deepdishregretti

Devon

@deepdishregretti

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late 20s / Devon / Agender / Pansexual

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deepdishregretti
@deepdishregretti
AutomaticTiger
@AutomaticTiger
AutomaticTiger
@AutomaticTiger

Social VR is probably going to stick around because the cool weirdos who use it know too much to let it die.

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 doesn’t 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 there’s 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 ‘flipping a normal’ 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 don’t have a solid open alternative too…but I can’t 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 mean…nothing is guaranteed . The future is unknown. I could be wrong about all of this but…I would have never believed I could do what I do now when I started using vrc, and I think that’s true for a lot of people. Social VR is sticking around because it’s for the weirdos, and the weirdos build things.

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AutomaticTiger
@AutomaticTiger

Possibly! That's the part I'm least certain about here. I do think the basic components are going to get cheaper and more common though. It feels like it's only a matter of time before the conditions are right with the right motivation to me. How long it'll take to get there is a bigger question.

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PhormTheGenie
@PhormTheGenie

The presence of a small but extremely passionate operating base is good, and certainly says something about endurance and longevity.

But it also speaks to a closed and insular community that others cannot access easily.

While social VR may persist, the monetary and hardware hurdles to access it will remain tremendous - And that's before the enormous social hurdles that will face newcomers trying to make inroads into an established, exclusionary community.

It's likely to persist, but it is likely to do so while slowly dwindling, with a lack of new users.

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AutomaticTiger
@AutomaticTiger

This…just has not been my experience at all is the thing. ^.^;

For one thing, the user numbers for VRChat are steadily increasing. Like objectively, you can check steam charts. The metric of Furality gets bigger every year too. This year was huge. It set a few records.

It’s true it’s niche! The hardware costs blow. This is something literally all my friends from VRChat agree on. And they all hate that it costs so much because we want people to be able to have VR. We all know people who would love it but can’t afford the hardware.

To this end, I have also seen a lot of generosity with older hardware. It’s really common to see folks sell hardware to folks under value or even give it away to new folks who have been playing the desktop modes of various social VR platforms. Desktop users are surprisingly common too!

Also like…I feel like I got in ‘late’ to VRChat because I got into it July of last year. But I’ve bounced around a few communities and all of them were really welcoming! I do think it’s tricky to know where communities are, but they all seem pretty friendly by and large.

If you ever want to give it another shot, you could totally hit me up! I like your posts and it would be cool to meet virtually.

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PhormTheGenie
@PhormTheGenie

I mean, that's fair. It's not been my experience, but I'll grant you that my experience is likely not the norm. Nor is it indicative of trends.

My bad experiences in VR, and the way I see it panning out, are likely coloring my interpretation of the evolving landscape. I appreciate your optimism, and your kind offer as well <3

I doubt I'll be getting back in, given the fact that I lack the time and know-how, and I interpret the current dominant platform as malware. I mean, I might cave on that, but in the meantime, I feel steadfast.

...

A lot of this is probably, admittedly, sour grapes. I invested in so many goddamned Vive trackers so I could try to do bellydance in VR before they pulled the EAC shit. Now they're very expensive paperweights, because nothing but VRChat can even begin using them.

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PhormTheGenie
@PhormTheGenie

I have heard about Resonite, and I've been tempted to give it a shot. But holy dooley is it ever freaking complicated. I seriously lack the time to figure out how to even get started with Resonite, never mind trying to find or import models. Wow.

Plus, it suffers from the "No one is here, because everyone is there" phenomenon that we see with so many other platforms.

Those things aside, I do appreciate the suggestion. Resonite does seem like the most appropriate place as an alternative!

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MapleMakes
@MapleMakes

I'm unsure how you would accomplish this without complicating the overall system architecture. Would a client wrapper to unity be what you're after? Even if that happened, basic stuff would have to be extremely standardized across hundreds of avatar bases for a one-size-fits-all client like that. Unity just is straight to the point and if you want, you can take it so much further. It's as simple or as complex as you make it.

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