Originally published on my Patreon
You know a virtual world is compelling when its inhabitants kick against the walls of reality until they finally succeed at bursting through. Here’s five of my favorite VRChat worlds which create what’s seemingly impossible on the platform to totally rewrite the limits of our virtual experience.
While I can’t claim these are the absolute most boundary breaking worlds, many were recommended by some of the most popular and beloved creators on the platform:
Fractone (pictured above)
VRChat website landing page here
Created by Japanese player “Raii”, Fractone is a fully realized simulation of a music synthesizer replete with all the controls you’d expect from one in real life, which also generates music in real time as you play it. (Watch a demo basic here; watch a live concert, complete with a light show, right here.)
Beloved VRChat game developer Jar considers it among the most technically ambitious worlds on the platform.
“To me that’s impressive because by all means that shouldn't be possible to make and yet there it is,” as Jar puts it. “Also not many digital synthesizers are multiplayer/collaboratively compatible, even outside of VR, so that’s cool.”
Four more below!
Library of Babel
VRChat website landing page here
Created by a programmer, know as “Mahu in VRC”, the Library recreates the classic, nightmarish story of Jorge Luis Borges, of reality being an infinite library containing all the knowledge of the universe ever written, but where the seeker never finds the answers they are searching for.
“A goal of mine with the project is to build a world where searching and finding the books felt meaningful,” Mahu recently told me. “That means I wanted to build not only an infinite total library but I wanted it to be completely searchable and I wanted to make it possible to reasonably travel to the books you had searched for. The books near the entrance to the library where you load in have the fewest letters per page, and as you travel deeper they fill up with everything possible to put on a page of a book.”
This is my personal favorite VRChat world, for it creates an interactive experience that could only easily exist in a virtual world.
“The Library does things that are only possible in virtual reality,” as Mahu put it. “It contradicts the laws of euclidean coordinate systems, allowing you to seamlessly traverse what I call fractal space. So in a way my take on the library is perhaps more infinite than Borges' had imagined.”
NeoWorlds
VRChat website landing page here
NeoWorlds, created by "Widget365", is a virtual world created within the virtual world of VRChat -- which looks and plays like a low-res 2.5D virtual world of the early 2000s era. (Think Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, and so on.)
There's even an old school web-based log-in page for NeoWorlds (cosmetic only), and a log-in experience which starts you in front of an old school, desktop PC and cabled mouse of the era
Recursion is a frequent theme for virtual world creation -- I’ve seen Minecraft recreated in Second Life, Second Life recreated in VRChat, and so on. But the dedication to the recreation of NeoWorlds is not something I’ve seen before. Where it really gets especially mind-boggling when you "log in" to NeoWorlds via a 90s computer, and realize that your VRChat avatar has been faithfully converted into a low pixel, 2.5D version of it -- which you still control.
"A variety of tricks are at play here,” Widget tells me, explaining the how of NeoWorlds. “Without getting too much into the intricate details, the main thing probably throwing people for a loop is the change in perspectives. You can do tricks with camera animations to override your first-person view in VRChat; I first discovered this was possible by seeing the trick used in a VKet world, and had been trying to think of clever ways I could implement it ever since.”
Widget says NeoWorlds has been visited over 160,000 times since launch.
Thad Recursive Room
VRChat website landing page here
Thad Gyther created the brain-melting Recursive Room of VRChat, which puts you in a room within a room within a room.
“Someone found out that they can pick themselves 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 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 reference 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."
VRtual Park
VRChat website landing page here
As the name suggests, this is a theme park builder similar to the classic game Roller Coaster Tycoon, but in full person VR. But not only do you get to create and simulate the rides, it comes with 500 NPC customers with their own AI routines. (Watch the trailer here.)
This is not the only theme park simulator in VRChat -- Udon Tycoon comes to mind -- but VRtual Park is the first I’m aware of that incorporate AI-powered NPCs which respond to what is being built -- much of which was created from scratch.
“When the player first spawns in,” as creator Myro P explains to me, “there's no theme park, players need to build it themselves, NPCs only start to enter the theme park if the theme park is open and has a few rides they can visit, players can open and close the theme park at any time.”
“I programmed an AI for the NPCs; for instance, when they're hungry, they'll order food, and when they're tired, they'll rest on benches until they feel better. I had to implement my own pathfinding algorithm because I couldn't use Unity's built-in system."
With over 50,000 visits, VRtuel Park has inspired countless mini-worlds build within this creation platform within a creation platform -- like this one above, from @n4rGm5DmrVXXz6I. (Above)
I’m very sure this list likely misses other worlds that are equally frame-breaking if not more so -- please include any I should include in a sequel to this feature.
Thanks to An, Jar, Rae, Renamon, and others for their recommendations!
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