One of the reasons I think social VR has a big future is: tech companies hate it, view it as a failure, want it dead dead. They keep pivoting to games and office stuff, which doesnāt stick because there is no mass adoption for either. But the social VR stuff keeps growing. Not rapidly, but steadily. EAC was a hiccup, people kept using VRchat and it bounced back bigger. I think the nature of VRChat and NEOs/Resonite specifically made this happen.
When something keeps going this long even in the face of corporate indifference and hostility that means thereās passion for it. Getting deeper into VR necessarily means getting deeper into the guts of confusing software. But every step you master, every new little bit of customization, every time you put a little digital piece of yourself into the virtual world, you not only stand out more, but learn the way tech actually works on a level more fundamental than making something in say, secondlife or furcadia.
I know what an animator in unity is now thanks to customizing vr chat avatars. I know what weight painting is because of learning things about blender from my friends. I know what āflipping a normalā means and why that makes level design easier for similar reasons.
Even the hardware side of things! While slime VR as a company has had some hiccups there is now a template for open source motion tracking that works pretty damn good. You can use it with spare switch controllers. Or build your own. Tech weirdos are making huge strides with eye tracking tech that seems uninteresting to corporate types except at the very highest end of hardware.
The biggest missing piece of the puzzle right now are headsets and controllers. The one thing we donāt have a solid open alternative tooā¦but I canāt help but feel like one little push would get us there. IR emitters, IR sensors, and accelerometers are all cheap and known tech. Same with LCDs.
I meanā¦nothing is guaranteed . The future is unknown. I could be wrong about all of this butā¦I would have never believed I could do what I do now when I started using vrc, and I think thatās true for a lot of people. Social VR is sticking around because itās for the weirdos, and the weirdos build things.
It was July 2022 when we finally worked up the courage to join in with US VRChat meets.
In the time since, we've learned about texture editing (without paying for Substance Painter), from starting with a well labelled PSD in the GNU Image Manipulation Program, to learning how to export and label a UV map when one isn't provided, and more and more about vector illustration and ideal export workflows.
We've learned so much about Unity; going from truly struggling at adding the most basic of toggles to a ridiculous number of submenus on my main avatar (while still keeping VRChat's performance indicator at medium).
(Moving away from Unity definitely would be nice, although Resonite's in-world editor also presents a lot of its own challenges)
We've learned more about shaders and materials.
More about Git - how else are you going to even attempt to retrieve the version of an effect that only existed at 4am on one day of Furality before you tweaked it to something else?
More about OBS and Steam VR overlays - sometimes you want to record something while having a script up
More about OSC for a personal dashboard and easier randomization than trying to deal with Unity animators.
More about the principles of photography.
More about automation - because we needed some way of processing the hundreds of photos we take.
And if someone needs help, we'll share what we know.
We've seen creativity be pushed to its limits over and over again - from a friend's party trick of transforming into another friend at the boop of a snoot, to filling a room with Goop at a moments notice, to the public avatar we saw this morning which included the entire tram sequence from Half-Life 1.
The lead programmer of Resonite is right at this moment at BLFC, 3D scanning things and quickly importing them into Resonite.
I remember the whiplash I felt the day of Furality Sylva's closing ceremonies - which was also the day of the Apple Vision Pro WWDC keynote.
That Apple's solution for socializing with people who are not physically present (at least, the only one presented so far) is a fucking video wall, when I had spent ~3AM to ~5AM that morning snuggled up with (primarily) so many Good Girls thousands of miles away.
And so yeah, I think it's safe to say that Big Corporations do not fucking get it - and that as long as there are still furries (especially therians) that need species euphoria, there will always be a place for social VR, and always a place to learn and grow because of it.
vision pro, as far as i can tell (as someone who cannot buy one), still having zero native apps allowing creatures (or even humans!) to be together in shared space rather than just on a VR wall, is fucking weird.
but within the space of a few days of release, there was an ALVR port. full, apple unsactioned, PC VR streaming. the VR community routing around another corporate problem.
(and personally since this post, we learned/were reminded of at least a little blender skills, too)
