Who is in a headset
If you open the online list today you will see a small pair of goggles beside some names. It means what it looks like: that person is in a headset right now, flying the same sky you are.
This is the last piece of something that has been half-built since the middle of September. Back then we added a VR flag to the session telemetry, because a headset's browser is an ordinary web browser and we genuinely could not tell a PICO flying in VR from a PICO showing a flat page. That fixed the numbers. It did nothing for the people, and the note we left in the code said so: the badge was deliberately postponed as a separate decision. The decision got made this week.
Why it is not the same as the phone badge
There is already a mark for "this person is in the mobile app". It looks similar and it works differently, and the difference shaped the whole thing.
Which client somebody runs is settled the moment their socket connects and never changes after that, so it travels along with the rest of their player record. A headset does not work like that. It goes on, it comes off, it goes on again twenty minutes later, all inside one session. So the VR mark is a live roster of sockets, broadcast on every change. That is the same machinery the ⏸ pause badge uses, and the ⏸ badge is the other mark in that row describing a moment rather than a fact about the connection.
That turned out to be a simplification rather than a cost. Because the roster is keyed by socket, the flock roster needed no mirror field of its own: the same snapshot answers for a pilot in the air, a visitor in the lobby and a listener with the radio on. The app badge needed a mirror, and has one.
What it does not do
It does not publish anything new. The flag already travelled to the server for the flight-time numbers; all that changed is that it now travels back out. It names no hardware. We cannot tell a Quest from a PICO from a socket, so the tooltip says "in a VR headset" and stops there.
It is shown for guests too, for the same reason the app badge is: which device somebody is on identifies nobody, and a visitor who arrives in a headset is exactly the arrival worth seeing.
And the absence of the mark means "not in VR as far as we were told", never "on a flat screen". Older tabs simply do not report, and a wrong mark on a socket that never spoke is the precise error the whole field exists to avoid.
Your own row reads the flag locally rather than waiting for the round trip, so the goggles appear the instant the session starts, not a moment later. If you have the game open in one window and a headset in another, the row follows the more engaged of the two: somebody flying in VR with a desktop tab parked on the storefront is flying in VR, and the badge says so about the tab the row is actually describing.
Nothing else moved. The pause badge, the radio and walkie tags, the flags and the rank icons all sit where they were, with one more neighbour.