New World Notes

VRChat Announces User Monetization, Enhanced Avatar-to-Avatar Dynamics, Webcam/Mobile Face Tracking, and Many More Upgrades Coming Soon-ish

VRChat devs just dropped a ridonkulously huge grab bag of announcements on Twitch, both upcoming and experimental; I pulled some highlights onto my YouTube, and my VRC correspondent Adeon Writer watched live and took copious notes. Most exciting to the user community was probably what's featured above: Avatar-to-avtar dynamics, which enable users to "physically" interact and even manipulate each others' bodies -- that's on the company's roadmap for this Summer.

Also coming out starting this Summer: User monetization options and, finally, a full creator economy: 

"User-to-user subscriptions is the first thing they are adding," Adeon reports, "basically Patreon except in-game directly, and Udon and scripting can react to it." (I.E., monetization options can be embedded directly into interactive experiences.) And while the ability to sell content in-world is on VRChat's roadmap, virtual currency is notably not: "[VRChat devs] specifically said they won't be doing a fake currency; real money only for anything they make."

Maybe most interesting from a cross-platform point of view are upcoming/experimental features that track body and facial movement via webcams and mobile devices:

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":

Multiplayer Beat Saber Becomes Gesture-Based Social VR Community

FlipperPA has a good analysis of multiplayer Beat Saber, which has evolved to become a supportive social VR community that reminds him of Second Life in its early "small town" years -- except instead of communicating via text, socialization is through real gestures:

It may be by complete accident, but it seems like they may have made the friendliest online community I have ever been a part of:

• All players can create avatars and have a name.
• Players can gesture with their hands, and you can see their heads move as well.
• There is no voice interaction
• There is no chat window.

This has led to a rich language of gestures evolving: players enthusiastically wave hello when a new player joins the game. It is common to see people clapping to the person who won the round, and the winner graciously taking a “namaste” bow. People wave goodbye, and gesture up to the center board in between songs to encourage a newcomer to select the song they would like to play next. It is incredibly friendly and warm. Has Beat Saber accidentally stumbled on a wonderful way for us to communicate in games? 

I enjoyed the solo Beat Saber for awhile but after it began to feel repetitive, gave up on it. Clearly a community of players has remained, and evolved:

VRChat Now So Popular With Devs, Thousands Are Using a Compiler That Converts C# to the World's Internal Scripting Language

As another sign of the VRChat community's growing strength as a creator ecosystem, here's another fairly mind-boggling factoid:

• Like many virtual worlds, VRChat has an internal scripting language. (Called Udon, in this case.)
• However, many developers (especially those who work on a professional level), prefer to code in C#, which already runs natively in Unity (the game engine underneath VRChat).
• So much so, a VRChat community member named Merlin has created UdonSharp, a C# to Udon compiler, which he built and open sourced on a voluntary basis to serve other VRChat creators, and has a Patreon in hopes that he can keep doing that full time.
• Based on the latest GitHub stats, the UdonSharp Unity package from GitHub has been downloaded around 20,000-25,000 times.
• Which suggests, based on recent stats, as much as 10% of VRChat's total monthly active user base have tried using UdonSharp at least once.

Varneon, creator of this impressive VRChat driving sim, estimates that the vast majority of VRChat worlds using Udon were actually scripted originally in UdonSharp:

Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 Sales Claims Probably Don't Mean What You Think They Mean

Quick tip on spin detection: When a company spokesperson claims their figures have "doubled" or even "quadrupled", but decline to give you specific, absolute numbers, make sure your antennae twitches furiously. So it is with Facebook's Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, recently making this claim about Oculus Quest 2 sales which are being breathlessly repeated by VR enthusiasts:

In response to [BusinessWeek reporter Emily] Chang’s question about when VR will begin to see mainstream traction, Bosworth said:

“If you look a little closely, I think it’s starting to happen right now. The fact that Oculus Quest 2—in just a few months on the market—has outsold not just its predecessor, but all of its predecessors combined, is a tremendous indicator that we are now at that point where we have broken through from the early adopter crowd to an increasingly mainstream crowd.”

This is indeed a significant milestone, especially considering that Quest 2 has only been on the market for five and a half months, while the company’s first headset launched five years ago. 

Is it though? The thing is, what a company says to a reporter is often different from what they're legally obligated to accurately state in their earnings report:

Play in VRChat: Incredibly Detailed Driving Sim With Multiuser Support & Real Foot-to-Virtual Pedal Control

I didn't think this would be possible but there's now a driving simulation in VRChat with an insane level of detail. (If you have VRChat installed, click here to play)

"It's very well scripted and a great example of the types of interactions that are possible with the Udon language [VRChat's scripting system] when close care and attention is taken," my top VRChat source Adeon tells me. "I also didn't know the feet trackers in full-body [VR] could be used as an input device".

As that suggests, yes: In this sim, you can drive a standard shift in VR and control the car's clutch, brake, and acceleration with your actual feet.

More details from its creator, Varneon:

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:

How to Track Total VRChat User Concurrency Across All Platforms

A bot on the official VRChat Discord (link here) regularly updates the number of online users -- or you can just click here to get that number.

For instance, as I write this at around 1:30pm PT, for example, there are 29,414 concurrent users. Which is interesting, because if you check VRChat's concurrency via Steam (see screen capture at right), 16,446 are logged into the world via Valve's platform.

Which is interesting! Because that suggests almost half VRChat's userbase is logging in not through Steam but though Oculus Home (for PC) and Oculus Quest. (Vive owners can log in via Viveport, but are likely to go in through Steam.)

Thanks to Adeon for the tip and analysis help!

Why Virtual Mirrors Are Popular in VRChat: A Philosophical Explanation

In this new video from Strasz (previously featured here), the VRChat sociologist deep dives into the obsession with staring at one's avatar in virtual mirrors. (It's such a popular VRChat pastime, we devoted two posts and an original comic to it.) Heavily citing French postmodernist theory ("Foucault* would have a field day in VRChat"),  Strasz argues that VRChat users aren't simply being narcissistic:

"I think ultimately a lot of behaviors in VR (like standing in front of a mirror) are misunderstood," as he puts it to me. "People tend to see them in a negative light, or see them as anti-social, when in reality they serve a powerful purpose. The mirror in VR isn't just a thing that lets you see yourself -- it's one that lets you calibrate your body, and get a sense of how you fit into the virtual space."

Given his Strasz's previous report, suggesting that a majority of VRChat users would literally like to be their avatar in real life, that sounds right.

And once a virtual mirror anchors the individual VRChat user, Strasz adds, it then becomes a social hub:

Watch: Why So Many VRChat Users Play as Female Anime Avatars

Why do so many VRChat users look like cutesy anime girls, anyway? If you assume the snarky and simplistic answer is, "Because it's full of otaku geeks with a weird waifu fetish",  watch this video which suggests the actual story is much deeper and far more fascinating than that. Created by "Strasz", who's becoming something of an anthropologist of VRChat on YouTube, his insights are based in part on a survey of over 200 hardcore VRChat users, heavily skewed (at 85%) toward people who access the virtual world through a VR headset.

His thesis for why so many VRChatters play as female anime avatars, he tells me, boils roughly down to "a confluence of factors":