In this blog post I will explain to you, a quick and easy method to create a 3D avatar of yourself for use in VR and supporting games. I will also tell you about the best social VR platform that I have found so far and why I feel that way.
When I first began my VR adventuring back in 2019, I was blown away by the fact that having a VR headset was the equivalent of owning a teleporter. What I mean by this is that, in addition to being a gaming device, the presence of Social VR means that anyone with a headset can meet up with friends or complete strangers in VR and experience a type of presence that makes you feel as if you share the same space. Furthermore, international distance is no impediment to this fact, only that international interactions require mutually beneficial time zones.
I had drawn these conclusions by using the now-defunct AltspaceVR, a social VR platform in which I attended the university open day, leading to enrolling on my MA course. Sadly, AltspaceVR (which was bought and owned by Microsoft) found that its user numbers were not sustainable, and the service was closed during March this year.
I had tried other social VR platforms during my explorations. I have blogged here about Meta’s flawed ‘Metaverse’ platform known as Horizon Worlds. I loved the ease-of-use aspect for world-building but found that graphically, the experience was very cartoonish. Making beautiful-looking VR spaces on that platform seemed to have a trade-off where the better looking a creation was, the fewer people would be allowed inside it at one go. Then, I had to admit that I had avoided social interaction in Horizon Worlds because most of what I had encountered were rude teenagers and other idiots (1) using the platform. I started to withdraw from it. I just didn’t feel that Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision of ‘The (His) Metaverse’ is ‘right’. There’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with how it feels as a platform.
What alternatives then? There are a few. I’ll post a link at the bottom of this entry if you’d like to read some more. My surprise hit of the year has been to rediscover then fall in love with a platform known as VRChat. Admittedly, my initial introductory experience was so poor with the platform that I’d written it off.
I had wandered in as a noob, found the first public areas full of obnoxious kids, then decided that this just wasn’t for me. None of which was helped when I trustingly allowed a 20ft manga character to pick me up off the VR ground and found myself being swung around like I was on some kind of fairground ride from hell.
Last year, I met a VR developer at an event, got chatting about social VR, and was advised to give VRChat another go, that it is a better experience when someone shows you around a bit. I mentally bookmarked this advice then found myself returning to the suggestion around a month ago. I had partly been prompted to remember as I had just had a play around with a service called Ready Player Me. What’s that?
Ready Player Me (Link below) allows you to quickly make a 3D avatar of your likeness to use within social VR platforms as well as games. I’m not suggesting that this is a perfect representation of myself, but it’s a useful avatar to fall back on when being a cat, a silver flying fox, a xenomorph etc(2) don’t quite fit the mood of a given social situation in VR. Which leads me back to the point of this entry, VRChat.
I took the advice and gave VRChat another try. This time, I accessed the platform via my PC (3).
I decided to explore the user interface more carefully before leaving my cartoonish looking ‘Home world’ (A home world is the 3D equivalent of having a home page on your 2D web browser, as it generally gives you a starting point for everything that follows) As things turned out, the interface, which appears in your virtual hand, is relatively straightforward to use. Instead of gravitating immediately to busy worlds, I decided to use the search tool (a magnifying glass) then type in the first things that sprung to mind, which in the first case was ‘Alien Movie’. A number of suggested worlds appeared in my menu. I noted that the menu had a filter option, so I opened that and made sure that ‘Popular’ was ticked. The results shuffled, with popular choices at the top of the list. I noted that ‘Nostromo’ was rated highly, so I opened that up.
This was around the point where I began to reevaluate VRChat. I found myself immersed within the iconic sleep chamber environment seen in the 1979 horror film Alien. From a VR perspective, I felt largely like I was actually inside the spacecraft, the sounds of the spacecraft ambience hummed through my headset’s stereo earphones, the attention to visual detail was superb. My current VR play space is small, so I use the thumbsticks on my hand controllers to walk around. If I had a larger floorspace available, I could set my device to do what Is known as ‘Roomscale VR’, which would allow me to physically move around using my feet.
Whoever made the Nostromo was clearly a dedicated fan of Alien, many of the ship’s iconic interiors were explorable within this VR world, I explored the creation by walking through automatically sliding doors and travelling down familiar looking, interconnecting corridors. It was awsome!
VRChat’s control menu allows users to take photos and selfies, which is why you can see my avatar in the images of this blog post.
Once I’d soaked up the whole painstakingly detailed spacecraft, I started thinking about other iconic locations from films and TV shows. In no time, I’d found the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. It was the strangest feeling to perceive actually being in that place. The world builder who’d recreated the scene, had gone to the trouble of adding familiar jazz music, maze-like curtained corridors, and just a wealth of other details to make the visiting experience feel authentic.
Depending on how well or how long you’ve known my online work, I should probably add that I made my own 3D Black Lodge back in oooh… 1999, as part of a 3D pre-social media thing called Cybertown. I discussed that a few entries ago here.
The reason I’m bringing it up now is because someone I met in the real world asked me ‘Isn’t social VR just another version of Second Life?’
I’ll assume that my readers are aware that Second Life is a 3D social media platform launched during the 90s. In beginning this paragraph, I thought I’d do a little homework. Second Life still going and appears to have added VR functionality. When I was originally asked the question, I said ‘No’ because I think that there’s an experiential gulf between looking at a flat screen monitor, tapping on a computer keyboard and mouse, vs putting on a headset, standing up moving your whole body to engage with a set of environments where your brain is tricked into feeling a strong sense of presence of being in the place being presented to you. It seems that with Second Life entering the VR fray, the gap between platforms has closed somewhat. I may well try out Second Life VR at some point, to offer a more reliable comparison.
I can only talk about my own experiences, so back to VRChat, why I think it’s important and why I think you should try it if you can.
If you haven’t glazed over thus far, then you might be wondering how the social aspect applies, given that I’ve barely mentioned social interactions. When I first began exploring VRChat properly, I found a stunningly beautiful world called Treehouse In the Shade. When the world appears in your headset, you are presented with a location containing a tree and treehouse in your central view, however, the landscape surrounding comes with a twist. Rather than trying to explain it to you, I’ve found this video, which provides a much more visual perspective:
During my first visit to Treehouse In the Shade, I made my first VRChat friend, another user based in Canada, who just happened to be hanging out there to soak up the splendid atmosphere. We got talking and this resulted in my being given a tour of various other worlds that had impressive visual and technical prowess. The first of which was an O’Neill Cylinder. This world was particularly impressive, as it provided cars to drive around within it. Putting the cylinder to the test, I drove around one of the circumference roads, noting that all of the surrounding architecture remained three dimensional.
My new friend, who I’ll refer to here as H.M, explained a few things about how VRCHat deals with social interactions. For example, it has an integrated system of trust, where users are rated based on their behaviour with others. This is subtly indicated by colours which denote new user (light grey) to experienced/trusted users (Gold) H.M also pointed out that the player menu system also features some easy access tools to befriend, mute and block other users, making it easy to curate one’s own social interactions on the fly.
Despite its name and function as a social VR experience, VRChat isn’t exclusively a platform for talking to and meeting people. To date, the platform contains 25,000 user created worlds (4), of which a few hundred are frequently populated by people, the rest are unoccupied artworks to explore on your own or to explore with friends, should you wish to invite them to join you. I tend to like exploring, so I keep myself to myself. If I happen to encounter another explorer whilst doing my own thing, and they happen to strike up conversation, this can enrich the experience further.
I tend to search out worlds with striking visual splendour. To me, they deliver all the core reasons of why I love VR. I always believed that it could be a medium where a person could enter and explore the mind of an artist. From what I’ve found on this platform so far, I stand by that statement completely. I’m likely to dedicate future entries to shining a spotlight on the best examples I have found in my virtual travels. I would suggest that if you have an interest in VR and the arts, VRChat is probably unrivalled as a showcase for artistic talent within this young medium. Anyone looking for a possible future career in gaming or developing VR content, has a great opportunity to pick up a broad, transferrable skillset in building worlds and avatars.
On that note, my closing comments should cover perhaps the most important feature that the platform offers, beyond the social interaction. Anyone with the desire to create and share content such as avatars or worlds, can do so by downloading the appropriate VRChat toolkit for creating both. This will involve downloading a specific version of the Unity Engine in order to get started, however, there are plenty of tutorial videos on Youtube which will help aspiring world-building/avatar artists get off to a great start.
Over the coming months, I hope to report back here with examples of my own creations, as I have realised that VRChat is an excellent platform for showcasing creativity and having a system for easy VR interaction baked into its core mechanic.
I realise that I’ve tried to say a lot, and that there’s much more that can be said. If you have stumbled upon this entry and haven’t experienced VR yet, but are thinking of doing so, then I hope that some of the above proves to be helpful. Feel free to use the comments box if you have any questions, I’ll happily try to answer them.
Moving forward, my next VRChat related blog post is likely to be presented in video, as I think that a lot can be said by actually showing you moving imagery, rather than my waffling on in a blog post.
Footnotes & Links
(1) Teenagers and other idiots. I know, that sounds a bit harsh doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the reality of popular virtual reality worlds is that they can and often are, frequented by noisy teenagers, kids and idiots. Well this naturally begs the question of why on earth you would want to visit virtual worlds? I think the easiest answer that I can offer is this: Avoid popular VR worlds, start exploring, search for places which are less likely to be attractive to any of the aforementioned demographics. I will share my own findings of the kinds of places you should consider visiting, in the near future.
(2) In VRChat and other 3D social media platforms, the sheer variety of personal avatars is quite dizzying, although many appear to have a preference to appear as Manga style 3D characters known as Vroids. Avatars should be considered as interchangeable personas to suit the mood of the user. This is literally a virtual form of fancy dress or role play. I tend to use my real world appearance most of the time, however, when I wish to be more anonymous, I will switch to a bipedal cat form or one of several avatars that I keep to hand, just for the fun of it.
(3) I should point out that VRChat is available on Quest 2 headsets, Playstation VR, Steam VR and Oculus PCVR. If you happen to access the service on a Quest 2 stand alone device, while there are some very cool experiences available, there are even more experiences and worlds that are only available to users with higher powered machines, such as consoles and PCs.
I’m likely to report back in future blog posts, some of my favourite discoveries in VRChat, I’ll specify which platforms these are available to. I think at present PCVR and console standards of VR are quite a niche market due to the cost of entry. While Quest 2 is the most popular method for most people to experience VR for the first time, it doesn’t provide a graphically superior experience. Meta will release the Quest 3 later this year, this device will be smaller, lighter and more graphically powerful. I would expect that the gap between stand alone devices and PC/Console quality experiences will narrow significantly over the next five years.
(4) To clarify what a ‘world’ is, one should generally avoid viewing this in literal terms. A virtual world is any 3D location which can be visited by a user, then explored. A world can therefore be as small as a single room, to as large as a sprawling environment such as a city scale art piece.
In some cases, a virtual world can literally be a spherical, explorable representation of a real planet. A great example of this can be found in the game No Man’s Sky, which boasts 18 quintillion explorable planet locations.
Road to VR’s list of Social VR platforms with a summary of the features of each