Syrmor Rising: VRChat's Virtual Reporter Attracts Massive Community, Real World Meet-Up With Worldwide Attendance

#syrcon2019 meet-up - photo by Gabrielle

How beloved are the VRChat interviews of Syrmor, the social VR world's best embedded reporter? Here's how much: Right now in Toronto, nearly two dozen people have gathered from around the world for what they've dubbed #Syrcon2019, a meet-up that the young Canadian filmmaker had nothing to do with at the start.

"I didn't organize it," he tells me, laughing. "It was a bunch of people on the Syrmor community Discord became friends and decided to do a meet up and it just got larger and larger until it became know as Syrcon."

They arrived from the United States and his native Canada, and from far farther parts: "Twenty people have come from a bunch of different places like Finland, Germany, and UK", he tells me. Yes, Finland. ("I didn't even know that country was real!", Syrmor says with ironic wonder.) 

"I'm meeting up with the people in Toronto but I didn't organize it or anything... We've rented out a bar and have plans for a bunch of things around the city," Syrmor goes on, "And they all get to meet friends that have made appearances in my vids."

As anyone who's seen Syrmor's interviews knows, they're uniformly funny, sweet, and positive (if also often sad and poignant). So notwithstanding VRChat's reputation as a hovel of trollish a-holes, the Syrmor community has followed that lead, becoming a chatty, social community -- one that's even inspired some real relationships:

"I think just cause it's based around people talking to others, so a lot of people who join are interested in getting to know others," as Syrmor puts it. "We have a few relationships that have met within the community." (Including the one featured above, which Syrmor just shared with me.)

 

Somewhat surprisingly, Syrmor tells me VRChat the actual company has not reached out to him yet. So all this community enthusiasm is completely organic. (And VRChat has yet to put on an official fancon.)  

 

Based on concurrency rates, VRChat the social VR world probably has regular users in the low six figures. But as I've said before, those log-ins only tell part of the story. With Syrmor's 634,000 YouTube subscribers, 6,000+ Discord members, and 16+ fans who flew across the actual world just to meet this one VRChat creator and fellow followers, the virtual world is a lot larger than just the people who log on. And for the people who made the trip, a lot more real.

STORY TIME: A bunch of people from around the world became friends in the community and they're all coming to Canada to hangout and they've been calling it 'Syrcon' and they've already started arriving and now there's cookies and it's so strange it's real pic.twitter.com/eWV2QwvGio

— syrmor (@SyrmorS) July 30, 2019