PhormTheGenie

Vixen. Genie. Vixdjinn!

Hi! I'm Phorm, and I'm a Vixdjinn!

A Friendly Vixdjinn Says Hello!

I'm a genie girl, who really likes being a genie, and really likes everything about genies (really)! I'm a bit confused, lost, and trying to find my way, but I always enjoy interacting with folks here. (Trans🏳️‍⚧️, occasionally NSFW, Be 18+ or please be gone.)

A Genie Bottle, With A Rising Wisp of Pink Smoke In The Shape Of a Heart

See here for the Genie Lore Index!

Profile Art credit to CinnamonSpots!

Avatar by DVixie
Banner image by BlackShirtBoy



I think it's widely recognized that the era of VR - particularly social VR - is more or less completely over. It's a mouldering pile with a few hangers on, but the tech is all but dead and there's a recognition that it's no longer worth developing for.

That's a good thing, particularly considering the way that scoundrels and assholes were getting their hands on it. The minute someone pushed the word 'metaverse' into the popular narrative was the moment VR needed to die, anyhow.

I still feel a pang of longing for having missed out on it as much as I did.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @PhormTheGenie's post:

It's still around, but it's more or less an exclusive club for a select few who have A) A lot of free time, B) A hell of a lot of money, and C) The connections to artists in order to get multiple constant refreshes of models and updated worlds on a priority queue (or else being such an artist/creator yourself).

So, yeah, people are still using it. But their numbers are dwindling, and activity is slowing tremendously. Beyond that, the whole thing is becoming extremely stagnant because it's a clique-y club and chances are, you ain't invited.

I do kind of wonder what the future of VR headsets is, I don't think many companies are actively perusing the kind of stuff that VRChat users want to use. The facebook headsets require facebook and just suck, I don't even know if HTC still makes their stuff now???

I never looked into it too much admittedly, I get 3d sickness kinda easily and I feel like VR would primarily give me a massive headache. Plus expensive.

PSVR seems to be something of a dead end... at least in terms of it no longer getting quite the same level of attention as it did initially.

I feel like Facebook are the people who've sank the most money into the market for the least reward though and I'm kinda surprised Oculus as a division are apparently still putting money into R&D; but I can also see Facebook wanting to compete with Apple in the whole Mixed Reality game so they may well just spin Oculus off into that.

I'm convinced the apple VR is going to be a gigantic flop, they showed up way too late to a market that never existed. It's going to be funny to see the whole thing get retconned.

If you ever hear someone say "the biggest flop since the newton" about it, I'd immediately point out that the newton probably sold more than it ever will and actually got some model refreshes. I'm convinced this thing is gonna be DOA.

PSVR doesn't do vrchat so it was dead out of the gate. You also know my feelings about the PS5 lol

The Vision Pro isn't even their actual entry into the market. Odds are they're going to sell as many as they can make, which isn't that many based on the display supply chain news, and then when they come out with the lower cost, mass market version in like... another two years, we'll see if it flops.

Ignoring VR as a social tool, it's compelling to me to have a 3D workspace with effectively arbitrarily large 2D planes, as well as 3D models and doodads. Not $3500 compelling for damn sure, but I'm not quite willing to write them off entirely.

It intrigues me to consider the possibility that you have to have rock solid software and impressive developer commitment to really get the platform off the ground. I mean, Apple pulled it off with the smartphone, which was long written off as a boring business tool with a small extremely nerdy PocketPC contingent, before Apple came along.

I disagree with most of the stuff being said in the comments here? It’s certainly annoying vr hardware is in an awkward phase but I don’t know if it’s dead yet. Vrchat’s userbase is bigger than it has ever been and keeps getting bigger. Even if meta sucks they’re still putting out reasonably priced headsets and rumor is they’re going to sell an even cheaper one next year as an entry model.

Most people in VR I know use public avatars or modified bases, not fully custom commissioned avatars. Those with customs are virtually all people who made their own. Everyone I know is happy to share knowledge on making stuff, and especially modifying stuff.

And like, I kinda don’t care if it’s not mainstream? As long as there are affordable headsets (and there still are right now), there will be people who use it. If you want to explore social VR it really isn’t too late at all.

I’m sure there are assholes out there, but that doesn’t mean it’s all assholes.

I'm really hoping that facebook's decisions will at least require them to remove the online requirement from their sets. People should have a cheap option and I really hate the "Here you can have the cheap one if you give us tons of data ;-)" model. Then again, smart TVs...

Big agree that it's good that it's not "mainstream", I guess that would be nice in that hardware might be cheaper but the big push was for using VR to do office work or whatever which is... dystopian lol.

Take all of this with a big pinch of "does not use VR" but I have lots of friends that do and they seem to enjoy it a lot. I want them to continue to be able to do so.

Yeah, while all the "metaverse" garbage like Horizon Worlds and Decentraland were dead on arrival (or earlier!), VRChat's playerbase is still consistently large and trending upwards.

Most people in VR I know use public avatars or modified bases, not fully custom commissioned avatars.

This part seems really interesting to me, as someone who hasn't personally spent more than, like, an hour in VRChat.

For people whose primary way of seeing what's going on in there is seeing active users post screenshots to social media, it makes sense that those screenshots are frequently going to be from the sort of user who has spent time or money making/modifying their avatar, and wouldn't be representative of the average player

honestly I'd love to see more browser-based 2D social VR spaces. browser-based because it's more accessible and 2D because it's inexpensive. "Whirled" is probably still pretty chill but I stopped using it when browsers dropped flash support, we need something that doesn't rely on a plugin.