New World Notes

VRChat User Survey Results: Profile of a Passionate Virtual World Community

Here's the key results of my VRChat user survey with beloved VRC reporter Syrmor, primarily drawn from subscribers of his YouTube channel and my virtual world blog New World Notes. While it's not wholly scientific and has a relatively small sample size of 165 respondents, it is (I believe!) the first public survey of the rapidly growing and evolving virtual world community. 

Which takes us right to the question above: Asked what they most love about VRChat, respondents overwhelmingly selected "Community":

"Personally I can say that VRChat has made life better for me as a whole," as user Fryman574 puts it. "I've had the ability to join communities I would have never known about if it weren't for VRC... [and] I've been able to meet so many cool people; like one of the best things to do in VRChat in my opinion is finding someone who has a story to tell and spend your day talking to this person. That's actually how I was able to meet my boyfriend of 6 months now."

Like this person and many others, VRC user Flamant says this community has offered social connections that have been difficult to find in the material world:

"I can be myself around other people in VRChat which is something i have always struggled with, with my social anxiety. And in that way it has helped me forge an identity as a person, now being able to be vulnerable and open myself up to others without fear. I have met some truly kind people in this virtual world that has come to feel more like a home than my actual surroundings..."

Next up: Avatar/ real life gender identity, how they first discovered VRChat, other virtual worlds VRC users play, VR usage, and much more:

How to Connect Your Kinect to VRChat for Full Body Tracking

Here's the latest clever hack for VRChat: An Xbox One Kinect connected to the virtual world, so the user's real life movement is tracked and mapped onto their avatar.

In this video above, VRCer "Zotteke" is using a Quest 2 to log into VRChat while dancing in front of a Kinect; Zotteke's furry avatar does the rest. The body tracking is fairly decent (especially for an older device that's likely sitting in your closet if you still have one), even accounting for its single camera:

VRChat Users: Please Take This Short Survey from Syrmor & New World Notes! (Use PC/Mac For Best Results, Include Account Name to Be Quoted)

Acclaimed VRChat reporter Syrmor is back after a short hiatus with a moving new avatar interview (watch above)... which is a good time to re-up this VRChat user survey that we're conducting together. Take below (use a desktop/laptop for best results) and include your VRChat name if you'd like your opinions to be quoted!

Physics-Based Remote-Controlled Toy Cars Are the Latest Amazing Thing in VRChat

Remote control cars for VRChat players are the latest amazing user-made innovation in VRChat, and creator Chris B. is not just content to make them amazingly physics-based, but she even shot this pitch-perfect Saturday morning cartoons-style commercial-but-with-furries to promote them too. As the ad mentions, they run on VRChat's internal Udon scripting system (specifically, the C#-to-Udon compiler); and as you can tell by the way they move and bounce, the cars make use of Unity's existing Newtownian mechanics which is also part of VRChat:

"Unity's physics engine has a lot of really neat features that are under-utilized in VRChat," as Chris puts it to me. "Stuff like ragdolls are perfectly possible, but nobody does them for some reason."

More on how she made her cars' physics so satisfying:

VRChat Raises $80 Million in Venture Funding, Proving the Metaverse is So Far VR's Most Successful Application

For some reason this huge news hasn't yet been picked up by any of the major tech outlets that I can see, but VRChat just raised $80 million in funding:

The VRChat team is excited to announce that we have closed an $80M Series D investment round. This latest financing was led by Anthos Capital, alongside existing investors Makers Fund, GFR fund and others. We welcome Anthos and are proud to have them on board!

This new investment will allow us to expand the VRChat team, iterate on the platform and grow our community. This includes the ability for creators to earn and enable more people around the world to access VRChat. Partners like Anthos Capital open unique opportunities to help us further our goal as a virtual universe.

As a reference point to how huge this funding round is, consider the fact that in 2017, VRChat only raised $4 million. Defying the bearish performance of nearly all other VR-related startups since then, usage has continued to grow since then, with monthly active users I'd estimate to be in the low six figures -- and even more notable, 1 in 3 daily users (i.e. about 40,000-100,000) logged in via HMDs, With VRChat concurrent numbers starting to pass Second Life's CCU this year, I'd estimate VRChat now has over 1 million monthly active users (and that's probably a conservative guess).

Looking at larger market, VRChat is one of the most-used VR applications, easily eclipsing usage of high-end games like Half Life: Alyx and indie hits like Beat Saber. And far as funding goes,  take a look at this:

Quest Owner Survey: 74% Say They Probably or Definitely Won't Buy VR Apps Which Have Ads -- But I Doubt Facebook Cares

Here's results of my survey aimed at Quest owners, asking if they would buy VR apps for their headset if it contains ads. (As Facebook recently announced would start happening soon.)

Of the 50 respondents, a majority answered that they would never buy or use a Quest app with ads, while a much smaller 18% answered that they are less likely to buy/use an app with ads. That effectively comes out to 3 in 4 Quest owners surveyed who are negative about ads.

By contrast, only 10% of respondents said they were receptive to Quest app ads if this made a given app lower cost or free.  (I'm personally somewhat surprised more did not answer this way.)

So Quest owners are overwhelmingly negative about ads in their apps! However, I doubt Oculus owner Facebook cares all that much:

Inside VRChat's Happy Hill Dog Park, the Virtual Dog Experience Created by Academics to Study Real Life Well-Being & Social Isolation

Since launching last week, Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat has been swarming with avatars of all kinds, playing fetch and applying copious force-feedback enabled head pats with the AI-powered pooches. Dr. Kim, the director on the project, told me Monday that it's already attracted over 43,000 visits, and been favorited 7000 times.

And while the bucolic experience might seem like a VR version of Nintendogs, it's at heart a sophisticated project spearheaded by an academic with the modest goal of bringing more happiness to humankind.

Dr. Brenda Freshman, a professor of Health Care Administration at CalState Long Beach, conceived and self-funded the project as a proof of concept, working with Kim (a veteran VR/game developer) and Studio CyFi to deploy it in VRChat.

"What I'm doing now is gathering my academic partners," she tells me during my visit to the dog park. "and we'll be putting a variety of studies together, but I think the first ones will be dealing with well-being and social isolation."

One VRChat user told Kim that he had recently lost his dog in real life, and was now visiting Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat as a way to heal from that grief. But as she puts it to me in VRChat (watch below) Brenda tells me they're not specifically creating this simulation for people who lost dogs in real life, or are unable to own dogs due to allergies or housing restrictions:

Pet the Dog in VR: Adorable, AI-Powered Pooches Arrive in VRChat, a Free Public Demo of a Upcoming Research Project

The dogs in Happy Hill Dog Park are waiting for you to come play! Available now on #VRChat for both PC and Quest.

Environment and animation design by @jendaviswilson , AI & logic by @CyanLaser . pic.twitter.com/mpJ87FXXx7

— Studio CyFi (@StudioCyfi) May 19, 2021

Click here to visit Happy Hill Dog Park in VRChat, the latest, impressive user-made project on the platform -- not just virtual dogs, but dogs you can interact with in full VR.

That's right: Pet the dog in VR. And feel yourself petting them too.

"Basically the controller vibrates if you pet the dog, and they'll follow you around if you're holding like a stick or a tennis ball," VRCer Ben Rainwolf tells me.

The immersive effect of the dogs' AI, matched to the VR experience seems pretty compelling: "The cute dogs never stop wanting attention and I feel terrible if I don't give it to them," as another player put it. "It's like an adorable trap that you can't leave."

"The dogs gain trust with you over interactions and change their animations and wagging the more you interact," project designer Jen Davis-Wilson of Studio CyFyi tells me. (Her co-founder Cyan Laser created the dog AI.)  "The conditionals of going home, interacting, petting, etc. does get a bit complex with multiplayer networking. But this was a fairly small job."

Studio CyFi, as regular readers may remember, was founded to turn a popular VRChat world into a standalone Oculus Quest game. This dog park, however, was not mainly created for entertainment:

VRChat Users: Please Take This Short Survey I'm Conducting With Syrmor! And Include Your VRChat Name if You Want to Be Quoted (Complete Survey on PC/Mac For Best Results)

Click here to take the survey!

Famed VRChat reporter Syrmor and I are running a short VRC user survey to get a better understanding of who's a member of the growing virtual world and why. In a week or two, we'll hopefully report the results on his social media channels and of course here's on New World Notes!

One again, click below to take!

Rec Room Has More Users, So Why Does VRChat Seem to Have Much More User Creativity? Consider the Stonecutter Test

Rec Room recently reported over 1 million monthly users and a higher peak concurrency than VRChat. But when it comes to the two leading social VR worlds, VRChat seems to have a crucial edge: A far more active and ambitious creative community. 

That statement is my personal estimation, to be sure. And to be fair, Rec Room does have some interesting user-made projects. But I follow both worlds pretty closely, and VRChat’s user-driven worlds and innovations consistently seem to hit on a completely different, higher level. Just in the last few months, for example, I’ve written about*:

• A user-made program that converts C# to Udon (VRChat’s internal scripting system).
• A user-created process to juggle virtual balls from real life motion tracking.
• A group-created VRChat world that’s so popular, it’s becoming a stand-alone VR game.

There’s even an entire VRChat-based rave subculture (see below). 

Why has VRChat succeeded so far on this front? A casual survey of user creators points to a core factor: