New World Notes

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:

Watch: What VRChat Gets About the Metaverse That Meta Does Not

While VRChat does not actually describe itself as a metaverse platform (yet?), it is by far the leading contender in that space. I feel like I've been writing about that little appreciated theme for at least the last couple years, but this new video from Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer) of People Make Games makes that case with copious interviews and examples (several of which I've also featured here, see below) and in a far more charming accent.

His video is a great and golden respite from the deluge of putative "metaverse" stories which generally turn out to be NFT-flavored cash grabs, or just as questionable, the latest bland announcement from Meta or another corporate giants. But as Quint tells me, they are missing something key about platforms like these:

VRChat's New Avatar-to-Avatar Interactions Are Amazing -- Here's Some Tutorials to Get Started Booping & Grabbing

Update, 4/21: Avatar Dynamics is now live. Check out this post for tutorials and community-created samples of this avatar-to-avatar tech!

As promised last year, VRChat recently updated its avatar dynamics to enable far more interactivity between avatars and the virtual world, and (even more key) avatar-to-avatar.   Now in open beta, the VRChat community is already coming up with some fun and zany application of the technology -- there's even this project to physically hug across the metaverse through haptics -- and at least a couple user-made tutorials:

Code to Connect Real Life Devices to VRChat Published to GitHub - With a Small Catch

Remember "Dream Drive" (aka "Micchy" in VRChat), the Japanese inventor who is jaw-droppingly creating a robot in the real world that is controllable from within VRChat? Of course you do! We don't fully have a Metaverse along the strictest definition until there's a way to bridge the virtual world with real world devices. So here's some good news:

He just published to his Github the code enabling serial communication between VRChat and the real world. Now other inventors can take his code and start building other mixed reality projects.

Slight drawback: Micchy's Github code is only in Japanese for now, so the next step may be getting a tech-fluent translator to bridge Japanese with English and other languages. If you're interested, connect with him on Twitter directly, or post in Comments below, and I'll nudge him to reply. (Also see his Japanese language tutorial below the break.)

Watch: Inventor Creating 8 Foot Real Robot Controllable from Within VRChat!

I've seen some insanely ambitious VRChat projects but good god just watch this video already. It's from "Dream Drive" , a Japanese inventor who is creating an 8 foot tall Transformers-type robot in the real world... that is controllable from within VRChat.

That's possible, he tells me, by virtual serial communication between VRChat and Raspberry Pi. (His VRChat username is "micchy".) And while he's creating the software connecting the virtual world to the real one in order to control his robot, he plans to make the code generally available for people to create other mixed reality applications:

"Community makes things valuable" - I Talk About Virtual Wealth in the Metaverse Era on Bustle

NFT? Maybe that should mean Not Friendly Transactions. Allie Volpe of Bustle recently asked me who will be rich in the Metaverse:

Virtual plots of land or massive yachts won’t be signs of wealth in the metaverse if other users aren’t on the platform to witness it, especially if outsiders don’t see value in these items aside from their high price tags, Au says. “To me, the realization that these [metaverse] startups are missing is that community makes things valuable, social cohesion makes things valuable,” he says.

If you're wondering which metaverse startups I'm talking about, here's my post on the so-called Metaverse real estate "bubble".

I go into detail about what is truly valuable on metaverse platforms:

VRChat Hires Community Member Who Created Popular Scripting Compiler -- UdonSharp Planned to Become Part of Official SDK

Above: Merlin's home office working for VRChat Inc. 

Great update to UdonSharp, the hugely popular user-made compiler that converts C# to VRChat's Udon scripting language: Recently, VRChat the company officially hired "Merlin", UdonSharp's creator, to work directly and full-time for the company, and implement his code into the official  development software.

"In the near future, yes it will probably be imported automatically with the SDK," as Merlin puts it to me. "I think it will depend on how much the SDK ends up needing to tie into UdonSharp to decide if it'll be included in the main Udon/SDK package at some point down the road rather than as an extra package that's installed automatically. But to the user it should essentially look the same with it being imported automatically with the SDK in versus it being part of the main SDK."

VRChat first hired Merlin to do contract work to support UdonSharp last year, a good thing to benefit the thousands of community creators who already rely on his compiler -- not to mention financially supporting Merlin himself, who was unemployed at the time.

“I was living off savings from my prior job and working towards breaking even on living costs for rent/food/etc with Patreon,” he says.

Merlin later saw a need to improve the Udon SDK on a broader level -- but only if he were working for the company full-time. So he applied, and joined the team:

Does VRChat or Second Life Have Better Avatar Options? New World Notes Readers Debate the Pros & Cons

Good reader discussion in last week's post about VRChat's new peak usage numbers. This growth inspired "Timo" to ask why so many VRChat avatars seem so low detail, as compared to Second Life:

I read many comments here recently about how VRChat uses more modern technology, custom shaders from Unity etc. Which is supposed to be light years ahead of SL's dated engine.

So I was wondering how come VRChat looks so terrible? In the screenshot in this article, shading is so bad it's almost impossible to see anything. All characters seem to be completely flat shaded.

I understand that everybody likes to use cartoon shaders on VRChat, but even for cartoon [avatars] the quality of shading I see seems awful, dark and flat. In addition to shading, the quality of models is also not looking good. Low poly to the extreme.

Does anybody know what is the reason for that? Is it just because everyone on purpose choose shaders that look flat? Or is it because of the technical limitations? I can't understand how the game based on 15 years newer engine can produce results that are so much worse visually than Second Life. 

Longtime reader Adeon, who was very active in SL before jumping into VRChat, makes a case for the latter, arguing that it's more a matter of the VRChat user community preferring non-realistic avatars:

VRChat User Concurrency Hit Nearly 90,000 Last New Year's Eve!

Chart annotations by Adeon - click to embiggenate

VRChat hit a huge milestone in the final hours of 2021, when the company and community host a widescale New Year's Eve party across the platform. As you can see from the chart above, peak concurrency on the last day of the year reached as high as 89,300+, but let's just say "nearly 90,000."

To put that in perspective, those concurrency numbers make VRChat usage competitive with the the top 10 most played games on Steam.  For instance, Grand Theft Auto Online also had about 90,000 players logged in via Steam on New Year's Eve. But unlike that game and all the others topping Steam's chart, almost all of the content on VRChat is created by the user community, not a professional studio or publisher.

This also means VRChat has finally beat the all-time concurrency record of local favorite Second Life, which peaked at just over 80,000 during its hype period.

This news (and the charts here) are from longtime VRChat user Adeon, who was checking the platform's concurrency API for just this month. If past trends remain consistent, he believes 90,000, as high as that is, will become the standard in 2022.

"[Y]ou can see that the jumps mostly happen on New Year's -- and they stay around. So this will most likely be the new normal, and slowly increase from here."

As Adeon's chart also suggests, VRChat usage grows every time there's a new spike of VR headset purchases -- or as he calls it, "Questmas":