New World Notes

Watch: Juggling VRChat-Based Objects from Real Life Via Motion Tracking!

If I'm describing this video accurately, it's mind-boggling: VRChat YouTuber Mitama Sakumaru (known as "390_JUGGLER" in VRC) is juggling in real life -- but the objects he's juggling only exist in VRChat. 

Yes: The juggled objects in VRChat are physics-enabled and respond to his real life juggling movement via the motion tracking of his VR rig, he tells me.

In a tweet, he reports that juggling virtual objects with no mass is harder than it might seem: "The weight and lack of finger sensation are quite severe, and it is about three times more difficult to do with normal gravity! " 

It's part of his effort, Mitama tells me, to create a new kind of virtual performance, where "the border between props and bodies are more ambiguous":

More Tips on Running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2

Reader David Cheney recently tried out these detailed instructions for running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2 via Firestorm ("This is a lot of fun and works pretty well!"), and added some further tips in Comments:

On my cabled Quest 2 I had to take a couple of steps I found at the VR Firestorm viewer page:

- To fix a black HMD display I created a profile for the viewer in your graphic card settings and enable FXAA. Other types of Anti-aliasing can be disabled.
- To get the stereo images to align I followed these directions using F5, F6, and F7: Set IPD to 0 (zero), adjust Texture Shift until image is sharp and focused (I ended up with 15.0 on a 4k display and 30.0 on a 1k display); adjust IPD to get a good 3D effect.
- On a 4k display the visuals are gorgeous but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are not aligned and so operation is really tough; on a 1k display the visuals are lower rez and aliased but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are aligned and operation is practical.

Kudos to the developers!

Kudos indeed. I'd love to see more VR videos of Second Life beyond the one I posted above(from Redditor "IDontUseAnimeAvatars", who helped get the VR/SL ball rolling)--if you've seen any or are shooting some of your own, please post links in Comments below!

Watch: Neos VR May Have the Best UI & Feature Set in All Social VR

While VRChat attracts quite a lot of attention thanks to its smart and inventive community, and Rec Room for its high usage numbers and valuation ($1.25 billion, the Wall Street Journal just reported), both of those heavily-funded social VR platforms still seem to be over-shadowed on the feature and UX front by Neos VR, a metaverse crowdfunded on a much smaller budget and developed by Solirax, a tiny studio with less than 10 people on the team. 

"You can literally drag-and-drop almost any kind of files and it will work, like 3D models, images," virtual world explorer Luca tells me, by example. "It's easy to use on desktop mode, and things are just not that hard to learn, it's just the kind of seamlessness I've never seen or experienced on any other VR platform." (That's Luca above, visiting the notably furry-heavy Neos.)

Luca considers Neos' basic usability about on par with VRChat, "but when it comes to more complex stuff, like changing certain settings or figuring out the content tools, NeosVR's UI just feels more intuitive:

VRChat's Mirrors Help Enhance the World's Crucial First-Person Only Perspective (Comment of the Week)

Very good point by Adeon on the importance of mirrors in VRChat, jumping off from Strasz's video, where he notes, "While vision is key, where that vision emanates from [in VRChat] is even more important. We need to believe that it comes from our own eyes, and that the body parts we see are in a place that makes sense."

A longtime explorer and creator in VRChat and before that Second Life, Adeon notes how important the first-person-only perspective is for VRChat, and how mirrors help enforce and enhance that design choice:

When someone decides to check out VRChat for the first time, they usually won't have VR. One of the first questions they ask is, "How do I enter third person view?"

Of course, the second question they ask is "Ok... so why doesn't this game have a third person view?"

And to VRChat's credit, they know exactly what they're doing. Forcing first person is absolutely critical to everything that's special about VRChat. Mirrors are the one way, the natural way, to get everything you lose by not looking at yourself in third person -- without everything that you lose from having third person.

The devs understand that even the personal option for third person would take away that mutual understanding of shared space and connection.

This sounds exactly right; VRChat is one of the rare virtual worlds/MMOs without a 3rd person POV option; unsurprisingly, regular VRChat users report a strong and deep association with their avatar, probably much moreso that worlds with a 3rd person option.

Speaking of which, other readers wonder why Second Life (where the default is 3rd person) doesn't have an easy-to-use mirror option, and Adeon replies with this video:

South by Southwest Conference Launches XR Experience in VRChat

If people citing postmodern theorists in VRChat videos isn't enough of a sign of the virtual world's growing cultural prominence, here's another one: South by Southwest (i.e. SXSW), generally considered one of the leading tech and culture (music, movies, etc.) conferences in the US if not the world, is staging some of its events and showcases in VRChat this year:

Using the SXSW 2021 look and feel, SXSW Online XR will showcase live panels, meet ups, special events, a selection of 360° videos from the Virtual Cinema program, as well as 2D video feeds of SXSW programming. Austin venues recreated in the space include The Paramount Theatre, the Contemporary Austin, Mohawk, Empire Control Room & Garage, and Cedar Street Courtyard. SXSW worked with world-renowned artists and the social XR events studio VRrOOm to design and produce the festival’s virtual edition, which will be hosted on VRChat. The complete Virtual Cinema Program, including previously-announced Virtual Cinema Competition and Virtual Cinema Spotlight projects, will also be accessible and downloadable via the VRrOOm store online. The VRChat worlds can be experienced on PC, PCVR and Oculus Quest headsets.

I like the abstract, dreamlike version of Austin, Texas they've created for VRChat, and am curious if the platform allows enough local concurrency to capture anything like the wild serendipity that SXSW itself is beloved for, possible only when enough creative and zany people can be close together in the same place. (Three random personal examples off the top of my head: Joining a live klezmer band street party at 3am, watching a Japanese punk band turn themselves into human bowling pins, and playing real life Frogger on Austin's busiest street with a remote-controlled Roomba from a hotel balcony.)  

Anyway, info for joining the VRChat conference below:

How to Connect Your Oculus Quest 2 to the Virtual World of Second Life

What you're watching above is a pretty cool hack of classic virtual world and new VR technology: Oculus Quest 2 running Second Life. While the venerable sandbox MMO wasn't originally architected to run in VR, its user community has created a number of unsupported viewers that are compatible with leading virtual reality platforms, while the world itself boasts tens of thousands of excellent locations to explore -- not to mention as many users online 24/7.

Setting up your Quest 2 to run with Second Life, to be sure, does require some extra patience and tinkering. Fortunately, the Redditor who shot and sent me this demo video, "IDontUseAnimeAvatars", also sent me highly detailed instructions on doing just that; read those below. As with any unsupported third party software, user beware -- and seeing as Second Life isn't optimized for VR, also beware vertigo:  

"I highly encourage that you DO NOT try to walk around in first person," as they put it to me, "controlling your vision with your head and mouse is a first-class ticket to puke city."

Full tutorial after the break:

Facebook Beating Valve on Valve's Own Platform (But I Doubt Valve Cares)

Well this seems unexpected:

Nearly 5 months after launch, Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 is the most used VR headset on Steam.

That is according to the February 2021 results for the Steam Hardware Survey.

Valve finally started counting Quest 2 headsets in its own category at the beginning of January. Quest 2 jumped from 17.40% of total VR usage in January to 22.91% in February, overtaking the Oculus Rift S, which fell to 21.58%. Valve’s Index headset comes in at third with 16% and the original HTC Vive follows at 13.05%.

The Valve Index is the VR headset that came bundled with one of the most anticipated games of recent years: Half-Life: Alyx, also from Valve. And while it was seemingly designed as Valve's killer app to sell the Index, sales have been decent but not great: Roughly 2 million sold as of last December. (Compared to 10 million+ for Half-Life 2.) I was hoping Alyx's modding community would be the Index's killer app, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

All that to one side, I doubt Valve cares that Facebook is beating Valve on its own platform:

SuperData: Only 1M+ Oculus Quest 2 HMDs Sold in First Quarter of Launch

Based on a recent Facebook' revenue report, it looked like the Oculus Quest 2 had sold 1.5 million to 2 million copies in its first four months on the market, starting last October. Nielsen analytics company SuperData, however, recently asserted sales were significantly less than that:

Over 1M Oculus Quest 2 headsets were sold in Q4, breaking records. The Quest 2 sold more units in a single quarter than any VR device that is not powered by a smartphone. (The Samsung Gear VR holds the overall record and sold 1.4M units in Q4 2016.) The Quest 2 benefitted from a lower price than its predecessor and also from pent-up demand among those interested in joining the VR audience. The original Quest was sold out during much of 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19 on supply chains. The Quest 2 was also the first Oculus headset to launch around the holiday season, so its addressable audience included gift givers in addition to VR enthusiasts.

It's only a "record", to be sure, relative to the niche of VR, but not in the overall addressable market for interactive entertainment; in contrast, for instance, the Playstation 5 sold over 2 million units in its first two weeks on sale.

In any case, if SuperData's estimate is accurate, it does suggests a small amount of good news for VR developers: Facebook reported "other" revenue of $539 million in Q4 2020. So if it only sold 1 million Quest 2s then, that accounts for roughly $300,000,000 of this revenue --  with the remaining $239 million not from Quest sales.

And you know what that means:

MultiBrush Turns Tilt Brush Creativity Into a Social VR Experience

A scant few weeks after I worried that Google's open sourcing of its excellent Tilt Brush VR app would lead the codebase to die the death that open source projects often do, I'm happy to say I was totally wrong: VR startup Rendever quickly created a multi-user version dubbed MultiBrush (available for Quest here), and it's already attracted a decent-sized community around it and other open source spinoffs of Tilt Brush:

"[We] have created one big community on Discord [via @IcosaGallery] with most people who are working on the open source TiltBrush part of it, and a main fork at the moment of Open Brush," VR artist Rosie Summer tells me. "We are all talking and collabing. Did a lot of play testing for the MultiBrush fork via the Discord. It’s a real exciting hub, and some funding doors have also opened to us too."

Rosie, as you will remember, is a master of solo TiltBrush art, and loves the experience in this new multi-user spinoff: 

As Unreal Unveils MetaHuman, Oculus/Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Has Advice on Bringing Ultra-Realistic Avatars Into a Social VR World

As Unreal unveiled its new MetaHuman system for highly detailed ultra-realistic avatars, I happened to be chatting with Oculus / Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick, who's been thinking quite a lot about the best avatars to use in a social VR space.

"Increasing the visual fidelity of avatars raises the expectations for realistic motion to make those realistic features look alive," Jim notes about MetaHuman. "The more realistic the avatars look the better you have to be at tracking facial movement in VR to avoid the avatars looking dead. If you can't capture sufficient movement you have to instead be good at synthesizing it based on the social context, but if you get that wrong the avatars look creepy not because they look dead, but because they don't respond in a natural way given the social context."

Realism in social VR introduces a new challenge:

"Most of the current attention is on improving motion capture by the headset," as Purbrick puts it, "but the better that gets the harder it becomes to escape your real identity: all of your habits and movements are transferred faithfully to your avatar whether you like it or not... Short version: people don't want creepy avatars more than they want realistic avatars and it's a lot more work to make realistic avatars not feel creepy in VR."

These points are a good place to introduce a recent talk Jim Purbrick featured on his blog, largely drawing on his experiences developing avatars for Second Life: