Watch a tour of the Recursive Room above at 07:32
I finally got a chance to chat with Thad Gyther, creator of the brain-melting Recursive Room of VRChat, which puts you in a room within a room within a room. (Watch above to see what I mean.) Since launching last January, it's been visited over 50,000 times, Thad tells me.
Occasionally VRCers ask how he created it, but, "I also like to just watch people play around and see what they come up with in Thad Room. They sometimes even surprise me with things I haven't thought of myself. Like when someone found out that they can pick themself up when they use the grappling hook and grapple onto some object in their other hand." (That's actually a glitch in his scripting, he admits, but now won't fix, "because it's way too cool.")
It's easily among the most brain-melting metaverse platform experiences I've ever seen. (And I'm thinking back to the Crooked House of Second Life here.)
Thad also patiently explained how he created it, and... I'm only slightly less confused. The explanation is almost as brain-melting as the actual experience.
Here's what I mean:
"It's done with multiple cameras rendering onto the same screen," he tells me. "They are placed further away or closer to make things seem smaller or bigger. But a lot of objects (especially those which are interactive on multiple levels) are actually copied. In the end, be it those objects or the cameras, it all comes down to constantly moving things around by transforming between different refence coordinate systems."
He shared this "behind the scenes" photo to illustrate the process in action:
"[H]ere you see the player looking into the smaller room and you see that other virtual camera in the big room far away from the player -- it is placed as if the player was big and looking into the regular sized room. At that position it looks actually the same as what the real player sees when looking into the small room. So that image is rendered on top of what the player sees.
"By the way, the camera really just captures other players and a few dynamic objects. The rest is actually duplicated and really in the scene. That is better for optimization and also the only way to allow actual interactivity."
His world was partly inspired by the standalone VR puzzle game "A Fishernman's Tale", and a VRChat world full of mind-bending demos, called "Eccentric Rooms".
"So I certainly can't claim this idea all to myself. But seeing that it was possible within VRChat made me want to build something like this myself. The system had so much potential and I wanted to see it used for more than just a pure tech demo. I wanted to build an experience that people would like to come back to. A playground that encourages interaction with that system and with other players."
Speaking of glitches, the Recursion Room depends on what seems to be a glitch in VRChat's building tools.
"The eye distance VRChat uses depends on the size of your avatar and your real size. It took me forever to find the value VRChat uses and I would have given up if I hadn't seen this working somewhere else before and, therefore, knew it must work somehow. Turns out, VRChat takes all objects with an AudioListener and scales them in a similar way to what we need for whatever reason. It is in fact the reciprocal of that value that gives us the right value for the scale of our cameras. That's the kind of undocumented and possibly unintended stuff I had to deal with."
As with many metaverse projects, in other words, the Recursive Room depends on the platform creator listening closely to creators on the platform like him.
"I just hope an update of VRChat doesn't break my world in the future."
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