![]() The lack of restrictions on the platform makes it feel pretty limitless. One room features markers that let people draw in the air, which can be fun and chaotic. I’ve seen one guy play guitar while another improv’d some lyrics (this was on an environment resembling a gigantic Tide Pod called Tide Pod World). In a world of iMessage and Slack and Twitter and other asynchronous platforms, it can feel refreshing to just lurk and watch people interact with each other in real time. Uh, they just sort of stand around and talk to and troll each other. After all, running around as a 3-D SpongeBob isn’t really that different from making SpongeBob your profile picture. It’s unclear where the line is on using copyrighted material as your avatar in VRChat. Technically skilled people have imported and created countless avatars, from Homer Simpson, to Gordon Freeman from Half-Life, to Naruto (you should know, there is a higher-than-normal ratio of anime avatars in VRChat). The people who make VRChat provide an SDK, a software pack that allows other people to make content for the platform, including 3-D avatars. One of the most incredible things about VRChat is that it is an intellectual property Wild West, and I’m not just talking about someone blasting clips from Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” over their mic. Did I see a Morty from the television show Rick and Morty in that video? Sometimes, this can be fun sometimes, it allows players spread around the world to watch another player suffer a seizure in frightening detail … VRChat also takes the size of your 3-D model into account, so some players can be enormous while others are knee-high. VRChat supports body-tracking, so players can crouch and move their arms freely, if they like. The reason it’s worth playing with an actual headset is that it really works as VR. You cannot use the VR part of VRChat with, for instance, a VR-enabled phone and Google Cardboard. VRChat works with both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive - these are two heavy-duty pieces of VR hardware. No, you can actually use it as you would any other PC game, it’s just way better with a VR headset. You pick a 3-D avatar, you walk around, and you talk to people. ![]() ![]() It’s sort of like the infamous social arena Second Life, if you remember that, or like World of Warcraft, except without the standard goals that games usually give you. Users walk around in 3-D environments and talk to each other. VRChat is exactly what its name implies - a virtual-reality chat room. It is either a peek at what the future of social network looks like, or the newest outpost of the internet’s most offensive and antisocial. This new territory is “ VRChat,” a virtual-reality chat room teeming, like the internet itself, with creativity, intellectual-property infringement, friendship, and a concerning amount of casual racism. While you’ve been hanging out on the centralized, Instagram-filtered internet, full of hashtags and viral GIFs, a weird, wild, and extremely fascinating new territory has been established - surrounded by difficult technical borders and protected by a social vocabulary with a steep learning curve. ![]()
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