New World Notes

Let's Watch VRChat's New Trailer to See How VRChat Represents Itself

Official trailers are a good way to see how a company (VRChat, in this case) sees its market -- and the market it wants. I think it's fair to say the general gamer perception of VRChat is something like, "It's a bunch of neko anime girls hanging out", and the trailer shows... a lot of neko anime girls hanging out. Along with a wide variety of other avatars, some impressive 3D scenes, and some scripted mini-games, including a shooter, and emphasis on the Unity-based building tools. And flying pizzas!  It's actually pretty impressive. 

Though if you really want to be impressed, here's a bird in VRChat named Kevin Costner with 7 foot tall legs talking about being homeless in real life. Yes, really:

Watch: Text-to-Speech App for Voice-Free Communicating in High Fidelity

Recent virtual worlds and social VR platforms tend to give more centrality to VOIP over in-world text chat -- a serious design mistake, in my view*. If you use High Fidelity, however, here's a solution: Text to Speech v1.0, now in the HiFi store.

Created by High Fidelity developer Zach Fox, it was inspired, he tells me, "by our desire to give a communication option to users who can't or prefer not to speak in VR. TTS is also a fun communication option to experiment with when hanging out with friends!"

If you watched (and listened to) Thomas Dolby's recent performance in High Fidelity, you know the world has some impressive audio capabilities; here's how Zach made use of them for this app:

With Slow Sales, VR Headset Market Still Not Having Meaningful "Rebound"

IDC, an analyst firm which was once so bullish about virtual reality, the company predicted (as recently as 2016) that VR headset adoption rates would be as fast the iPhone -- yes, seriously -- is now touting a "rebound" of sales:

The VR headset market returned to growth in 3Q18 after four consecutive quarters of decline and now makes up 97% of the combined [AR/VR] market. Global shipments for VR headsets reached 1.9 million units in the quarter, up 8.2% from 3Q17, as extensive discounts on existing products and interest in new ones led to shipment gains in both the consumer and commercial markets. "The VR market is finally starting to come into its own," said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. "On the consumer front, the combination of lower prices and increased content is beginning to resonate with users. Meanwhile, commercial adoption is also on the rise for a range of use cases, including training, design, and showcasing."

If there's commercial adoption, why are there so few palpable VR hits besides Beat Saber (still a modest hit at best, in terms of the overall market) while even the once-viral VRChat has seen a usage decline? But the real problem with this analysis is that "shipments " are not the same as sales or usage  -- and more key, 8.2% growth in shipments isn't much of a "rebound" when you compare the growth to other competing platforms. For instance:

Will Steam's Hardcore Gamers Try Playing Sansar Now That It's in the Store?

Steam is by far the largest game platform for hardcore gamers on PC, Mac, and VR -- which is why many competitors have launched would-be Steam Killers in recent months  -- and so it's notable that Linden Lab just published its social VR platform to Steam. The way the Lindens categorize Sansar ("Genre: Casual, Free to Play, Massively Multiplayer) and describe it to this gamer audience is interesting:

Welcome to Sansar - the best place to hang out with friends, play games, and stay connected with your favorite communities! Host and attend virtual events: concerts, watch parties, meet-and-greets, and more. Create and share virtual spaces with your friends, and explore the thousands of experiences our users have already created. Cheer for your favorite players and teams WHILE playing any number of fun virtual mini-games: cornhole, shuffleboard, pong, bowling, and more. Shop for new items and sell what you create on the Sansar Store.

No mention, for instance, of Sansar's branded experiences for education, NASA, Ready Player One, or even its hardcore gamer e-sports partnerships. Compare the description with its likeliest competitors on Steam. Here's how Rec Room describes itself:

Rec Room Social VR Planning to Support Non-VR Devices, Including Mobile

Rec Room is probably the second largest social VR space in terms of popularity (after VRChat, of course), with a daily peak concurrency in the low to mid-three figures. Unlike VRChat, which has a popular PC client, it's fair to say Rec Room's focus is on VR rigs. (Its PC version is less full-featured than its VR client.) 

Last month, however, the developers at Against Gravity posted a survey in the official Reddit group asking their users, "Would you like to play Rec Room on Android, iPhone, Switch, or something else? Vote in our Platform Survey! Feel free to share with friends/family too." So clearly the devs are planning to make social VR less virtual reality-centric. 

Unsurprisingly, this has provoked some consternation and/or resignation among its VR-heavy fanbase, with the most currently popular thread in its Reddit being, "Rec Room and VR no longer being a priority":

Watch: Augmented Reality App Created for Virtual Reality Headset

Last week we were speculating on Philip Rosedale's comment that VR is preferable to AR, since after all, you can use the video camera capabilities of many virtual reality headsets to create an augmented reality experience within VR. And then a guy named TonyVT Skarredghost came by to comment that he'd done exactly that: 

I already do AR with the Focus. (At the link you can also find an opensource plugin for that that I made for Unity) and also mixed reality.  And I can guarantee you that is pretty awesome. And it has the potential of showing a modified view of the world... so not only virtual objects added to the world.

Read about it on his blog post cleverly entitled, "How to create an Augmented Reality app for the Vive Focus in Unity". Tony gets pretty deep into the technical weeds of making AR possible on a VR platform. For instance, it involves hacking the Vive Focus' camera streams:

Linden Lab: Social VR is "The Future of Spectator Sports", Promises A Major eSports Partnership Next Month

Do you want to watch an immersive 3D experience while in another immersive 3D experience? Linden Lab thinks you do. Interesting new interview on the Cheddar (LOL) news network with Linden VP Sheri Bryant, who drops hints of a big eSports partnership with Sansar coming next month, announcing, "We believe social VR is the future of spectator sports." In terms of eSports, she mentions incorporating elements from a live game into the Sansar experience -- for example, a dynamically updated, 3D game map. (I assume like in those "war rooms" in the Star Wars movies, where the battlefield is represented in a cool holographic map.) 

Maybe social VR is the future of real world spectator sports (which very much remains to be seen) but I'm not sure why Linden Lab keeps insisting this is the case with eSports. So far, their existing eSports partnerships don't seem to be increasing Sansar usage. But to be fair, it's still early days. The deeper problem is this seems to misunderstand the popularity of eSports viewing on a platform like Twitch:  

Holodeck VR Uses Hybrid Tracking to Map Virtual World Experience Onto Real World Location With Up to 100 Users in the Same Physical Space

Holodeck VR is a fairly unique twist on location-based VR experiences with a lot of potential. For one thing, it uses light, low cost Gear VR headsets, rather than bulky systems where the user is tethered to cables or a heavy backpack. For another, it's using a patented hybrid tracking technology which incorporates both optical and radio signals, which is reportedly able to coordinate the location of up to 100 items or people in the same virtual/real life space. In other words, a multi-user virtual world experience mapped onto the location of users in the real world. 

Based in the EU, Holdeck VR's platform is already being used at theme part locations in Europe, including a location tie-in for last year's Valerian movie from Luc Besson. Longtime game developer Barbara Lippe is the company's co-founder and head of content, and she tells me the tracking technology they're using took 16 years of development at the German Fraunhofer Institut, before it was even ready for users wearing VR headsets, so they could navigate around each other without colliding:

Thomas Dolby, Pop Star & VR Enthusiast, To Perform Live in High Fidelity

Dolby singing "She Blinded Me With Science" in VR rig for audience in High Fidelity

Recently a distinguished academic showed up in High Fidelity as an avatar, researching social VR platforms to use in the Music for New Media program at the Peabody Conservatory. "He didn't identify who he was at first but did share that he was a professor looking for a medium to teach VR and music design," High Fidelity's Ryan Downe remembers. "After sharing contact information, he reached out and revealed his identity and my colleague spent some time helping him get familiar with our platform."

The professor, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, also happens to be pop star Thomas Dolby -- yes, the one who was massively blinded by science -- and is appearing live in High Fidelity next week, singing into an audio stream piped into the virtual world while his VR-controlled avatar performs. (Click here to reserve a slot at November 17's FUTVRE LANDS Virtual Reality Festival.)

Dolby has been working directly with High Fidelity on a number of performances previous to that -- not just appearing as an avatar, but making dynamic use of the social VR platform:

"We collaborated with him on a pair of Halloween-themed events at our 'Zombie Island' domain," as Ryan explains. "From a perch above the island, he musically scored the event in real-time as visitors (most of whom didn't know he was there) ran into jump scares and zombies played by live actors."

So far from being a "special celebrity appearance" event, Dolby's appearance in VR is very much part of his explorations as a musician and performer. (Not unlike how, in VR's last generation, Duran Duran's Simon LeBon was an avid user of Second Life before his band officially created a presence there.)

VRChat Reports 50,000 In Its Discord -- Good Estimate of Its Active User Base

VRChat recently announced it has 50,000 subscribers in its Discord server... which also gives us a pretty good estimate of VRChat's active userbase of people who log into the world at least once a month. Up until now, we've only had some insight on the social VR world's daily average concurrency rates (via Steam), which hover somewhere between the 6000s and 7000s every day. The fact that there's 50,000 just in VRChat's Discord server alone (you're not likely to join unless you're actively engaged with the community) suggests monthly active usage of the world itself runs between 50,000-75,000. (As a rough estimate, but this also fits an industry rule of thumb that active users are 10x the daily average concurrency.)

So until the company reports otherwise, I'd say 50,000-75,000 users is an educated guess -- among them, a shy German anime dancer and a small Korean bird who's a military vet and a Kanye fan.