---
pubDate: 2022-10-22
title: Social VR?
tags:
  - technology
  - vr
abstract: |
  What's involved in being social in VR? How does it compare to real
  life? A case study with VRChat and RecRoom.
table_of_contents: true
---

## My Background with VR

I bought a VR headset, [the Valve Index][valve-index] to be used tethered with
PC and its dedicated graphics card, about 6 months ago. Since then, I've mostly
used my headset for applications such as:

- [Half-Life: Alyx](https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx)
- [Eleven Table Tennis](https://store.steampowered.com/app/488310/Eleven_Table_Tennis/)
- [Google Earth VR](https://store.steampowered.com/app/348250/Google_Earth_VR/)
- [Blade and Sorcery](https://store.steampowered.com/app/629730/Blade_and_Sorcery/)
- [VRChat][vr-chat]

![Google Earth VR](https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/348250/ss_6042a4e24d73c5972a9ee0728ade8a2c2893faef.1920x1080.jpg?t=1508799201)

![Half-Life Alyx](https://arcritic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/outdoor-vistas-half-life-alyx-screenshot.jpg)

In particular, VRChat is the only "social" applications listed
here. And in it, even though I was in online lobbies with many other people,
the experience did not feel very social since I wasn't outgoing enough to try
and make friends with people in the short amount of time I was there.

I was not very impressed with social VR. In VRChat (which I will introduce in
more detail in the [VRChat](#VRChat) section), there were a few times I came
close to having an actual conversation with someone else, but without the
pretense of knowing that we are trying to talk to each other, it was a little
hard to start conversations. Sometimes, people would approach me and show me
stuff, but they would leave just as quickly, and were usually with other people
they were talking to primarily.

![VRChat](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nBEWCsmq-Yk/maxresdefault.jpg)

VRChat is also just a crazy place -- it reminds me of early amateur YouTube.
Almost everything is user-made, so every world has its own ad-hoc aesthetic and
hacky interactive features. And, of course, the avatars. There's a rediculously
huge variety of user-made avatars. And as far as I can tell, moderation is
pretty relaxed so its typical to run into giant monsters that cover your view
and spin wildly, random characters that play music or recordings of lines from
movies or TV shows.

I also briefly tried RecRoom (which I will introduce in more detail in the
section [RecRoom](#RecRoom)) one time recently. I think its much less well-known
than VRChat, so I hadn't heard about it until then. Overall I was very impressed
with the UX. The avatars and worlds were much more constrained than VRChat's, so
the performance was much more optimized and the experience overall much more
organized. I attended a VR talent show that was pretty funny, although most of
the contestants were middle-to-high-school kids singing badly singing pop songs
(sometimes multiple consecutive contestants sung that same pop song...). I had a
positive experience, but wasn't exactly sure what I was interested in doing
next. The games weren't as fun as other VR games I already had.

Overall, it was a funny gimmick to see the early stages of social VR, but I
only participated in social VR around 5 times during 6 months.

## Giving Social VR another Chance

Listening the Meta and technology enthusiasts talk about the promises of social
VR, I started to wonder if there's something that I missed from my previous
experiences. The main thing, I noticed, was vising a friend or some aquaintance
that I could actually chat with persistently and have some benchmark to compare
to (talking with them physically). I didn't, however, go as far as to install
Meta's Horizon Worlds. But, given the positive results of the following
experiment, I may be willing to try it once in the future.

I invited a friend, who will go by QMD in this article, who I talk with (via
text) frequently online to join me in VR via his [Oculus Rift
S](https://www.oculus.com/rift-s/), the last model from the old Rift days for
Oculus. We first met in [VRChat][vr-chat] for about 2.5 hours, and then in
[RecRoom][recroom] for about 2.5 hours.

### VRChat

![VRChat](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f0770791aaf57311515b23d/1594323097093-T0ZKL126WLLITS38XH7L/logo.png)

VRChat hadn't changed much since that last time I used it a few months earlier.
But, it has certainly improved a lot over its lifetime.

For the uninitiated, VRChat is a free VR application where you can visit
user-created private/public virtual worlds. You exist in these worlds as a
configurable and user-created avatar of your choice. If you've never seen VR
Chat before, I reccomend looking up a [short YouTube video
demonstration](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vr+chat+gameplay),
which will instantly give a better idea that a textual description.

QMD and I donned avatars and explored some random VRChat words. VRChat has these
notable capabilities:

- Locations are organized into worlds. You can find world via a primitive search
  menu, or through hub worlds or other users that advertise certain worlds to
  you. Some worlds are static, intended for socializing or serving as a base to
  implement special activities on top of, and some worlds are designed to host a
  specific interactive game or other experience.
- Voice chat is distance sensitive; the volume of a person's voice is
  proportional to how close they are to you.
- Your avatar tracks the movement of your head (via your headset) and hands (via
  your controllers or hand-tracking such as on the Oculus Quest 2).
  Additionally, most avatars have animations that make the character
  faux-lipsync, blink periodically, and move other limbs and attachments (e.g.
  legs, clothing, equipment, hair) to give the impression of physics.
- You can move and jump like in a typical 3D video game. This usually causes
  motion sickness however, so many newer users use _teleport movement mode_
  instead, which lets you use your controller as a pointer to choose where to
  teleport to, without inducing motion in your view.

To start, we explored a few different worlds and talked to some random users.
Most of the users we met were male children -- by the sound of their voices, in
the age range 8-14. Most people used anime or cartoon avatars.

![an example VRChat avatar galery world](https://vrlowdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/VRChat-avatar-worlds-big-als-avatar-corridors.jpg)

We met a particularly enthusiastic young user who guided us to a world that
hosts a sort of avatar gallery, which was vast.  While the avatars are all
cartoonish, some of them were extremely sexual and sometimes even explicitly so.
Many avatars had special _emotes_ which are pre-rendered animations of the
avatar doing a short expression such as dancing, clapping, jumping, smiling,
shooting a laser gun, etc. The intention for some emotes seemed to be to truly
emote i.e. communicate a certain expression. But, in our experience the emotes
were exclusively used to show off something cool about the avatar.

One avatar I found particularly interesting was a squid puppet. The avatar was
invisible except for a cute little cartoon squid attached to your right hand.
So, you could control the squid as a puppet. While this avatar was cool, the
problem with it was that you couldn't really use it to communicate effectively
with other people since it didn't track the motion of your head or other arms,
or have an animated mouth while you talked.

We explored a few other worlds to see what kinds of stuff people usually do in
VRChat. There were some RP (role-playing) worlds, such as an RP Drama Court
where people debated some joke criminal charges against a volunteered user.
There were also many game-focused worlds such as a Tron-like laser disk game.
Everything was user generated, so UIs were often very clunky and poorly
explained, so you just kinda had to go around and tinker with things to see what
happened. Most of the places we stayed had somewhere between 10 to 15 people.
So, I'm guessing that around 15 people is the max number of users in most
worlds. When the number of users overflows, the overflow users are typically
sent to a parallel copy of the world.

Communicating with people was generally pretty difficult, but not impossible.
You had to try hard to get people's attention, when they were usually focused
on talking with their current group of VRChat friends. There were few visual
indications that someone you were trying to talk to was acknowledging you. Even
if they turned to face you, there was no clear sense of eye contact.
Additionally, some computationally intense worlds and avatars caused QMD and my
programs to lag, which further hindered communication in a similar way to laggy
video chat. However, almost always we found at least 1 person who was somewhat
helpful or responsive when QMD and I wanted it. Suprisingly, we didn't
experience any harassment, joke-intended or otherwise.

Eventually, QMD and I settled down in a more "chill" world styled like an old
Japanese village -- that is, a static world meant for hanging out and talking
rather than a game or other interactive experience. We went upstairs into what
looked like a restaurant and sat next to a large window, which looked out over
the town. It was very pleasant in comparison to what some might call the assault
on the senses which was our experience so far. Still, there was someone else in
the village that was transforming into a large dinosaur or something, which was
distracting, so we configured _earmuff mode_ which limited our hearing to just
people within a few meters.

#### VRChat Review

QMD and I took physical and virtual seats to review our experience so far. How
does our communication in VRChat compare to our physical interactions? For
context, we both live in the USA, but far away from each other, so we usually
only physically see each other once a year or so when we visit our hometown.

_Attention._ One on one, it was actually much easier to get a sense of whether
the other person's avatar was looking at you, or was paying attention to
something else (such at looking out the window or interacting with a personal
menu). The correspondence of the avatar's head to your physical head was
correlated enough that you could distinguish whether the other person was
looking at the table between you or at you yourself, but since there is no eye
tracking this accuracy was limited to head rotation. So, for example, it was
hard to tell where exactly on the table the other person is looking since
usually you just move your head in the general direction of the (normal-sized)
table, and then move your eyes to pay attention to something specific on the
table.

_Natural Conversation._ In audio and video calls, a common problem is
accidentally talking over the other person since visual queues are impossible or
harder to notice in time, especially with the introduced delay, in comparison to
physical conversation. In VRChat, this effect is slightly mitigated by the
availability of physical queues such as hand and head motion. When the other is
talking while moving their hands, and then the make a finalizing gesture and
stop talking, you know that you can start talking without a conflict. Or, when
its ambiguous who should talk next, you can make a gesture towards the other
person rather than say "you go" which could lead to another conflict. However,
there is still a little lag (about the same as audio call, not as bad as many
video calls). Overall, it seems like the additional body language provided by
both head and hand movement is enough to noticably improve the sense of natural
communication over video calling. But video has some other advantages as well, in particular the lack of facial
expressions. Meta is [working on
this](https://www.wired.com/story/metas-vr-headset-quest-pro-personal-data-face/).

_Avatar Projection._ To some extent its still can be inherently hard to make it
feel natural when your conversation partner is a giant robot or sexy anime cat
girl. But not all of that unnaturalness is bad, of course. Although avatars have
some artistic details, they are hugely simplfied in comparison to the details of
a person's physical appearance. People choose an avatar in order to be funny,
cute, or stylized for whatever preference. In order to have a casual
conversation, QMD and I used simple avatars that didn't have a lot of moving
pieces so that we could focus on talking rather than messing around with emotes.
Its fun to have your appearance abstracted in this way to something that you
have full control over. When you go up to someone new, its straightforward to
pre-judge them based on their appearance, and you don't need to give a second
though to how their physical body actually looks because for all intents and
purposes that doesn't matter in this context. Some of the users QMD and I talked
to mentioned that they liked VRChat because it let them be social without
experiencing anxiety, presumably for exposing their physical body and mannerisms
to new people. In VRChat, the full control over your avatar's appearance (as
well as the ability to leave at any moment) provides a buffer between you and
other people that can make it easier to be outgoing and experimental. My guess
is that a big factor here is that it feels like you aren't risking as much in a
status game in these interactions, because of that buffer.

_Shared Presence._ A huge advantage of VR interactions compared to audio and
video calls is the shared presence it provides you and your conversation
partner. You each have your own perspective in the physical world, but you can
experience that same things together. Thinking back to the time I spent with QMD
in VRChat, it feels more like we visited a _place_ rather than just playing the
same game together. Above that, in contrast to playing non-VR video games
together, the controlling a humanoid character in the VRChat worlds that the
other person can react to contributes to a sense of bodily immeresion. What I
was really left wanting, however, was the ability to share a computer screen, so
I could show the other person something I looked up online, for example. What we
really needed in VR was the equivalent of a tablet. I'm sure that something like
this is possible, its just a matter of UI design. So, I'm very interested to see
where that sort of feature becomes available.

### RecRoom

![RecRoom](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/582e7271bebafbd72792bd97/t/5cfeaf9a904d11000101ece8/1560194976582/OC+LANDSCAPE.jpg?format=1500w)

After VRChat, QMD and I decided to try out [RecRoom][recroom]. I've used RecRoom
briefly before, but QMD hadn't.

RecRoom is similar to VRChat in the sense that it is also a free VR application
where you can visit dev-created and user-created private/public virtual worlds.
You exist in these worlds as a configurable avatar, but the avatar is very
constrained compared to VRChat. The vanilla avatar body is very basic, and the
accessories such as clothing and hair styles can only be acquired through an
in-game shop that costs money (after converting it to in-game currency, of
course).

QMD and I met in my _dorm room_, which is a private room that every user starts
with. It has a white board with markers, mini basketball ball/hoop, water bottle
(with crude particle effects when the water is poured out), a desk, a bed, and a
mirror. So, an extremely luxurious dorm room. I was curious to see if the white
board was effective for communicating written ideas to each other, and it
roughly was. Drawing on it was basically as fine-grained as a real whiteboard.
But, it was too small.


The aesthetic of RecRoom seems to be going for faux realism, where UI and game
elements are depicted as if they were the physical analogues you'd see in the
physical world. For example:

- the quick game menu is accessible by looking at your wrist as if you were
  wearing a watch
- doors which lead to other worlds are passed through by actually reaching out
  and opening the door
- accepting people into your party is performed by fist-bumping them

This definitely works in favor of an intuitive UX, and a somewhat immersive
experience, but at times it does interfere with the efficiency of navigating
menus and using things. Like, I would have preferred the whiteboard in my dorm
room to be bigger, and the markers to be more fine-grained and
pressure-insensitive.

RecRoom seems to have a focus on providing amateur in-game creation tools, such
as the _maker gun_, which is a sort of advanced 3D pen that you can use in
private areas. The structured you make can be moved around, but don't have
physics properties. QMD and I played around with this briefly while inside my
dorm room.

Then, QMD and I went to the central hub world, the Rec Center, where we were
again taken under the wing of a young-sounding user. He brought us to a
horror-themed game world. The game was pretty boring, so we only tried it out
for a few minutes before moving on. Over the next 2 hours we tried out
paddleball, frisbee golf, paintball, bowling, and an escape room. The were all
fairly impressive in how well-made they were, with paddleball, frisbee golf, and
bowling standing out as very fun. The best thing we were looking for was
something that we could do together while also chatting casually with each
other. None of the games were particularly impressive as standalone games, but
with a social aspect to them, they were perfect.

![Bowling in
RecRoom](https://external-preview.redd.it/aO3LrgpPwH5z1DU_LFMwjLbLIMtMO-KXHRXFfsXLp40.gif?format=png8&s=18b94063c1576f6cca40366a3e8b46b65fd17d7f)

I noticed that, since our avatars were less interesting, we spent less time
looking at each other's avatars than just talking while passively doing other
activities. This worked out pretty well, since its kinda awkward to, such as in
a video call, just stare at the other person while you are having a conversation
with them. In VRChat this was more normal because of how visually stimulating
people's avatars were.

Most of the worlds that we visited in RecRoom were dev-created, such as the
paddleball and bowling. But, the escape room was definitely user-generated, which
was apparent from its lack of polish and "minimalist" instructions. There
definitely seems to be a lot of user-generated content in RecRoom, but we were
satisfied enough with the dev-created worlds we tried for a few hours that we
didn't end up trying many of user-created ones.

#### RecRoom Review

_Attention._ One of the restrictions that comes with the avatars is that
RecRoom's developers decided to make the avatars simplified floating torsos with
unconnected hands and a head. In particular, the avatars don't have legs or
arms. This didn't turn out to limit expressiveness much in my opinion, since you
don't have direct control over your avatar's legs and arms in VRChat anyways.
The facial expressions of the RecRoom avatars aren't very complicated either,
although they do seem to respond to a few stimuli (e.g. if you throw something
at an avatar, it will cause their face to briefly have a pained expression). It
was harder to tell where each other were looking by looking at each other's
faces, since the eyes of RecRoom avatars are much less detailed (they're
basicallyj just stylized black dots). But, this never was an issue since the
things we were interacting with were big enough that we didn't need to worry
about precisely tracking each other's head movements -- general head-facing
direction was sufficient information.

_Natural Conversation._ This was basically the same as VRChat. Even with
minimalist expressions of just simple faces on a head floating above a torso
with floating hands, using body language while talking worked pretty much just
as well as in VRChat. In fact, I think it usually worked a little better because
the bodies of the RecRoom avatars are much easier to read than some of the weird
VRChat avatars.

_Avatar Projection._ Since the avatars are also so similar, the appearance of
your avatar doesn't realy express that much detail about your choices. In fact,
at one point QMD notified me that somehow I had put on a dress without realizing
it. I didn't really care, since the details of our avatars weren't very
important -- I didn't feel the compulsion to mess around with configuring my
avatar like I did in VRChat.

_Shared Presence._ Since the environments felt more realistic and immersive than
the VRChat environments, I could make more sense of them visually and
intuitively, and therefore it felt much more like a shared _place_ to visit with
QMD than many of the VRChat worlds. Still, however, having tablets to use
collaboratively inside of RecRoom would be a great feature which should be added
as soon as possible.

## Conclusions

What was new about this experience was that I shared it with someone that I have
interacted with physically and in non-VR games  many times before. In this way,
I had an implicit benchmark to compare my VR interactions to like I haven't had
in my VR interactions with random people online.

With this in mind, overall, I was impressed with how much of the interactivity
of physical interaction transfered to VR interaction. Of course, there are
things that we could have done physically (such as get food) that are pretty
much impossible to meaningfully transfer to VR, but there are also many things
that we could do in VR that are impossible or very inconvenient to do
physically, such as visiting interesting worlds and playing Tron laser disk
battle, bowling, and paintball. Along these lines, I see hanging out in VR as a
way to improve the experience of playing video games together. I would prefer to
play mini golf, bowling, and similar games in VR with someone over getting
together in person to do it, even if the person is close enough to me to
feasibly join me for such an activity in person.

When it comes to the pure social experience of focusing on talking with
someone, I was definitely impressed by the VR experience, but its still lacking
in some critical aspects compared to the physical social expperience, and I'd
say the lack of facial expressions is by far the biggest of these. I'm very
interested in seeing how progress in the technology for that and its adoption
goes, since I then that will be a huge improvement that could draw many more
people in social VR, if its done well of course.

I'll say this again as well -- having a tablet in VR would be a huge benefit. So
many times when I'm spending time with someone in person, we have a computer
open or are sharing things from each other's phones. Its so annoying to access
your computer and phone while you're in VR, and always a disappointment when you
can't share your view desktop or phone with other people. I'm not sure how this
exactly should be implemented, but something like a mini desktop that you could
spawn into the world would be a good start.

I see current social VR as good for socializing with friends that you don't see
regularly in person. In the near term future, it could be an ideal medium for
audio-visual interactions such as podcasts, planning, and team meetings. I could
easily imagine hosting a podcast in VR -- maybe Yuta and I will try that
someday. I also mention team meetings since it can be cumbersome to get several
people to come to the same location to meet for an extended period that involves
primarily sitting down around a table or at a whiteboard doing things you mostly
prefer doing in your own workspace. But, meeting in person has proven, at least
for the kinds of meetings I have, to have many benefits over video calling. My
hypothesis is that much that is lost going from physical meetings to video calls
is preserved by VR interactions.

Lastly, in retrospect, I feel like I had more fun in RecRoom than VRChat since
it was easier to specifically focus on talking with QMD rather than getting
distracted with complicated avatars and random bullshit happening all around us.
There is definitely something lost there though, where VRChat feels more
exciting and RecRoom feels more predictable. More generally, VRChat feels like
it has much more content and much more variety of content overall, so I could
see there being particular worlds I would be interested in enough to boot up
VRChat specifically to visit, but none of the worlds I've seen so far qualify.
Finally, if I was inviting someone to hang out with me in VR for the first time,
I would choose RecRoom over VRChat pretty much every time.