New World Notes

Syrmor Rising: VRChat's Virtual Reporter Attracts Massive Community, Real World Meet-Up With Worldwide Attendance

#syrcon2019 meet-up - photo by Gabrielle

How beloved are the VRChat interviews of Syrmor, the social VR world's best embedded reporter? Here's how much: Right now in Toronto, nearly two dozen people have gathered from around the world for what they've dubbed #Syrcon2019, a meet-up that the young Canadian filmmaker had nothing to do with at the start.

"I didn't organize it," he tells me, laughing. "It was a bunch of people on the Syrmor community Discord became friends and decided to do a meet up and it just got larger and larger until it became know as Syrcon."

They arrived from the United States and his native Canada, and from far farther parts: "Twenty people have come from a bunch of different places like Finland, Germany, and UK", he tells me. Yes, Finland. ("I didn't even know that country was real!", Syrmor says with ironic wonder.) 

"I'm meeting up with the people in Toronto but I didn't organize it or anything... We've rented out a bar and have plans for a bunch of things around the city," Syrmor goes on, "And they all get to meet friends that have made appearances in my vids."

As anyone who's seen Syrmor's interviews knows, they're uniformly funny, sweet, and positive (if also often sad and poignant). So notwithstanding VRChat's reputation as a hovel of trollish a-holes, the Syrmor community has followed that lead, becoming a chatty, social community -- one that's even inspired some real relationships:

I'm Finally in VRChat as Hamlet_Au -- What Should I Do Next?

I swear any time I create a new account on a new-ish platform, some total tool has always already taken "Hamlet" as an avatar name before I can grab it for my own. But no worries: Connect with me on VRChat as Hamlet_Au.

I'm logging in via Oculus Quest, so I my options are somewhat limited compared to the full Oculus/Vive client, but so far, the new account creation process is not horrible. I like how you start in a lobby all your own, and have an option to teleport to a small, private home location all your own. (Second Life, by contrast, has always been plagued by an on-boarding process where your avatar is dropped into an orientation area used by multiple players, then plopped into a Welcome Area usually teaming with many more multiple players, who tend to make the Welcome Area unwelcome AF. Most people quit SL, disoriented and intimidated, somewhere in this process.)

On the down side, VRChat's account creation process is still very beta and user-unfriendly for anyone who is not already a hardcore gamer, so there's a lot to be improved. Anyway, that's my early experience. Who else reading these words is in VRChat? Please connect with me in-world and share your experiences and tips in Comments!

Rec Room/Against Gravity Site User Demographics: 174,000 Uniques, Mostly Male, Notably Older Than VRChat Site Users

SimilarWeb, my go-to resource for online/mobile data, just shared with me some exclusive user data for the site of Rec Room/Against Gravity (the studio behind the social VR platform). While this doesn't give us direct user data on Rec Room the download client itself, it gives us a pretty good estimate on unique users over time, and demographics. So:

Total unique visitors over the last 12 months globally are 174,130.  That would track with my estimate that Rec Room probably has about 20,000-30,000 active monthly users.

As above, over 3 in 4 users are female, with the largest age cohort (34%) being 25-34 years old.

Compare and contrast that with SimilarWeb's VRChat site user demographics: 82% are male, with the largest age cohort (43%) being 18-24 years gold. This suggests Rec Room's user base is on average older than VRChat's user base, with 1 in 3 users aged 35 or older. Not surprising, since Rec Room is much more VR-centric than VRChat, and VR rigs aren't cheap -- typically, people outside college age can best afford them.

Rec Room/Against Gravity site demographics by location are also worth a look:

SL Should Adopt VRChat's Avatar Rankings -- And SLers Should Be Less Like Barbie, More Like Elizabeth Warren (Comment of the Week #2)

Great conversation in this post praising VRChat's new avatar optimization rankings (from Excellent down to Very Poor, for avatars over 70,000 triangles) -- including this great comment from reader "Finni Graves", who agrees with reader "Cake" that Second Life should adopt these rankings:

I've invested a lot of my SL esteem in the whole crazy avatar adornment scene. Then one day, after trying to navigate a horrible shopping event, I've got to stop being so selfish and hogging so much resource. What's the point of looking good, if I don't feel good? These ridiculous mesh bodies, heads, hair. clothes, and accessories are literally sucking the life out of our SL. We must simplify ourselves because this whole hamster wheel isn't working.

Cake is right. All of us need to be graded harshly and it is our duty to ask ourselves, " do I really need this?". It's also the duty of content creators to make consumers aware of the optimization of their products and to guarantee it. They should have to be graded too, at least on Marketplace. 

Finni says SL's many fashion bloggers should advocate optimized avatars and stop promoting resource heavy avatars which degrade the performance for everyone around them. And then, notably, likens these reforms to the plans put forth by the US Presidential candidate who's leading the charge to reform the American economy by penalizing people whose greed hurts society and the environment:

Why VRChat Players Love Looking at Themselves in VRChat-Based Mirrors

In case you were wondering what inspired Nylon Pinkney's latest comic about VRChat, reader "Cake" has some more context for you in Comments:

The mirror is a big social area in your typical VRChat room. People stand in front of it and talk like they would if they were primping with friends in a bathroom. Shaders also look slightly different in different maps depending on what you're using--so even if you have one set for your avatar, you still go to the mirror to check out what you look like on that particular map.

That's actually a fascinating analogy, and does a lot to help explain VRChat's popularity:

Nylon Pinkney Is Online - Why Virtual Mirrors Are Popular in VRChat

Watch: Daily Show Features VR-Based Baptism, Hilariously Misses the Point

The Daily Show's Ronny Chieng featured virtual reality-based baptisms in a recent segment, hilariously noting the strangeness of AltspaceVR avatars ("God created man in his own image, not in the image of a purple dildo!"), while just as hilariously missing the actual point* by asking, "Does a virtual baptism even count?" As it happens, I just asked that very question to Bishop DJ Soto of VR Church, who's featured in the Daily Show segment, and who had a very substantial answer:

"First and foremost, we believe the sacraments of baptism and communion to be symbolic. They are an external expression of an internal experience," as DJ puts it. "We don’t ascribe to the literal transformation of the bread into the body of Christ. We don’t believe that baptism literally washes away guilt and sin. We believe these sacraments are symbolic. Therefore, in the spirit of this symbolism, VR Church celebrates VR sacraments."

Still, Bishop Soto tells me he took the Daily Show segment in, well, good faith:

VRChat Site User Demographics: 430,000 Uniques, Mostly Male and Over 25

SimilarWeb, my go-to resource for online/mobile data, just kindly shared with me some pretty interesting behind-the-paywall demographic on VRChat's site. (The company has not publicly released much concrete, industry standard user data numbers, beyond saying 30% of daily users are logged in via a head-mounted VR display.)

Here's SimilarWeb's age and gender demographics for the site:

• Gender Distribution
• Male: 81.5%
• Female: 18.5%
• Age Distribution
• 18 - 24: 42.8%
• 25 - 34: 32.1%
• 35 - 44: 12.1%
• 45 - 54: 6.6%
• 55 - 64: 3.8%
• 66+: 2.6%

The gender breakdown, alas, is not a surprise -- as embedded reporter Syrmor says, "VRChat is really disproportionately male".

The VRChat site age breakdown, however, is fairly notable: A strong majority (about 58%) are over 25, while 1 in 4 are 35 or older. That runs counter to the general assumption that VRChat users are mostly teens and early 20s.

In terms of unique users, VRChat site visits over time give us a pretty good guess at active unique users of VRChat:

If an Actual Pastor Simulates a Baptism in VR, Is It Spiritually Real? Here Comes the Theology

You've probably seen the virtual baptism performed by a real life pastor in VRChat, the latest video from acclaimed embedded reporter Syrmor. Left unanswered is the obvious question: If a "baptism" is only simulated in a virtual world, is it still real in any theological sense?  

From one perspective, the answer suggests another way VR and virtual worlds might one day disrupt traditional services -- in this case, the service being organized religion.

"VR baptisms are new to theological conversations," Bishop DJ Soto of the VR Church acknowledges to me; he is the pastor who who performed the baptism in Syrmor's video. "Our position on VR baptisms doesn’t seek to convince all denominations and religious constructs everywhere because a wide stream of varying theology already exists. Therefore, we simply state why we celebrate VR baptisms."

A trained theologian, DJ once helped launch an actual mega-church in Pennsylvania, but then decided with his wife that the next place to take his ministry was in the metaverse.

Now, his VRChurch typically holds services every Sunday in Alt Space and VRChat, with services in Rec Room soon planned. 100-150 attend, Bishop Soto tells me, with parishioners logging in from the US, UK, Holland, and Germany, "and then a sprinkling of like 10 other countries", from points as far as the Middle East, Africa, and South America.

When it comes to talking about the validity of virtual baptisms, he alludes to well-established strands of Christian theology that have existed for centuries: