New World Notes

This VRChat Explorer Photographs Beautiful Worlds Like These -- But The Most Popular One Here May Surprise You

Neomance is another great VRChat explorer. Like Bradlee, he explores the platforms' many worlds, takes breathtaking photos of his favorites, and posts them in a dazzling cascade on his Twitter.

Like many -- most? nearly all? -- of the active VRChat community, he discovered VRChat through "random YouTube videos, and I got on to socialize with random people".

Unlike most others, he's spent 2 years actively exploring the platform, deeply browsing the user-created worlds, and learning to photograph them like a pro. (That's even led to a few for-hire VRChat photography jobs.)

Here's five of the favorite recent worlds he's photographed -- tweets include creator credits and info for visiting them yourself:

• Abrepear
• suishogu (pictured at right)
• Ecology (pictured below)
• Forest Magic Shop
• Floating Delight (also pictured below)

If you've explored VRChat at all, you'll notice that many of the most popular and well-visited worlds aren't necessarily the most beautiful -- and vice versa. In fact, of the five worlds listed here, the most popular one might surprise you:

VRChat Tips: Five Amazing Worlds to Visit Recommended by a Top Explorer

World name: もいらんどのラビットライド#VRChat #VRChat_world紹介 pic.twitter.com/2hUSx7LuCr

— Bradlee (@Bradlee1011) September 9, 2022

Bradlee is a superb Twitter account for anyone excited by the potential and creative community of VRChat, but for that very reason, is wondering which user-made VRChat worlds among tens of thousands they should visit first. 

 

That's where Bradlee's Twitter comes in. It was inspired by explorations with his his friend Juno, who he met in VRChat.

 

"Eventually I decided to share them on Twitter cuz I want people to also be able to see these worlds and make them hopefully go visit them or make them want to explore themselves," he tells me. (VRC name: Bradlee101.)

 

His Twitter stream is full of photos from his travels through VRChat, so I asked him to recommend five of his favorite worlds here. Read on for those, with links for directly teleporting to them in VRChat, along with his tips for exploring the platform:

Watch: Machinima Shot in VRChat Features Amazing Fight Scenes Using a Full Body VR Rig in a Surprising Way

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S.Y.N.C. is an upcoming machinma shot entirely in VRChat, and it's among the most amazing that I've seen -- along with the professional polish, the many fight scenes (via guns, swords, and full contact kung fu) are impressively fluid and articulated. And as befits most metaverse projects with this level of excellence, it's a fully furry production.

Directed and starring "Legend50210" (let's call him Legend for short), the footage is captured, he tells me, "using the natively supported stream camera function supplied by VRChat. I hold the artificial camera in my hand and move it accordingly like an actual camera minus the weight."

The action scenes are, as they appear, shot with the actor in a full body rig:

"Most people on the platform use the standard form of 6 point tracking which accommodates for head, hands, feet and hips.
Me, I went all out and got added ones that include my chest, knees and elbows, bringing my points of tracking up to 11."

At first I thought the scenes were shot with actors logged onto VRChat from various parts of the world. But the way these scenes are actually shot is perhaps even more painstakingly impressive:

Watch: VRChat's Horizon Adjust Feature Used to Recreate David Bowie's Classic Escher Maze Scene from Labyrinth!

Thanks to #VRChat's new Horizon Adjust feature, you can do cool stuff! Here's an homage to the movie 'Labyrinth' I made to demonstrate! pic.twitter.com/OZvVoiovCK

— Dr Ocelot (@doktorocelot) August 1, 2022

VRChat's new Horizon Adjust feature may have been mainly added to address usability concerns  -- it allows someone who's confined to a bed to comfortable use VRChat -- but very much on brand, the VRChat creator community has already created a seriously cool bonus use case: Gravity-defying special effects!

For instance, here's creator "Dr Ocelot"  using Horizon Adjust to re-create a classic David Bowie moment; the classic Escher maze from Labyrinth. (Above; original below for comparison purposes.)  

Almost all of this clip, Ocelet tells me, was shot "in camera" in VRChat -- here's how:

VRChat User Concurrency Back Up to Pre-Mod Ban "Protest" Levels -- Update: Now 6000+ Over Last Week's Protest Levels

Update, 8/3: Yesterday's peak concurrency was 70,478 -- well over 6,000 concurrent more users than last week Tuesday, when the protest started. As I suspected, the trend remains: VRChat gonna VRChat.

As I suspected last week, the "protest" by some VRChat users over the company's ban on modified clients has all the indications of a vociferous but small subgroup, rather than reflecting any broad community uprising. You can see that in the user concurrency levels from this VRChat dashboard, which today shows a 5,581 increase of users from last Monday, when the announcement was posted.

One week later, the only indication that there was even any kind of user disgruntlement is on Steam, where thousands have since barraged VRChat's listing with a negative review. But even there, the loss is a few thousand concurrent users at most, and is offset by growth from the Quest userbase. Also, a little bird tells me we may see much more growth evident today at the peak time of 8pm PT, so stand by there.

As I wrote last week, some of the mod ban protest was legitimate, since there was concern that a few mods improved VRChat's usability, such as text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, for people who are bedridden, and so on. VRChat management very quickly addressed those concerns with an update to the original announcement:

Steam Protest Against VRChat's Mod Ban So Far Leads to Little Change of Actual VRChat Usage on Steam

VRChat July '22 concurrency via SteamDB

Ever since a user protest against VRChat's recent announcement banning mods led to a bombarding of bad user ratings on VRChat's Steam page, I've seen dire warnings of disaster for the platform. But having covered user protests on metaverse platforms for quite some time, my general rule of thumb is:

VRChat Community Wracked by Protest Over Ban on Modified Clients

Above: Steam's VRChat ratings bombarded by protesters

A Metaverse platform is nothing without a thriving community, but the flipside is portions of that community can seem to endanger the platform. VRChat is experiencing that now, due to an announcement that seems benign on its face:

“Modified clients” are a large problem for VRChat in a variety of ways. Malicious modified clients allow users to attack and harass others, causing a huge amount of moderation issues. Even seemingly non-malicious modifications complicate the support and development of VRChat, and make it impossible for VRChat creators to work within the expected, documented bounds of VRChat.

In order to prevent that, we’ve implemented Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) into VRChat. If you’ve played Apex Legends, Fortnite, Gears of War, Elden Ring, or many more, you’ve seen Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC)...  The integration of EAC means that all modified clients are blocked...

Every month, thousands of users have their accounts stolen, often due to running a modified client that is silently logging their keystrokes as well as other information. These users – often without even realizing it! – run the risk of losing their account, or having their computers become part of a larger botnet. 

Excuse me while I recover over flashbacks around various modified third party-made Second Life viewers which were banned for having dubious features. As with Second Life, a highly vocal number of VRC players have been protesting VRChat's move since it was made, include bombarding its Steam listing with bad reviews. Which as you can see above, is also an indicator of how small the protest is: Less than 10,000 users have recently posted a negative review. (Based on various figures, I'd estimate VRChat has about 5 million monthly active users, give or take.)

Do the protestors have any legitimate points? Somewhat, in the sense that some mods include some features that provide text captions for deaf users, contrast for colorblind users, and so on. But then again, from VRChat the company's point of view, thousands of users are reportedly having their accounts actively stolen by modded viewers every month.

Which side is right? Rather than weigh in, I'll quote a famed and highly respected member of the VRChat creator community, who requested I quote them anonymously, "due to the toxicity online" (their words), and provided great context on the situation:

July 27: HBO Debuts "We Met in Virtual Reality", Joe Hunting's Crowdfunded Documentary Devoted to the VRChat Community -- Here's the Trailer!

VRChat/metaverse lovers, pencil in July 27 on your calendar, because that's when HBO is premiering "We Met in VR", Joe Hunting's feature length documentary devoted to the VRChat community. Watch the trailer above, featuring some VRChat worlds that have also been covered here, including the deaf community which teaches sign language in VRChat, and Udon Tycoon, an insanely ambitious roller coaster construction sim.

I've been chatting with Joe since January, when his crowdfunded documentary debuted at the Sundance film festival:

There's Well Over 10 Million Subscribers to VRChat Content on YouTube!

When we talk about user-generated content on metaverse platforms, it's important to focus not just on 3D models and scripted experiences in-world, but metaverse content created for external consumption -- for instance, quite prominently, for social media/streaming video platforms.

With VRChat, for instance, in compiling a list of YouTube channels focused on that platform, there's dozens of them devoted to that platform, with the top ten amassing well over 10 million subscribers. Discounting overlaps of unique users, that's likely more active viewers for VRChat content on YouTube than there are players of VRChat. 

As a sample, here's 10 YouTube channels with a heavy (or complete) focus on VRChat which have 500,000 or more subscribers. Starting above, doing a walk through of a survival horror game in VRChat, by NadditionVR (512K subs).

After the break, a surprisingly well-made VRChat machinima (Spanish only) by Jailden Wold (594 subs):

This is What Strong User Growth on a Metaverse Platform Looks Like

As comparison data to that chart on blockchain-based metaverse platforms from yesterday, here's VRChat's daily peak concurrency on Steam since 2017. (Via SteamDB.) Important qualifier: This is not a full reflection of user activity on VRChat, since it doesn't count people logging in via the Quest headset/store.

After a brief spike in late 2017/early 2018 due to the infamous Ugandan knuckles meme, VRChat's user concurrency slipped for a time but then in mid-2019, started steadily and strongly growing to now in 2022, when VRChat's peak is consistently over 30,000 every day, and sometimes over 40,000K. (Again, this is only via Steam -- the total CCU tends to be nearly double that, counting Quest devices.)

This data is just a bird's eye view of the real thing that's important to have on a metaverse platform: