Furality Ultra shows creative contrast in a technology world looking to homogenize

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Furality for 2026 has completed its strongest year yet. Their attendance continued to grow by gaining 1,000 more attendees at 27,943. This growth has tempered, likely due to headwinds primarily caused by a new requirement of verifying age through electronic tools required to attend starting this year. They raised $116,121 according to the latest announcement for Resilient Hearts animal sanctuary, a LGBTQ+ run animal rescue.

The theme for this year was “Ultra”, a gaming theme where you visit the virtual world of the fictional console of the Ultravox Prism that is set to shut down at the end of the weekend. Many of the references were to the consoles of the mid-2000s that included loading intros and health warnings of overplaying that preceded many games of the era to invoke nostalgia toward that era of gaming long past.

The format of this gathering is seeming to become established and with that being the polish of the worlds is better than they ever have been. This article will go over the improvements found, but this year will primarily focus on the Dealer’s Mall in later sections. For a more larger view of Furality it is recommended reading our premiere article covering Furality Umbra from 2024. [2025 Furality Somna also available]

The Main Stage

The main stage this year was a smaller and more intimate space craft, with a two layer approach with upper and lower seating and typically had instances for 20 people. Though those who were more daring could actually stand on the archway which sprawled above the stage and look down upon it.

I found this to be one of the worlds this year that one could argue may not have been as cool or memorable as last year’s which had a stage below a sprawling book shelf. Though there was an improvement in the colliders not impacting seating as much as had occurred last year.

New technology implemented this year dealt with the audio of presentations. There was a surround sound system that allowed for audio channels to feel as if you were more in the video. This could get confusing as it wasn’t really advertised anywhere so when there was cross talk in the video being projected behind you, you would start to feel it was audio coming from the audience rather than the video itself. This is due to how on VR Chat people in the audience may not be silent as they would be in real life because you can always mute people conversing amongst each other during a show in the virtual spaces.

When you hear someone back there you would look behind you and when no one was there, it’d make you feel a bit silly, but once you knew what was going on you could adapt quickly. Some people I was with did voice the desire to turn such a feature off, however, which didn’t seem to be an option. Fortunately for them it was used rather sparingly.

The Meets

An improvement to the fur meets this year was not one within the VR world, but within the handling of their overall logistics. Most meets would have two versions that would be held about 12 hours apart from one another. For instance a “Kangaroo and Marsupial” meet would take place on Friday and 2PM ET and then also take place at Saturday 2AM ET the following early morning. This would allow people of different time zones to worry less about having to sleep and entirely miss the meet they desired. I ran into this issue during the 2024 Furality (Umbra) where the Kangaroo meet was at 4AM in the morning. Though to be fair, for Australia that would have been around the early evening, so it was in that way understandable.

The world was a bird observation game that had an outdoorsy vibe. Including a camp ground, waterfront, and lush greenery. One of the buildings had a peculiar aesthetic where the upper loft seemed to be held by a buttress of cylindrical beams that had the color of cigarettes. The closing ceremony credit roll would have a picture of a bird sitting next to a pack of Newports, which I believe highlights the fact I wasn’t the only one to make that connection and someone on staff probably heard it as well.

Apparently there was a bird watching minigame, but usually when I was there it was primarily to conversate with others, so I didn’t partake. One core memory that was a bit silly is when I was in the rodent meet with some friends, I peeked into the satellite hut and saw 4 people in Chittari avatars on the console. I make a joke about “looks like we got a mouse infestation”. At this point one of them shouted that they were not mice but Chittari. “Oh my mistake,” I said and turned to leave the room, but I didn’t make it a few feet when I heard one of them shout “Get him!” from back inside. At that point I was chased about the server, having to jump over floating platforms before I was cut off and surrounded.

The outdoorsy and camp-like feel was nice, and I did like this meet area better than last year’s which was a bit more monochrome based on a chess set. I would note that this would be more personal preference than objective. Like the main stage I can see one arguing their preferences one way or another.

The spawn point was moved to a side building during the event as the original spawn point in a sort of cobble square seemed to attract the most traffic of people just hanging out. It’s nice to know the world designers are willing to change things from their original vision when the audience causes a need to shift it by hanging around what was originally intended to be the “loading zone”. More often than not furries just tend to complain about furries hanging out in the loading zone of worlds, but I think that it may be that many world designers don’t take into consideration that congregation is more a natural phenomenon and a world should be designed to encourage the leaving of said entryway.

Club FYNN

This year’s club took place on a raceway— or so it would have you believe because as it turns out it’s actually another spaceship. But unlike the ship of the mainstage, this one you move around on the outside and it has a very sleek body, similar to that of an F-Zero racer. It does have part of a race course that acts as its wings if you were to look from a different angle.

At first when I arrived at the dance floor I was a bit concerned as the floor looked very plain and industrial, though the surrounding was very nice and vibrant including a bar with a bunny thumping to the rhythm in the background on television screens. As soon as the first set hit though I realized why the dance area was so plain. Unlike last year where the dance area was static with some light visual motifs, this year there were drones and dynamic projections that allowed for a more three dimensional experience. Trees, NPCs, reticles and explosions all came alive on the floor itself interacting with the dancing space. Each set became more than just about the music as in prior years, but also experiencing the lightshow that went with it.

The sets had the feeling that the DJs were supposed to be some creature off your ship’s dance floor bow that you were ending up in contact with, and that they would summon lights and creatures to aim toward the dancers. Some highlights included a giant beast stomping the dancefloor with their paws, a spaceship flying and attacking the dancefloor with a reticle, and even a set that made the entire instance and all the colorful furries monochromatic.

They were even nice enough to place an easter egg that later was disseminated amongst folks on having an option to turn on flying so you could float about the floor and to the upper loft by flapping your arms like wings. Which became a sort of minigame for me to try and figure out how to navigate around in this unwieldy way.

This was also the most lived in the world with some instances having the option to join over a hundred people in the same instance. This came with warnings on using a Medium complexity or better avatar and to avoid changing avatars in the instance itself to help with load times. Also, it brought attention to the culling options presented in the tutorial video in opening ceremonies.

This club was my second favorite world this year behind the mall. It showed a lot of care to detail and was both detailed and subtle where it needed to be to allow its dynamic set shows to hold the spotlight. My recollection of last year’s club was that there was the bird plumage video screen, but outside that it felt like the DJs worked within the confines of that space. In this year the set and room felt like they belonged to the performer. I honestly do not know where they can improve upon this design or idea in the future, but a year is a long time in the technical world.

The Hub

The roughest start of a world this year went to the hub. Its opening was delayed significantly due to technical issues in both itself and other worlds, Club FYNN itself dealing with a three hour delay. From what people were indicating, the world had features removed and simplified to improve performance, which could be felt in that the map felt less cohesive than the others. I’m typically good at navigating new worlds, but this one could be a challenge with the teleports and verticality. I eventually got the hang of the layout though.

In this hub city world there were sky scrapers and many buildings to explore using a parkour mechanic. I think they may have been inspired by the old game JetSetRadio. I had not worked in a world that had parkour before, so this was my first intro to these mechanics, as I’m sure it was for others. Due to this I think it made navigation all the more perplexing for some, particularly when the world would reset you to your ledge if you fell down. This caused some confusion and frustration for those who actually wanted to get down. I discovered later that you could hold the jump button to override the reset when you hit the ground.

The world had a map you could pull up, as the previously released dealers mall did that would show your position along with others in the world. There were minigames that could be played including a cake slice hunt, a shooting gallery in space, and a parkour time trial challenge. Other elements of the world were further achievements you could find as well as an artist gallery that reminded me of the museum in the Super Animal Royale world.

Another addition is that in the middle of the world was a screen that acted as a— well, a “hub”. At this screen you could navigate the other worlds without using the Furality website directly. This is the first time I was seeing a mechanic like this in the Hub world that actually made it a hub, though this may have been an oversight on my part. Maybe one day the dream is to have an event rely as little on the website to navigate as possible, and it seems like it's starting to become more possible.

The firework show would take place over this city, but you would view it from a spaceship rather than from the ground.

Fire Work Show

This one returned to its tradition of having a more centralized viewpoint that Umbra had which means there aren't many views to go over this year. There was a way to get on top of the ship you were viewing through a door and then you could also stand on the wing. However, the show would always be you looking forward to the action which made it more a universal experience.

A big reason is that there were two distinct layers of this show, the explosions and the drone work. In the real world you usually wouldn’t mix the two styles of shows and when you see an explosion pierce through the flying machinations here, you’re reminded as to why. Allowing both of these together in the virtual allowed for spectacles though that you would normally not get in the real world. The new addition of the drones worked with the theme rather well.

Some highlights were when the show would emulate games such as Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Asteroids. Sometimes explosions would also be in more pixelated and angular style like in very old computer games. Like with Sombra the tone shifted in the finale to a more somber motif. Colors swirled around the perimeter of the dome city and joined up at the top before slipping down the center as the drones spelled out “Thank you For Playing.” Then the swirls came together in the center and plummeted down to the main pad like a fiber optic cable letting out a signal for the final time while the drones rearranged a disconnect symbol and flashed red with a disc wind down sound to close it out.

The Dealer’s Mall

Of the spaces that have evolved in ways for the better, it is undeniable that the Dealer’s world has shown the most drastic improvement of the three years. The world was laid out like a mall with large areas for each type of services and items for sale. The amount of categories increased from the prior year. And also unlike the prior year, the space felt like an actual mall rather than a VR world as this was more than just a single area cloned to serve differing booths. Videos waited until you stepped into the booth to load instead of as you were just passing by, improving technical issues and annoyances by people moving past booths. Last year, the pool color was the only indicator of which region of the den you were in, this year they were all unique biomes: a pine forest, a frosty cave, a desert indoor mall, and a soft cherry blossom sector.

Hang out spaces also were implemented into medians between booth rows on the perimeter, allowing the flow of places to converse and places to shop to be within the same areas as the shopping and browsing. This made the space feel more lived in. The prior year the ‘converse space’ near the billboard of each section often got ignored and people just sat on the cold lofts in front of the booths to converse.

With persistence technologies now more accessible to world makers, the designer of the mall space took full advantage. A new system allowed you to see right at the foot of the booth if you visited or had yet to visit a particular vendor. You could also clearly see those you had marked as favorites through the same space. A glass bubble would indicate this by being colored green for visited, blue for yet to visit, or orange for favorites. The system wasn’t perfect as it would sometimes forget you visited certain booths, as I discovered when ones I favorited became “unvisited” for purposes of achievement hunting going to all the booths, but it worked a majority of the time.

I did end up visiting all the booths, but I did not go after the other achievements as I’ve never been a completionist, I usually focus on a particular objective and go for it, and I thought visiting all of them would give me a sense of furry markets and how creators interacted in this medium now. There were definitely some booths that gave me the sense of 2000s nostalgia at what some creators set their prices at, which while generous I think it’s fair to say that I shouldn’t be paying less for a custom bespoke piece of artwork than I would take out pizza they throw in the oven for 20 minutes.

Back to the space it is difficult for me to think how they are going to improve on the Dealer’s in the upcoming years as I certainly could not think of any other way to design a furry mall than what was provided. It is kind of tragic in a way that this market is only about for part of the year, having a mall that is more accessible in the virtual world to buy virtual goods seems to have been quite allusive, and this really shows the potential of such a space. The fact that VR asset sellers such as Jinxxy and Gumroad don't have any Virtual Mall type worlds, that I'm aware of, is kind of a shock. This mall shows we're getting to the point not leaving the space to buy things is improving and should lower the chunkiness of web surfing while in VR to engage with VR markets moving forward.

Something “Fishy” going down in the mall - A lesson in contrast

A banner in the icy sector of the avatar services stuck out unlike any other, enough to instantly draw attention away from the booths around it. This white symbol of a fish on a grey background juxtaposed against the surrounding colorful landscape in a way that one couldn’t help but to be drawn to it. In it was some strange parody egg selling with a fish video playing some chill electronic music on repeat.

What I later came to find out through the easter egg hunt is that the fish booth was actually a strange piece to that puzzle and was an official Furality booth rather than just someone being silly. Another hint toward that is if you went into the weblink for the fish booth it would lead you to the Furality merch page. It shows that the people in charge of the Den knew how to design a logo that would stick out like a sore thumb amongst all the other colorful banners that surrounded it. More information on the scavenger hunt in the next section.

Then I noticed Nar290’s Deerbruh banner over their own booth, sharing this sort of simple curiosity invoking style, in the same sector. So then I went on a hunt for booths that were able to nail this contrast outside of being on staff and having access to the different banners they were competing against. Of the over 500 booths only six others used this nameless banner method of textless advert, around a 1% usage rate.

1. Deerbruh - Found in the Den as “Nar290’s Content Hub” this banner simply had a fierce horned looking 3D avatar staring from a red background. This was advertising their newly released avatar base and meshed with the femme fatale style.
2. Radioactive Crations - A fox face logo over a radioactive symbol with arrows pointing inward toward them.
3. LunaVRC - The logo is interesting in that it was the whole word of Luna but put in the space of one letter making it into one logo with a neon sign quality. Hot colors on a grey background.
4. Markcreator - A simple M logo on white background. A booth that is for a tool to help with avatar optimization so that users of less intensive systems can enjoy your work without sacrificing fidelity.
5. YUCP Studios - They seem to do technical work around audio interaction and hardware for virtual worlds. Certainly would be of interest for audiophiles. Their booth had references to early iPod ads when Apple implemented the simple logo style. So ironically they seemed to accidentally stumble on the simple banner style as a parody of an advert campaign that utilized it. The booth was white masked sharp eared critter surrounded by light blue skies and clouds.
6. When Snakes Sing - a short form content creator and musician from Australia. Their logo was some kind of stylized letter X on a square with a flushed out background. The inside of the booth described what they did and importantly as a musician shared a touring video with some of their music in the background as opposed to verbally introducing themselves as a musician in the ultimate show don’t tell.

So if you are thinking of going into the dealer’s for 2027’s Furality this design may be something to keep in mind to help your booth stick out. Have your banner invoke curiosity that lures people in so that they can get more details inside and on your video. Of course the challenge is if too many people do this then it will no longer stick out. Fortunately for you, this advice and article only reaches a small fraction of furries anyway, so give it a shot. I may also be thinking about if I decide to do the booth thing next year.

There was a part of me going through these booths wondering if I was going to do some sort of contest and declare one a winner. However I reminded myself that art is subjective and each of them showed their chops on why they were selected. There was no way to pick one out of some many that would stand out amongst all of the others.

The dealer’s den scavenger hunt

You can still do this hunt on the webpage at this time if you want to, so feel free to skip this section if you want. I will ease toward the answer with my experience solving it so the further down you go the more hints you’ll get until you get the answer at the bottom.

If you spent a good amount of time going into the booths you’d start to run into these odd ones with some form of eastern dragon centaurs (known as Faelyn Taurs) stretching across the image slates and on the video player a solitary letter would appear with some sort of random spacing. It wasn’t until I ran into three of these in quick succession in the 2D Artist sector that I took pause and knew that given their “Furality Ultra” banners that they were some type of Easter Egg to be hunted.

I assumed the letters had to be placed in order of booth number, and this was later reinforced when I went to the Dealer’s Den site and the booths had numbers and clue words in their descriptions. The words and letters, though, had no meaning to me. Other oddities were:

• There was a booth three and a booth five, but no booth four. However I did notice that the ‘Fish’ one was between them in booth order and given the keyword of clue three was “fish” it seemed to indicate they were related somehow.
• Booth “seven” had two letters instead of one with odd spacing between the letters.

After a bit a friend by the name of Shiny asked what I was up to and I noted that I was caught in the middle of a scavenger hunt. After going over what I had found he started noticing things I didn’t. In the booth’s sites the letter actually had underscores indicating their position in the string. The Seventh booth contained the four letter and seventh letter, but also had a special string at the start which finally gave the context. The characters “=v?” at the very left side.

While this may be technically obscure for many, people who use VR Chat a bit to call to YouTube videos to stream, a not uncommon action in VR Worlds, will know what those characters are for and what they mean. Following that we were able to put those characters into a YouTube address and get the answer. And the answer just left me confused, despite knowing it was correct. It’s a video of a CounterStrike player trolling another CounterStrike player with a random string of words before getting them stuck in a partially ajar door. The order of the words he spewed at the player matched the keywords on the booths.

This video it linked to was called “Door Stuck Remake” a recreation of a meme video from the old CounterStrike days with over a decade of history. I was more a Team Fortress 2 guy so I never encountered this until this Easter Egg, interesting that they landed on sharing a modern remake of it that was only a few weeks old as of Furality. However, the original meme was on the Source (1) engine and uploaded in low fidelity. The name of the channel was a bit suspicious as well, but I was satisfied just getting that far, so if there are any further threads that were missed feel free to put it in a spoiler comment below.

A future of creative contrast

Overall this year continued to improve upon what they have created in the three years I’ve done this, and also makes me curious of how these virtual worlds will continue to serve our community in the days ahead. This is especially true of the changing of our technical environment that some would say are worsening.

But the gap between corporate and their darling power hungry offspring of Artificial Intelligence and the creations of this dedicated team throughout this weekend gave me a sense of hope for humanity. Furality with a revenue that is in the low millions if not lower, has shown furries are far more capable of doing things that tech CEOs of technology companies were unable to accomplish with scores of billions. Create a world worth being in, with people worth being around, and also entrust us with our own God given legs to not act too much a fool. Just give us the tools to self-moderate our own social circles, we’re not children.

In the end, while Furality puts another year to an end, its short beacon in the light of our current technological landscape makes one thing perfectly clear. Unless these tech leaders can find a way of closing this insanely wide gap with their tech with the worlds a handful of furries can capture not for continued profiteering but for a love letter of the moment, the ingenuity and creativity of humanity will never perish. Even if it’s coming from those humans who are those pretending not to be humans.

Community and the individuals they are composed of are what technologies and platforms are supposed to serve. Furality Ultra ends, the furry fandom continues. Livejournal erodes and Yahoo! Groups end, furries head to Twitter, Twitter is Xed out, and they head for bluer skies. People running the platforms are increasingly making themselves the highway men between the people and the community. But the billygoats will move their communities to avoid the toll bridges the trolls put in place. Should our platform holders forget this fact, then the billions of losses incurred so far will be only the beginning. And the world will be better off for it. A platform is better when it serves as a prism and not as a prison.

During the event, the Valve Index I use had the foam pad’s adhesive melt off during the summer heat and as a result of general wear over the past three years combined with the marathon sessions spent at this event warming the mask. A lighthouse tower used by the Index for positioning also died right before Furality, but luckily I still had two remaining from the three I started with. I simply had to reposition my remaining towers and reset my room setup. But both of these failures reminded me that time ticks on and the tech is starting to age.

New technologies precariously peer on the horizon, and Valve has also sensed blood in the water for these before mentioned technological establishments. Their latest offerings of the Frame and Machine seek to target “Meta” [Facebook] and Windows respectively, as both follow the siren song of Artificial Intelligence, trying to replace the people who use the computer as a tool by making the computer a tool for the computer itself instead.

But we are in an awkward position where the machines are self consuming and devices are delayed due to transfixed demand, so in the meanwhile I’ll need to do the best to help my current gear endure until the new items have a chance to actually release, and in the meanwhile prepare for the sticker shock caused by the world’s lapse of judgement in the corporate and governance spaces.

The Winner - A proud journey contrasted against longing nostalgia

You know how I said I wasn’t going to pick a winner of the booths this year? Okay, I lied. But the booth in itself changed my mind, because it fit with my thought of contrast so well, but not in an artistic sense.

One door down from Eccentifur’s stand, the creator of the new kangaroo base I recently adopted, a video stood in contrast to its peers, and even against those wary emotions within myself in the previous section. The otter spoke not to sell wares, not to speak in fear of the present and future of dying games or longing nostalgia that Furality’s theme played upon, but to give pause and recognize the road we walked down which led us to his moment.

I leave the article with his words:

Hi! I’m Astolpho, thank you for looking in! I’m so glad that you’re here! And, can I say - You look great. That is a fantastic avatar, you’re killing it. Can I tell you how much I love Furality?

I have been enthralled by the idea of VR ever since I first read about it in the 90s and I have been in lots of virtual worlds since then, from furry MUCKs, to Second Life and Activeworlds, to finally living in a time when fully immersive VR is not only accessible to everyone - but has this thriving creator community surrounding it.

I hope that you appreciate how incredible this is with all these beautiful creatures that are all around you what a privilege it is being able to inhabit a space where the creative potential of so many minds, working in concert can be realized in this way.

I am very grateful to be able to contribute in whatever small measure I can. If you would, I would love it if you took a look at my links and I really hope that you have a great con! -Astolpho booth video