VRChat

[Cognisant]

Has anyone had any experience with this, can you explain it to me?

I've read Snow Crash, I'm familiar with Second Life, I don't recall there being virtual places that I can only describe as strip clubs where the strippers are all guys who look like underage anime girls, I want to know when the cyberpunk dystopia I was looking forward to became something weird and scary to me.

Spoiler: In Summary

 

[Black Rose]

Rule34.2
if it exists
you can have sex with it in VR

 

[The Gopher]

Has anyone had any experience with this, can you explain it to me?

I've read Snow Crash, I'm familiar with Second Life, I don't recall there being virtual places that I can only describe as strip clubs where the strippers are all guys who look like underage anime girls, I want to know when the cyberpunk dystopia I was looking forward to became something weird and scary to me.

VR is currently, but not for much longer the new "internet". Remember the early days of the internet when we were the weird ones? Now nobody uses forums anymore they use VR chat to be weird.

 

[washti]

Ask @Kuu ? Or is this a secret? Then Oops

 

[kora]

Maybe one day this place will be a VR chat, set in an actual dark castle, and our avatars will come to life

 

[Cognisant]

I'm frustrated because that's a really cool idea and I want to get involved in VRchat, maybe make a virtual bar or something as a hangout space, but at the same time I'm really hesitant to associate with the people who seem to be its most prevalent users.

Is there a more tasteful aspect to this?

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

The onluøy purpose of VR chat is clearly to explore various wacky sexual fantsasies. Definotely looking forwsrd to when intpf becomes that.

 

[Cognisant]

 

[Auburn]

I'm frustrated because that's a really cool idea and I want to get involved in VRchat, maybe make a virtual bar or something as a hangout space, but at the same time I'm really hesitant to associate with the people who seem to be its most prevalent users.

Is there a more tasteful aspect to this?

I feel the same way.

It's a lot of juvenile behavior at the moment, and not entirely of a sophisticated geek sort as the internet may have had at some point in its origins.

There's lots of Pe energy going rampant, but the trick is to find those few intelligent people and friend them. Idiots will pop in and out, but it can be nice to have one or two people you know and can explore different worlds with.

I think the environment may also shift once there's more to do. Avatars need to be able to interact with each other, and objects need to be able to be passed along (i.e. a Bag/inventory) and placed in worlds in a persistent way (i.e. not resetting every time the world is loaded). That will allow for interactions to stitch themselves together across time. As it stands each VRChat session is unstitched to the previous, and the lack of continuity makes it hard to build something of personal value or to grow attachments.

But imagine if you had a world where you draw with friends in 3D space, and the drawing is there every time you log back in. It can become a sort of collaborative project. Things like that would give a shared purpose. It could also allow for places to become community-worlds. Right now each world is kindof decentralized and belongs to nobody. That's cool in its own way, but "instances" that are specifically modded/admined by certain people would be ideal.

That would also allow for the quality of the Goofballery to be moderated in worlds that want more serious tones, or just a different tone altogether. This does happen to some degree with the End Game discussions on Wednesdays but again the location lacks persistence.

I'd say VRChat is just a few script changes away from having the majority of what we need in a metaverse. I'm fairly confident it'll get there in the next few years, or even in 2019.

 

[Cognisant]

There definitely needs to be moderator controls for individual instances, a congregation of say anime fans isn't a community until they come to a consensus on the boundaries that define that community and those boundaries need to be enforced otherwise they're meaningless.

Giving people the ability to moderate their own communities will greatly reduce the trolling/disruptive behaviour and save the developers/administrators a lot of work, rather than trying to keep the entire service family friendly they can let the ERP's and whatnot quarantine themselves behind invite-only boundaries while instances for kids can be protected by guardian moderators.

 

[Deleted member 1424]

Anti-social gamer that I am (except when sharing meatspace), I've yet to wade into the vr chat waters. Is it really as degenerate as initial perception suggests?

In other news, I'm sad I spaced on several recent sales.

 

[Cognisant]

From my limited experience as someone with no VR gear and just walked around looking at things silently like a creep, that's actually what most people are doing, and amoungst the lurkers you have groups of people who seem to know each other and they don't seem terribly obnoxious, at least not to the people they don't know.

 

[Cognisant]

Spoiler: Progress

Sammy's going to need to go a diet, VRchat models are supposed to be under 20,000 faces and he's pushing 100k, fortunately he's a robot so I can optimize the shit out of him and he'll still look okay.

 

[Cognisant]

Spoiler: Progress 2

Vanilla textures for now, vandalizing them will come later.

 

[Auburn]

@Cognisant oh you're a desktop user? noooo ;p

the headsets have really come down in price. for someone without a VR capable PC, Samsung Odyssey is definitely the way to go and can run on a decent PC or laptop at $322 USD refurbished here.

for someone with a capable gaming PC already, the Oculus Rift is the way to go, at $349 USD brand new here. although if you wanna wait 3 months, I'd go for the Oculus Quest in late March which will be $399 and require no PC at all.

also i'd recommend Cats Blender Plugin to help import custom models. (youtube tutorials abound) It does most of the work for you as far as making sure your bones are right/etc for VRChat specifically.

 

[Cognisant]

I used the Blender Source Tools addon to pull Hayden from Source Filmmaker, I've applied the textures and normals. I don't know what to do with the illumination maps but he seems fine without them.

I watched an hour long video on rigging, complicating matters is that parts of him are solid, his midsection and neck are not, and (although you can't see it in my avatar) he has various hydraulic cylinders that'll need to be rigged as well.

Also I still need to optimize his mesh and I probably shouldn't do any rigging until after I've done that.

Spoiler

 

[Cognisant]

for someone with a capable gaming PC already, the Oculus Rift is the way to go, at $349 USD brand new here. although if you wanna wait 3 months, I'd go for the Oculus Quest in late March which will be $399 and require no PC at all.

I've been planning to use the Leap Motion tracker for my telepresence robot, like so:

Spoiler: Youtube Videos

The hand looks good now, I'm currently trying to figure out how to make the elbow work, the problem is the elbow is actuated by a mitre gear on a DC gearmotor and the shaft coming off that motor is quite short so the face of the motor is right up in the joint and on the other end there's two gearmotors that rotate the forearm and they're right up in the joint as well, and then of course there's bearings, a potentiometer, the mitre gears and I still need to get enough wires through there for all the motors/sensors in the forearm because there's not enough room for a microcontroller or motor controllers in there.

Spoiler: Current robot hand

So yeah I'd like to figure out how to use the Leap Motion one if I can.

 

[Auburn]

Coggie is a vr hipster!
Headsets are so mainstream, yo

 

[Cognisant]

*stands on an omnitrack in a perfectly spherical room with video projected on the walls, a full surround-sound system and an array of 128 motion tracking cameras*

I call it Cogebro.

 

[Auburn]

that made me laugh so much harder than it should have

the only thing that could make it more analog is if the panels on the ceiling were hand drawn by robot hamsters every moment, then swapped out quickly to retain continuity.

 

[Melkor]

Okay Cog, I'll take you up on your offer of transplanting me to the virtual realm, pretty kind of you to be honest.
HOWEVER I wish to do so purely in the form of a distant and ambient balcony where I sit and monologue obnoxiously to the people below who can barely hear me or see me but are always aware of my presence.

There must be infinite amounts of virtual whisky and rumbling yet faded voiced advertisements for items I can never have.

Please hurry I am eager to enter this personalised limbo.

(This should help get you started)


Vr is actually pretty cool and I'd like to try it, but as VRchat shows until it is very good it will just be very embarassing and I have a low threshold for being EMBARRASSED.

 

[Cognisant]

It's Alive! Fuck man where have you been?

Vr is actually pretty cool and I'd like to try it, but as VRchat shows until it is very good it will just be very embarassing and I have a low threshold for being EMBARRASSED.

It helps me to remember everyone I'm speaking to is made of meat.

the only thing that could make it more analog is if the panels on the ceiling were hand drawn by robot hamsters every moment, then swapped out quickly to retain continuity.

Of course I use only the finest robot hamsters, trillions of nanoscale robotic hamsters live behind these panels and pour out like liquid metal when I bid them to form the scenery around me.

 

[lightfire]

Why VR chat when you can video chat? Am I missing something?

 

[Kuu]

I've read Snow Crash, I'm familiar with Second Life, I don't recall there being virtual places that I can only describe as strip clubs where the strippers are all guys who look like underage anime girls

The future is even better than what our greatest visionaries could've fathomed!

VR is currently, but not for much longer the new "internet". Remember the early days of the internet when we were the weird ones? Now nobody uses forums anymore they use VR chat to be weird.

Yes this. But VRChat kinda already lost the glorious innocence of its early days. December 2018 caused a massive flood of meme-following idiots that shifted the demographic severely from what was previously a much smaller, weirder, and friendlier community. Those people are still there, but now much harder to find.

Maybe one day this place will be a VR chat, set in an actual dark castle, and our avatars will come to life

Soon

I'm really hesitant to associate with the people who seem to be its most prevalent users.
Is there a more tasteful aspect to this?

Oh noes you will associate with degenerates! Your purity will be tainted! There's much more to it than that, that's just a very visible and "shocking" aspect to most people.

I've been planning to use the Leap Motion tracker for my telepresence robot

Have you got one already? For that purpose its okish I suppose, but it's rather underwhelming a device until they increase its angle of operation.

But for VRChat its VR or bust. Desktop is pointless.

Why VR chat when you can video chat? Am I missing something?

Immersion, sense of presence. The feeling of actually being in a place, doing things together with other people. Video chat is terrible, people just sit there barely moving, can be distracted by a ton of other things, they're not entirely in the moment, not wholly engaged. VR has your full attention.

 

[Pizzabeak]

It's supposed to be pretty good and I have to get more into it soon, but it just enhances the overall gaming experience. Other applications following suit apply, that can be used in other fields like technology to enhance the overall human life experience.

 

[Auburn]

It helps me to remember everyone I'm speaking to is made of meat.

I have the opposite strategy.

I very much treat entities in there as what they are -- which is very fascinating and bizarre. Because you buy into the narrative, and so do they, and so the interaction becomes dream-like.

I've felt that I've interacted with non-humans in VR several times. And I think that's gonna become the reality more fully eventually. Pretty soon the meat sack will be a vestigial appendage, and the "actuality" of the entity you're interfacing with.. will be whatever they embody in this imaginary world.

Imagine interacting with sentient A.I. in vr... who are LITERALLY nothing but the entity that they are. Whether that's Galadriel, Neo, Spongebob, etc. There is no corporeal analog; so this entity in front of you is the real thing, or at least they are what you see. period. o.0 ...it's a mind warp. But I love it.

 

[Firehazard159]

Hello everyone, long time no see ^_^

And @Cognisant - I can speak to this topic pretty extensively, though I'm not as much up on the current stuff, feel free to ask whatever - my latest equipment is the Rift & Vive, and I have an omni-treadmill and a few other peripherals.

What you really want is probably closer to AltspaceVR - there are also things like RecRoom and others. But Altspace provides for open-end meeting spaces, as well as private places - though it's less customizable.

Both Oculus and Valve's main software are also focused on developing the whole 'personal space you can invite friends to' - I haven't had a chance to explore the features in the last year or so, but last I check valve/steam already let you download customized environments and invite people to share in the space.

Altspace let's you share a screen with youtube/video streaming, which is really nice for hanging out and watching things together.

There's also bigscreenVR which let's you share games and even inputs, so you can "sit on a couch together" and play a virtualized N64 emulator like the good ol' days.

The VR space is pretty awesome, and only going to get better. I need to order an Index asap XD

 

[Deleted member 1424]

I have an omni-treadmill and a few other peripherals.

Stews in jealousy.

 

[Cognisant]

I have an omni-treadmill and a few other peripherals.

Stews in jealousy.

Has a spoonful.

Mmm salty with a hint of piss & vinegar, just needs a little thyme.