✤MURO Marching - VRChat (Part 1)✤

 Hello again, everyone! Today's topic is VRChat itself, a game I've mentioned in previous posts, and that will be featured heavily in MURO Marching and MURO Mellow!

VRChat is a social platform made for Virtual Reality headsets (see my blog post about VR headsets here), though it also supports mouse and keyboard. The platform is driven by community-created content, where each user (above a certain 'Trust rank' to avoid malicious usage) can create avatars or worlds and share them with others.

For this first part, I want to explain some of the more common parts of a 'world', as they tie a lot into VRChat culture. To do this, I'll explore my 'Home World' (the first world you load into when you log into the game, it can be any world of your choosing!) 'at Home Chill by Ourai Inc․' by OURAI_VR! There's a lot to cover, so this might be a bit disjointed and will be split into multiple posts.

Now, I'm biased, but I adore greenery. So, naturally, (badum tsh) I picked a world that had plenty of it and was small in file size. Your computer has to download every world you visit, so I try to stick to smaller Worlds when looking for potential Homes. I find it helps with my loading times when I log on. You can only have one Home at a time, but I like a change of scenery every once in a while, so I'll switch it up when the mood strikes me. You also have an emergency 'Return to Home' button in your game menu that will automatically relocate you safely and privately to your Home World.

Speaking of menus, many Worlds also have menus built in to make your experience comfortable! This world conveniently has the more normalized menu options - a Mirror, a Collider, Seats, and Night Mode.

Night Mode, as it implies, dims your screen to make it feel more like nighttime. There are people who are comfortable sleeping in VR (I am not one of them), so Worlds will often cater to our sleepy friends by having this option! The photo below shows a bit of Night Mode as well as Colliders.

Colliders are whether or not your avatar is able to phase through certain objects. Usually, these are couches, beds, and chairs, so that people with full body tracking can properly 'sit' on the furniture without being stuck above it due to collision. As you can see, colliders don't always play nice. If you don't enjoy looking like Linda Blair, turning off colliders is your friend.

 

Seats allow people to sit without physically sitting down - they're internally referred to as 'seat stations' because they're placed in a World in a static position, and the person who interacts with it is put into a sitting pose in that location and stationary until they use their movement controls to exit the seat.

Mirrors sound a bit vain to have in every world, but there's a genuine use case that leads to them being everywhere. When wearing a headset, you have a smaller FOV (field of view/vision) than you do when you're looking around normally. You're looking through the lenses to see in-game, so you can't use your peripheral vision. Mirrors help both immerse the player in the virtual world and help make up for the lower FOV. This gets poked fun of a bit, where people who stand in front of mirrors and chat get called 'mirror dwellers'.

That's all for this time! I'll be alternating this series with some other posts I've brainstorming. Thanks for reading!

 

See ya next time!