberpunk along with 'the matrix' and 'jacking in'.
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; by 2023 The Verge reported as few as 38 daily users, a figure the platform disputed with a claim of around 8,000.
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 argued that code its former id Software staff contributed to the Rift was its property; a jury agreed in February 2017 and the parent company plus some Oculus officers were ordered to pay.