This is What Paris Looks Like in VRChat, Which You Can Access With Meta Quest

In case you're wondering, there's roughly a dozen Paris-themed worlds in VRChat, the metaverse platform that's accessible through Steam and Meta's Quest platform -- including this one, "Paris Tour", an explorable portion of the City of Lights including the Eiffel Tower. It even comes with classic French music and a racing game! 

I note this because at the moment, seemingly half of Twitter is gawking at a recent announcement that Meta's Horizon Worlds is expanding into France -- because the official announcement looks like this:

Looks great! pic.twitter.com/aFFcvLv4ES

— james hennessy (@jrhennessy) August 16, 2022

Some VR enthusiasts argue that Horizon Worlds looks so rudimentary in this announcement, because the Meta Quest/Quest 2 can't handle high resolution graphics. That might be the case, but both VRChat and Horizon Worlds are build on Unity, and if you go into VRChat right now, you'll see everything from cartoonish worlds like Paris Tour, to photorealistic "Paris Apartments". And to judge by its concurrency, VRChat is more popular on Quest headsets than Horizon Worlds, and the Quest headsets are the most popular way of accessing VRChat overall.

As for what's going in the Meta announcement, I'm not quite sure. I've seen much better graphics demos for Horizon than this, so I suspect this is actually just a quickly whipped up Photoshop job not meant to depict Horizon Worlds itself. But in any case, many are wondering what Meta is getting for its $10 billion dollar investment in metaverse technology.

One answer: People using the Quest to go into VRChat.

Comments

[Martin K.]

I guess the difference is that VRChat allows users to import textures and models into Unity's highly optimised graphics pipeline for textured triangle meshes. But this results in lots of copyright infringements that VRChat can get away with because in the big picture, they are still a rather small fish.

Horizon Worlds doesn't allow users to import textures and models and instead requires them to build everything out of in-game primitive shapes like cubes, pyramids, and spheres, which are not (yet) as optimised as triangle meshes. The reason probably is that they want to keep copyright infringements in check already now because otherwise they might become a major liability in the long run. And since Meta is a big fish, they probably want to avoid legal actions against them by other big fishes.