New World Notes

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":

Coming to VRChat in Early 2022: Avatar Dynamics to Enhance Physics, User-to-User Interaction, PG-13 Sexytimes

Cool upcoming feature for VRChat to keep your eye on in early 2022: Avatar dynamics, designed to enable for more interactivity between avatars and the world, and (even more key) avatars to avatars.

"[I]t offers a ton of new options for people to explore that are into avatar development," as top VRC community creator Lakuza explains. "For one, it'll improve the performance overall for VRChat since the in-house dynamics system they've made is made with VRChat specifically in mind. Currently people are relying on a 3rd party asset called 'Dynamic Bones' which can be quite expensive on performance. So just being a more optimized version will do great for the regular VRC experience. But the team have gone a step further and made it easier to program player to player interactions into their avatar." 

Watch the company's demo video above for examples of what this enables. Adorably, VRChat is not showing off what avatar dyanmics will surely enable by the boatload: Avatar-to-avatar sexytimes! (At least as much sexytimes as VRChat's terms of service allow, which bans any pornographic content.)

More from the VRChat blog:

Watch: How VRChat's Unconventional Design Helped Inspire Its Amazing Creative Community

Via Adeon, who knows what's what with VRChat, here's a fairly technical dive into the unexpected miracle of VRChat's design and engineering, based on a year's worth of exploring by tech YouTuber CNLohr. As he explains, many of the development decisions the VRChat team made don't make much sense from a traditional approach, but they were made to enhance the creative freedom of the platform for the user.

As that suggests, it also features a slew of great footage of user-created wackiness, inventiveness, and deep social engagement. Speaking of which, the breathtaking, ever-changing world he mentions at the start, Treehouse In The Shade, can be accessed here.

Play in VRChat: Magic Heist, Community-Made, Pro-Quality Game Ride

Click here to experience Magic Heist in VRChat, a new community-made game world/ride that seems ideal for exploring over the Thanksgiving holidays. Co-developed by acclaimed VRC creators Fins, CyanLaser, and Lakuza, it is, to judge by the highly-polished trailer (watch above), pretty much indistinguishable in quality to a big budget console game for the family. Much of that has to do with the fact that Fins paid out of pocket to hire professional voice actors and license the soundtrack (the biggest part of the budget).

While it may look like a game built over a year, the team built Magic Heist in just about a month, Lakuza tells me, racing to finish it by deadline for the Raindance Film Festival contest:

Car Giant Hyundai Also Has an Experimental Presence in VRChat

Click here to visit the showroom, but to be honest, it's not much more than what you see above -- an experimental deployment from an R&D lab associated with Hyundai, it looks like. (And Google has no word about it having some kind of official launch or ribbon cutting, so apparently not a marketing project.) However, this does mean that Hyundai is the largest car company with a presence in VRChat, and not Nissan, as previously reported. But the latter world, by contrast, is being used for marketing, and could definitely use take some advice from what was previously tried in Second Life. 

Much thanks to François Pierre for the tip!

VRChat Hits New All-Time Peak User Concurrency Record: Over 55,000!

Data via VRChat Status

Last weekend VRChat hit what looks to be another all-time peak concurrency record for the platform, crossing over 55,000 users online at the same time (see above data from VRChat Status, a user-run concurrency tracker).

Much of that record seems attributable to a VRChat-based furry conference promoted by VRChat the company. Speaking of which, this furry influx pushed VRChat's weekend concurrency over that of Second Life, which peaked last weekend at 53,326, according to SL Grid Survey. Second Life was once the key immersive home of furries online, but to to judge by these stats, much of that fur has flown.

Also notable:

NIssan's Marketing Program in VRChat Could Learn Some Hard Earned Lessons from Second Life

"VRChat has much of the same discovery issues that've plagued Second Life," notes Adeon Writer, a denizen of both worlds, responding to my observation that Nissan's VRChat  marketing campaign doesn't seem to attract many visitors. "Mainly, as there are more and more places to visit, it becomes harder and harder to become discovered and retain attention from so many other possible places you could be. I don't think Second Life ever managed to solve this in a meaningful way. VRChat hasn't yet either."

That sounds very right. Also (I should add) as sub-communities in virtual worlds become more and more cloistered, it becomes an even more difficult challenge for outside marketers to engage with the world's user base as a whole. That seems to be happening in VRChat as well.

Reader and SLer Kaylee West has some solid ideas Nissan could do well to learn from:

Nissan Launches Community-Created Experience in VRChat -- Though Community Visits Seem Slow

Nissan seems to be the biggest real world brand to deploy a virtual marketing campaign in VRChat, the would-be Metaverse:

Nissan Crossing, in Tokyo’s Ginza district... has been recreated in stunning virtual reality showcasing the all-new Ariya electric crossover. The virtual gallery can be found under the name “NISSAN CROSSING”^* on the social VR platform VRChat in the “Worlds” category. The VR venue provides a new means of digital communication and offers a variety of content and experiences, including new announcements and briefings. An inaugural tour will be held by year-end to highlight the risks of climate change and how a future with electric vehicles could look.

Development of the virtual gallery was made possible thanks to the support of leading VR creators. 

[Update, November 11: Hyundai has a prior world in VRChat.]

"I think this is very clever because it is like an influencer marketing [campaign]," says Sanny, my indispensable Japanese translator. "Nissan credit all names of creators." A VRChat reporter name @OculusTan on Twitter has a video of the launch party:

Open Forum: Is There a Recent SL Project as Ambitious as VRChat's Udon Tycoon That I Should Be Covering?

Writing about Udon Tycoon in VRChat last week, it occurred to me that I haven't covered a Second Life-based project of similar ambition and scope in a long time. (Beautiful sims, to be sure, we got that covered, along with light roleplay game experiences in SL.) But Udon Tycoon has user-created, physics-enabled, save-able coaster building that's rideable and instantiated in the same world at the same. Is there a recent SL project (say within the last 3 years) with roughly comparable inventiveness? 

This is not a concern troll post, I'm genuinely curious -- it's quite possible (as has happened many time before) that there's some amazing project quietly being built deep in the heart of Second Life that the creators don't bother to promote, since they're not concerned about publicity per se, and enjoy the creation as an act in itself. Which is great for them, but the world should know too. (Well, I sure would.)

Mic is open below -- let me know! Please include links and contact info wherever possible.