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Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven

Definitely watch the presentation by the developer in VR Chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2u7NOpzcBQ I haven't played VR Chat in a few years, and holy cow this makes me want to jump back in. Seeing fully captured motion avatars of people is SO immersive. It's absolutely insane how the experience of interacting with people can feel so natural even when they're on the other side of the planet. I just love watching "body language" of the presenter, it's such a precise rendering of what a "real life" presentation like this would be. Plus, you meet people like the writer of this blog post, who are so knowledgeable and interesting and fun to talk to.

RamRodification 5y ago
Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.
- maeln 5y ago
  StraszFilms made a video touching on this subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v_Dl7i4Bcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v_Dl7i4Bcw ( he also made a very nice documentary about VRChat nightclubs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU )
- caslon 5y ago
  Most of them aren't actually all that small, it's just that the perspective it's being filmed from (the narrator's head-camera) is on a stage, and VR warps things in your periphery pretty hard. There's also the fact that it's easier to be immersed if you aren't leaning heavily on realism; Oculus has a lot of research on this, actually. For example, if you have a photorealistic avatar but aren't doing eye-tracking, it's actually more jarring and discomforting than a cartoon avatar without it. That's why the initial avatars they did had force-obscured eyes and no color, and the new ones are literally cartoons: your mind can adapt to something very different, but it can't adapt to something that's just subtly different. However, some people do choose to do weird stuff. That's mostly a tech thing though. If you go to a normal place, you'll find a lot of actual kids and actual teenagers, and they're relatively normal. Very few people as weird as the tech community. Really, technical people in digital spaces kind of get a bit wild with their self-expression. Some theorize it's because most of them don't express themselves much in real life. I've tried this particular app only a handful of times (I don't like using proprietary software, but it's important to keep yourself updated with the state of it), and when I wasn't visiting explicitly tech-related things, it was pretty normal. Lots of copyright infringement of Nintendo characters, as you might expect.
- jcims 5y ago
  I bought an Oculus Quest 2 earlier this year to check out the whole VR situation. It was basically a ghost town with pockets of children and, IMHO, sketchy folks having childlike conversation. I don't really know what I expected but it wasn't that. Aside from some focus issues the goggle hardware was pretty great but the VR world was not a good experience at all. :/
  - caslon 5y ago
    It's worth noting for anyone curious: the Quest 2 can't actually interact with or enter the majority of worlds because of technical constraints (they aren't even offered to Quest 2 users unless the author of the world explicitly opts into it and designs their world for it). Most adults are on private, PC-focused servers. The application is not a stunning technical achievement, but it's unfair to judge the program by jcim's summary, because he seemingly went into it without knowledge of how it worked and wasn't able to access any of the interesting places. It would be like judging Skyrim by an SNES backport.
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      While all of this is true, one should also note that none of this is obvious at any point while using VR Chat. It might be the most popular social VR app right now (Altspace has even more problems, and RecRoom is pretty much strictly children), but that doesn't mean the software is actually any good. We're in the Friendster/MySpace/Neopets days of social VR, with Facebook seemingly interested in making the LinkedIn.
      - pema99 5y ago
        Honestly, the game starts at the point where you meet a group of people you enjoy interacting with and stop visiting public instances. Much easier to get in to with a friend to guide you along the way.
        moron4hire 5y ago
        Yes, this is absolutely true. It's probably true for most people of most social software, but for me the immediacy and intimacy of VR and voice chat definitely amplify it a lot.
- mlindner 5y ago
  The number of people into furry or anime in the software community is large, especially among millennial generation. But unless we find someone of similar interests at work, we're not going to talk about it (or only describe it in vague terms) because it can creep some people out. Further if you're using VRChat I think you already self-select as unusual beyond that. (Anecdote, my college anime club almost a decade ago was almost all software engineers with an assortment of other science or engineering fields.)
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  It seems representative of VR's demographics ime. Weird fantasy and wish fulfillment. It's kept me from the platform as well.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  Should it be surprising that in a world where you can look however you want, lots of people would not choose to look how the real world forces them to?
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    It's just surprising that everyone wants to look like a mix of a 16yo anime schoolgirl and a fox.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      I think maybe because those are both things that are significantly different than reality.
      - moron4hire 5y ago
        Nah, it's more a combination of memeing and that the avatar interface in VR Chat is horrible. Picking an avatar takes a lot of work. Some of the ones listed can crash some machines. Many of the ones listed are only available on the PC version, so you get some "PC-Master-Race" posturing. And there aren't a lot of good, default options, so you end up with a lot of people picking the same avatars. There are lots of other avatars, but most of them are very unhuman-like and several are just plane bad. EDIT: for what is worth, I tangentially work on the same sort of software. My system is a training environment not intended for the public, but a lot of the same concerns are involved. Currently, we have no avatar selection system. Everyone gets the same avatars, differentiated by a name tag. This was 50% a deliberate decision to avoid avatar mayhem and maintain an egalitarian environment, 50% pushing off the problem until I can figure out how to give some options without devolving into avatar mayhem.
      - Grustaf 5y ago
        There are lots of things that are different from reality, the questions is why so many of them chose that particular way to be unrealistic.
        5y ago
- sneak 5y ago
  Why does it weird you out?
  - RamRodification 5y ago
    A few reasons I guess. For as long as I can remember, we have had adult predators going online posing as young girls/boys with different levels of malicious sexual intent. I understand that that isn't the objective here, but I can't help making that connection. Like "Oh! You weren't actually a 15 year old girl, you are a 30 year old guy pretending to be". That makes me uncomfortable. The anime stuff always seem to be overly sexualized. Skimpy outfits. Traditionally sexy bodies (Legs, boobs, ass, etc. Yes, that is highly subjective but I think you can see my point). Same goes for the furry stuff. Always the more or less "sexy", more or less "naked" looks. As an outsider it seems to be a sexual fetish more than anything else. I have absolutely nothing against people wanting to be more fluid with genders. Or wanting to be sexy. Or roleplaying as whatever. I welcome that. It's just a bit weird that it's such a common choice to be [sexy child] or [sexy animal]. And in a setting that, to me, is not where sexy things happen, or where sexy things are even really wanted?
    - jcims 5y ago
      You should try being in one of the rooms, it's extremely creepy haha. Apparently my poor Quest 2 experience was due to me being a n00b, but when you roll into a room with 5-10 avatars bopping around and you can hear conversations between 4th graders and suddenly realize you're 'alone' with them, it gets extremely uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's a rational response, but I never said a word while I was on there, boxed the thing up after a few hours and shipped it back to Facebook.
      - pema99 5y ago
        Unfortunately true, but also not the experience that most people who continue to play the game have with it. Public instances, especially those in popular worlds, are pure cancer. Anyone who has played more than a few hours will tell you. The reason they are so full of screaming kids is because everyone who isn't one has moved elsewhere. I very very rarely encounter minors, and hanging out with them makes me uncomfortable too, even having thousands of hours played. Sucks that you had a bad experience, the platform can be a completely different experience if you are brought into it by someone who already knows their way around.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- devwastaken 5y ago
  Because anime. It's cute. People want to be cute.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Why are all Peanuts characters children despite dealing with adult issues regularly? Artistic license. But mostly because when you are an adult, you still feel like a child in many situations.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Out of interest, what would you choose to be?
  - RamRodification 5y ago
    It's hard without knowing how freely I could pick. Maybe something from a video game I like or a caricature-y version of a movie character I like. Those are fun choices for a one-off thing though. Maybe I would reconsider if I really got into it and wanted something that actually represented me as a person. I don't think I would swap biological gender in any of those cases.
- jayd16 5y ago
  The tech might be a bit of a factor. If you don't have good lighting tech western style models will look like cartoons too.
mlindner 5y ago
You got a timestamp? You linked to an almost 3 hour long video. Edit: Presentation starts around 1:24:00
- Aissen 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/G2u7NOpzcBQ?t=5054 https://youtu.be/G2u7NOpzcBQ?t=5054
  - Keyframe 5y ago
    this is atrocious. Bunch of visual distractions made by avatars, horrible and disrespectful background noise/chatter, graphics like it's 1998..
    - exikyut 5y ago
      I'm kinda torn between the current top comment pointing out how immersive everything is, the current top reply remarking about the eyebrow-raising amount of furry representation, and this perspective. The graphics are indeed really bad. The background noise also seems to be poorly managed. And the avatars are visually striking just to the point of being very distracting. But I have not the first clue how to fix any of these issues. The graphics have to exceed 70fps cannot drop frames or you risk users getting nausea (and not using the platform!), the audio chat works just like every other audio chat out there - badly, and the I looked into the avatar situation and discovered that, contrary to my own intuition (where avatars would incorporate lightweight, aggressively CPU-throttled control programs that could arbitrarily direct how emoting works etc), you basically get a restrictive SDK that's just *upgraded* to the point where you have like 16 different things your avatar can do. It's simultaneously utterly inspiring and an absolute dumpster fire. I "got" VRChat for the first time when I discovered this last week and have been awkwardly conflicted about it ever since.
      - fennecfoxy 5y ago
        Idk why people would complain about furry representation in VR chat, if at all furries are driving things like VR chat and in 20-30 years or so everyone will be using it and it will "be cool". Not really much difference between an avatar of any other character and a furry avatar, just people are fans of their own character/universe than say a character from Star Trek or something.
vlovich123 5y ago
Is it fully captured motion? It seems like it was random or button controlled.
- AgentME 5y ago
  There is a walking animation that applies when someone uses a joystick to move around, but otherwise generally all movement of the avatar is directly driven by the positional tracking of the user. (All VR users have the positions of their hands and head tracked, but some users also have trackers on their waist and feet too.) There are also a couple people in the video that aren't using VR but are using VRChat in desktop mode. It's pretty obvious because their hands don't move from their sides while standing, their head motions are limited, their body never sways, etc.

RamRodification 5y ago

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

maeln 5y ago
StraszFilms made a video touching on this subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v_Dl7i4Bcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v_Dl7i4Bcw ( he also made a very nice documentary about VRChat nightclubs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU )
caslon 5y ago
Most of them aren't actually all that small, it's just that the perspective it's being filmed from (the narrator's head-camera) is on a stage, and VR warps things in your periphery pretty hard. There's also the fact that it's easier to be immersed if you aren't leaning heavily on realism; Oculus has a lot of research on this, actually. For example, if you have a photorealistic avatar but aren't doing eye-tracking, it's actually more jarring and discomforting than a cartoon avatar without it. That's why the initial avatars they did had force-obscured eyes and no color, and the new ones are literally cartoons: your mind can adapt to something very different, but it can't adapt to something that's just subtly different. However, some people do choose to do weird stuff. That's mostly a tech thing though. If you go to a normal place, you'll find a lot of actual kids and actual teenagers, and they're relatively normal. Very few people as weird as the tech community. Really, technical people in digital spaces kind of get a bit wild with their self-expression. Some theorize it's because most of them don't express themselves much in real life. I've tried this particular app only a handful of times (I don't like using proprietary software, but it's important to keep yourself updated with the state of it), and when I wasn't visiting explicitly tech-related things, it was pretty normal. Lots of copyright infringement of Nintendo characters, as you might expect.
jcims 5y ago
I bought an Oculus Quest 2 earlier this year to check out the whole VR situation. It was basically a ghost town with pockets of children and, IMHO, sketchy folks having childlike conversation. I don't really know what I expected but it wasn't that. Aside from some focus issues the goggle hardware was pretty great but the VR world was not a good experience at all. :/
- caslon 5y ago
  It's worth noting for anyone curious: the Quest 2 can't actually interact with or enter the majority of worlds because of technical constraints (they aren't even offered to Quest 2 users unless the author of the world explicitly opts into it and designs their world for it). Most adults are on private, PC-focused servers. The application is not a stunning technical achievement, but it's unfair to judge the program by jcim's summary, because he seemingly went into it without knowledge of how it worked and wasn't able to access any of the interesting places. It would be like judging Skyrim by an SNES backport.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    While all of this is true, one should also note that none of this is obvious at any point while using VR Chat. It might be the most popular social VR app right now (Altspace has even more problems, and RecRoom is pretty much strictly children), but that doesn't mean the software is actually any good. We're in the Friendster/MySpace/Neopets days of social VR, with Facebook seemingly interested in making the LinkedIn.
    - pema99 5y ago
      Honestly, the game starts at the point where you meet a group of people you enjoy interacting with and stop visiting public instances. Much easier to get in to with a friend to guide you along the way.
      - moron4hire 5y ago
        Yes, this is absolutely true. It's probably true for most people of most social software, but for me the immediacy and intimacy of VR and voice chat definitely amplify it a lot.
mlindner 5y ago
The number of people into furry or anime in the software community is large, especially among millennial generation. But unless we find someone of similar interests at work, we're not going to talk about it (or only describe it in vague terms) because it can creep some people out. Further if you're using VRChat I think you already self-select as unusual beyond that. (Anecdote, my college anime club almost a decade ago was almost all software engineers with an assortment of other science or engineering fields.)
crocodiletears 5y ago
It seems representative of VR's demographics ime. Weird fantasy and wish fulfillment. It's kept me from the platform as well.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
Should it be surprising that in a world where you can look however you want, lots of people would not choose to look how the real world forces them to?
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  It's just surprising that everyone wants to look like a mix of a 16yo anime schoolgirl and a fox.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    I think maybe because those are both things that are significantly different than reality.
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      Nah, it's more a combination of memeing and that the avatar interface in VR Chat is horrible. Picking an avatar takes a lot of work. Some of the ones listed can crash some machines. Many of the ones listed are only available on the PC version, so you get some "PC-Master-Race" posturing. And there aren't a lot of good, default options, so you end up with a lot of people picking the same avatars. There are lots of other avatars, but most of them are very unhuman-like and several are just plane bad. EDIT: for what is worth, I tangentially work on the same sort of software. My system is a training environment not intended for the public, but a lot of the same concerns are involved. Currently, we have no avatar selection system. Everyone gets the same avatars, differentiated by a name tag. This was 50% a deliberate decision to avoid avatar mayhem and maintain an egalitarian environment, 50% pushing off the problem until I can figure out how to give some options without devolving into avatar mayhem.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      There are lots of things that are different from reality, the questions is why so many of them chose that particular way to be unrealistic.
      - 5y ago
sneak 5y ago
Why does it weird you out?
- RamRodification 5y ago
  A few reasons I guess. For as long as I can remember, we have had adult predators going online posing as young girls/boys with different levels of malicious sexual intent. I understand that that isn't the objective here, but I can't help making that connection. Like "Oh! You weren't actually a 15 year old girl, you are a 30 year old guy pretending to be". That makes me uncomfortable. The anime stuff always seem to be overly sexualized. Skimpy outfits. Traditionally sexy bodies (Legs, boobs, ass, etc. Yes, that is highly subjective but I think you can see my point). Same goes for the furry stuff. Always the more or less "sexy", more or less "naked" looks. As an outsider it seems to be a sexual fetish more than anything else. I have absolutely nothing against people wanting to be more fluid with genders. Or wanting to be sexy. Or roleplaying as whatever. I welcome that. It's just a bit weird that it's such a common choice to be [sexy child] or [sexy animal]. And in a setting that, to me, is not where sexy things happen, or where sexy things are even really wanted?
  - jcims 5y ago
    You should try being in one of the rooms, it's extremely creepy haha. Apparently my poor Quest 2 experience was due to me being a n00b, but when you roll into a room with 5-10 avatars bopping around and you can hear conversations between 4th graders and suddenly realize you're 'alone' with them, it gets extremely uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's a rational response, but I never said a word while I was on there, boxed the thing up after a few hours and shipped it back to Facebook.
    - pema99 5y ago
      Unfortunately true, but also not the experience that most people who continue to play the game have with it. Public instances, especially those in popular worlds, are pure cancer. Anyone who has played more than a few hours will tell you. The reason they are so full of screaming kids is because everyone who isn't one has moved elsewhere. I very very rarely encounter minors, and hanging out with them makes me uncomfortable too, even having thousands of hours played. Sucks that you had a bad experience, the platform can be a completely different experience if you are brought into it by someone who already knows their way around.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
devwastaken 5y ago
Because anime. It's cute. People want to be cute.
dragontamer 5y ago
Why are all Peanuts characters children despite dealing with adult issues regularly? Artistic license. But mostly because when you are an adult, you still feel like a child in many situations.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Out of interest, what would you choose to be?
- RamRodification 5y ago
  It's hard without knowing how freely I could pick. Maybe something from a video game I like or a caricature-y version of a movie character I like. Those are fun choices for a one-off thing though. Maybe I would reconsider if I really got into it and wanted something that actually represented me as a person. I don't think I would swap biological gender in any of those cases.
jayd16 5y ago
The tech might be a bit of a factor. If you don't have good lighting tech western style models will look like cartoons too.

mlindner 5y ago

You got a timestamp? You linked to an almost 3 hour long video. Edit: Presentation starts around 1:24:00

Aissen 5y ago
https://youtu.be/G2u7NOpzcBQ?t=5054 https://youtu.be/G2u7NOpzcBQ?t=5054
- Keyframe 5y ago
  this is atrocious. Bunch of visual distractions made by avatars, horrible and disrespectful background noise/chatter, graphics like it's 1998..
  - exikyut 5y ago
    I'm kinda torn between the current top comment pointing out how immersive everything is, the current top reply remarking about the eyebrow-raising amount of furry representation, and this perspective. The graphics are indeed really bad. The background noise also seems to be poorly managed. And the avatars are visually striking just to the point of being very distracting. But I have not the first clue how to fix any of these issues. The graphics have to exceed 70fps cannot drop frames or you risk users getting nausea (and not using the platform!), the audio chat works just like every other audio chat out there - badly, and the I looked into the avatar situation and discovered that, contrary to my own intuition (where avatars would incorporate lightweight, aggressively CPU-throttled control programs that could arbitrarily direct how emoting works etc), you basically get a restrictive SDK that's just *upgraded* to the point where you have like 16 different things your avatar can do. It's simultaneously utterly inspiring and an absolute dumpster fire. I "got" VRChat for the first time when I discovered this last week and have been awkwardly conflicted about it ever since.
    - fennecfoxy 5y ago
      Idk why people would complain about furry representation in VR chat, if at all furries are driving things like VR chat and in 20-30 years or so everyone will be using it and it will "be cool". Not really much difference between an avatar of any other character and a furry avatar, just people are fans of their own character/universe than say a character from Star Trek or something.

vlovich123 5y ago

Is it fully captured motion? It seems like it was random or button controlled.

AgentME 5y ago
There is a walking animation that applies when someone uses a joystick to move around, but otherwise generally all movement of the avatar is directly driven by the positional tracking of the user. (All VR users have the positions of their hands and head tracked, but some users also have trackers on their waist and feet too.) There are also a couple people in the video that aren't using VR but are using VRChat in desktop mode. It's pretty obvious because their hands don't move from their sides while standing, their head motions are limited, their body never sways, etc.