Technologies

Meow Wolf Enters the Mini-Golf Metaverse

Exclusive: Walkabout Mini Golf is adding a new VR course designed by immersive art pioneer Meow Wolf. The designers gave us hints of what’s to come.

Walkabout Mini Golf, one of the best multiplayer apps for VR headsets, is adding a course made by art collective Meow Wolf and based on the group’s real-world experiences. It’s Meow Wolf’s first big dip into virtual reality, and it’s scheduled to arrive later this year.

It’s not as strange a move as you might think for Meow Wolf, the group behind the cult hit House of Eternal Return, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a growing bunch of other in-person destinations (Omega Mart in Las Vegas, Convergence Station in Denver).

Or maybe it is.

But in a VR/AR landscape that still doesn’t really know what a metaverse is supposed to be, this collaboration could point toward creative teams actually trying to figure this out ahead of a wave of new headsets coming later this year.

Let me back up a bit. I find well-built, custom-crafted VR experiences wonderful. I also love immersive physical spaces and theater experiences that take similar care with how groups of people explore strange new worlds together.

VR and AR’s metaverse push of the last couple of years, however, has tried to just create big open social tools with no real guidance or superstructure. These places — VRChat, the soon-to-be-closed AltSpace VR, Meta’s flailing Horizon Worlds, Rec Room — seem to either be spots where fun stuff emerges, or confusing and poorly run experiments that feel empty or alienating unless you know who you’re meeting with and where you’re going.

Sometimes, I find that it’s the in-person experiences that can craft what the virtual ones can’t yet. Meow Wolf’s in-person, multilayered, maximally dense art collective spaces struck me as the sort of way to guide more-elaborate social virtual worlds of the future. The Meow Wolf–Walkabout collaboration sounds like a bizarre and whimsical mirror-world experience that’s also a foot in the door for Meow Wolf’s future explorations in VR and AR.

meow-wolf-walkabout-vr-2 — Meow Wolf’s course will involve an intelligent alien world called Numina that plays with reality.

Meow Wolf

Weird golf

“We’ve been dreaming about making mini-golf forever,” Caity Kennedy, one of Meow Wolf’s co-founders and the group’s senior creative director, said to me during a Zoom chat. “Since a lot of our exhibits are a big thing compartmentalized with a bunch of little things, mini-golf is like a pretty hilarious and very accessible version of that.”

Another Meow Wolf co-founder, Vince Kadlubek, had been playing in VR games and experiences for years, which led to the collaboration with the team at Walkabout Mini Golf. Meow Wolf had made its own AR companion app for the House of Eternal Return installation years ago, but translating some of those designs into a VR mini-golf course is a different type of crossover experience.

Kennedy already uses some VR art tools, including Gravity Sketch, to work on designs for Meow Wolf’s physical installations. Gravity Sketch was also used as a collaborative place to dream up the VR course. “We have VR artists, we have VR developers that are working on things,” Kennedy hinted, suggesting that Walkabout’s relatively contained structure might be a good starting point.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Walkabout Mini Golf has already become one of the best social VR destinations if you have a small group of friends. This game, and Demeo, are where I tend to join a few old friends for a casual game that lasts about an hour, allows us to chat and explore, and then stop. It feels like going for a walk, or getting coffee, or going to a museum. Or playing mini-golf. Unlike more-intense VR games, or way too open social worlds with no real focus, it gives us something to do while we’re talking. It works.

“It aligned a lot with our sense of humor,” Kennedy said of the collaboration. “You can be good at golf, you can be bad at golf, you can just not play golf and go explore.”

Golf as a strange doorway

Walkabout’s golf courses have already been getting a lot more immersive over time, becoming more like walk-through theme parks or stories than just a bunch of golf holes. A course based on the classic Jim Henson film Labyrinth is like a tour of the film’s plot, and even has a side labyrinth to wander around in. There are Jules Verne courses. There’s a Myst course.

The Meow Wolf course, based on the living other-dimensional jungle world of Numina that’s part of Meow Wolf’s in-person Convergence Station experience in Denver, is meant to be a sort of parallel virtual visit, or maybe a golf course that ends up being visited by and mutated by Numina.

Kennedy hints that the way Meow Wolf’s course will work is a lot stranger and more whimsical than even previous Walkabout courses, which of course excites me. Also, the presence of Numina as a character will loom large over the experience, a “living universe that is curious about us simple animals that are wandering around, falling down stairs and things.”

“It’s not just a duplicate,” Kennedy said of the VR version of Numina versus the physical creation in Denver. “There will be a familiar experience that is twisted and freed by the mechanics of virtual reality. People who’ve been to Numina in real life [at Meow Wolf] will see a lot of things that they got to see in real life, but a lot of people who have only seen pictures will get to wander around something akin to the pictures they’ve seen.

“But, lots of differences: I mean, gravity doesn’t exist in VR. We can make things slip. We don’t have to have electrical wires, or speakers or a lot of the things that limit what we’re able to do. And we’re able to have animation that we can’t do. There’s so much fluidity that is really only possible at the moment in VR.”

A massive furry art creature sculpture in a dim jungle world room — One of the areas in Numina at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station in Denver. The VR experience will refer to the real-world place in strange ways.

Scott Stein/CNET

Virtual and real winking at each other

Disney has explored crossovers of the virtual and real. It’s created a Star Wars Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge VR game that’s set in the outer realms of the same planet Batuu as the real-life Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge parks. In theory, visiting the virtual game could inspire you to go to the actual park, or the game could be a living souvenir.

Future planned metaverse-ish explorations could have a similar vibe. Meow Wolf’s own physical spaces communicate with each other via telephones, and a ton of merchandise already extends the stories into some take-home souvenir directions. You can buy Omega Mart merchandise from the alternate-universe store’s gift shop, for example, or get books and artifacts, much like you can at Disney’s stores in Galaxy’s Edge. In some ways, Meow Wolf’s virtual spaces may aim to do the same.

“Mini-golf is not a collective world, so there can’t be live feeds into anything, but having connections between the two, where people can at least see one from the other, or use something they found in one to affect the other… this is going to be kind of our test case,” Kennedy said. “This is our first foray into connecting a real world exhibit with virtual reality.”

Lucas Martell, the director of Walkabout Mini Golf, said the Meow Wolf course “is going to be much more of an experience,” admitting that the company is starting to flex out with more experimental designs that start becoming more like one-hour excursions for groups, as opposed to just a casual sport.

Even though Walkabout is a VR game, the company has also released a phone-based version that’ll use augmented reality, sort of: Courses can be seen through the phone screen, and swings happen by moving your phone like a real putter. The phone version is arriving ahead of Meow Wolf’s course, meaning more people could try it out.

“The irony is that a lot of people playing probably haven’t even been to an actual Meow Wolf,” Martell said. Considering Meow Wolf is still an organization some people haven’t heard of, much less seen, a little mini golf game like Walkabout could be a chance to open up awareness to a whole bunch more people. As someone who’s been lucky enough to check out the real-world Meow Wolf spaces, I’m looking forward to visiting a small virtual shard of it in my home.

Meow Wolf’s course isn’t available until later this year, but I can’t wait to play it with a few friends. We could explore those strange spaces together in VR as we talk, just like we’d do in the real world, too.

Iranian President Pezeshkian to head to New York for UN meeting as Trump warns of no-deal consequences

Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s economy or eliminate its leadership if Tehran doesn’t strike a deal, complicating efforts at diplomacy.

President Masoud Pezeshkian will lead an Iranian delegation at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, amid renewed hopes for a diplomatic solution to the Middle East conflict.

Pezeshkian will address the assembly and present Iran’s positions on “international developments,” according to the country’s semi-official Tasnim news agency, with a particular focus on its war with the U.S. and Israel.

He will also hold talks with the leaders of several countries on the sidelines of the event, which is scheduled to take place Sept. 22 to 26, and 28.

The Iranian delegation’s attendance at the UN has renewed hopes for a diplomatic solution to the war, lifting market sentiment on Monday, with stocks rising, oil prices easing and global bond yields falling sharply.

But U.S. President Donald Trump, who has said he would be open to meeting Pezeshkian during the assembly, has threatened to destroy Iran’s economy or eliminate its leadership if Tehran doesn’t strike a deal.

Trump told Fox News on Sunday that the only options on the table were “wiping Iran out,” or letting its economy “rot,” unless both sides reach a deal.

Separately, Iran’s military said that its intelligence suggested a new, large-scale strike being prepared by the U.S. and its allies, warning of “painful” retaliation across the Middle East. Regional countries backing such a strike would be treated as parties to the conflict, it said.

“If the U.S. makes any mistake against the Islamic Republic of Iran, all its positions and interests in the region will be targeted by sustained, effective and painful attacks,” the Khatam al-Anbia Central Headquarters of Iran said, according to Tasnim.

Houthi-Saudi conflict complicates diplomacy hopes

The U.S. State Department this weekend issued a security alert citing risks of unforeseen escalation in the Middle East, telling Americans to exercise more vigilance and be aware of possible flight cancellations and airspace closures.

The warnings came after Iran-backed Houthi militants claimed missile and drone attacks on Riyadh on Saturday, triggering the first air-raid alert in the Saudi capital since fighting escalated in July.

Saudi authorities said they intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile and reported no casualties or damage. The Houthis also attempted to target civilians and infrastructure in several parts of the kingdom, Saudi-led coalition forces spokesperson Major-General Turki al-Maliki said on X on Saturday, though those attacks were thwarted by the country’s air defenses.

Oil prices have pulled back in recent days despite widening hostilities, as traders hope for a recovery in energy shipments from oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Oil prices will remain high despite U.S. progress in moving oil through the Strait of Hormuz, a team of analysts at Eurasia Group said in a Saturday note. Any rebound in oil flows would not be enough to address the overall market deficit, they said, forecasting Brent prices to trade in a higher band of $90-110 per barrel through the rest of this year.

“Iran’s leadership will stick with resistance, even as they quarrel internally,” according to the consultancy firm, as Tehran seeks to use military proxies and tanker attacks to keep a chokehold on shipping flows, to pressure Washington into concessions.

Tehran has insisted that it would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until Washington fulfills its commitment under the June memorandum, which called for lifting the naval blockade of Iranian ports, easing sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets and ending U.S. military threats.

Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Sunday that Iran must keep on fighting and negotiating, to push back its enemies, and only work on diplomacy when it has the upper hand on the battlefield.

Technologies

U.S. crude oil drops below $100 a barrel as Trump signals willingness to negotiate with Iran

U.S. crude oil prices slipped back below $100 a barrel after President Trump signaled openness to talks with Iran and halted plans to bomb Yemen, while Middle East supply flows remained robust despite pipeline disruptions.

Crude oil prices declined for the fourth straight session on Monday after President Donald Trump reportedly decided against bombing Yemen for the time being and indicated he was open to diplomatic engagement with Iran.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures fell 2.7% to $97.59 per barrel by 7:48 a.m. ET, while Brent crude, the global benchmark, slipped 2.8% to $101 a barrel. The market has risen more than 11% so far this month.

Trump told Fox News he would likely be receptive to meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the United Nations General Assembly later this week.

According to The New York Times, the president has decided not to target the Iran‑aligned Houthi militants for now, despite requests from Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, crude shipments from the Middle East appear resilient after Saudi Arabia shut down its East‑West pipeline following attacks. JPMorgan analysts noted in a September 18 report that oil flows from the region remain surprisingly strong, averaging 17.1 million barrels per day over the past 10 days—about 6.1 million bpd below the 2025 average.

Potential supply disruptions persist. Trump told Fox that he is in a “deciding mode” and that “very big things” are expected soon regarding the U.S.–Iran conflict.

Prices are likely to stay closely linked to the pace of export normalization and diplomatic progress, said Daniel Takieddine, co‑founder and CEO of Sky Links Capital Group.

Any setback or renewed deterioration in shipping conditions would tighten the physical market and restore upward pressure on prices, Takieddine added.

Technologies

White House TV press pool won’t cover Trump after CNN ban

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Politics & Policy
White House TV press pool won’t cover Trump after CNN ban
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Politics & Policy

White House TV press pool won’t cover Trump after CNN ban

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