What to Do and Who to Do It With
How Social VR is Reinventing Everything from Game Night to Online Harassment
NOW SEEMS as good a time as any to make a confession: My whole life, I’ve loved the idea of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. I was infatuated by the dice, the character sheets, the intricate rules. When I was in elementary school, I’d buy pads of graph paper just so I could draw dungeons, plotting out labyrinthine corridors and catacombs that would ensnare my imaginary adventurers. I’d create characters, inventing elaborate backstories that explained why a gnome fighter would insist on trying to wield a sword that was nearly as tall as he was. I’d pore over books like the famous Monster Manual, reading about how many hit points a Gelatinous Cube had and memorizing the various types of illusion the carnivorous Rakshasa could cast. (One illusion I don’t have, clearly, is how cringe-worthy that last sentence is.)
Yet, I never played them.
Although I loved the idea of the game, the actual experience left something to be desired. Not enough of my friends ever wanted to play, and when we managed the rare quorum, it generally fell apart within an hour, whether because of boredom, confusion, or the diuretic power of Mountain Dew. I tried going to game stores but always felt self-conscious about joining a group of more experienced players. And sure, yeah, there might have been some shame in there as well—but regardless of the cause, the upshot was the same. I never broke through the beginning stage, never knew the thrill of banding together with my merry adventurers to defeat evil and lay claim to treasures untold.
Now, though, I’m standing in a tavern, trying to do just that. Well, it’s a virtual tavern, situated within Altspace, one of the early multiuser social apps available in VR. Five of us are gathered around a giant table: me, three other D&D players, and Tim, a “dungeon master” who’s taking us through the game. I’d say we’re a motley crew, but that’s not quite the case. Altspace offers only a rough handful of avatars you can select to represent yourself, and three of the five of us chose to be robots of various colors. The other two—me and a guy named Zyan—look as expressionless as the robots, thanks to the unchanging expressions on our avatars’ faces.
Tim asks us to explain a bit about our characters, and the adventure picks up where it left off last week. (Fair warning: if the rest of this paragraph sounds like Lord of the Rings fan fiction, that’s because that’s basically exactly what D&D is.) I’m playing a human druid named Cale Firborn; my fellow glory-seekers and I have taken on jobs as hired labor for a caravan of traders. We’ve been traveling by wagon for the past three weeks, working by day and by night trying to figure out who among us might be members of the Cult of the Dragon. Evil’s afoot in the land, and we’re hot on its trail. We’ve finally arrived at an inn just as rain starts to pour down, only to be turned away by the innkeeper—and laughed at by the group of aristocrats sitting in the inn’s common room.
We’ve got a hunch they’re holding the innkeeper hostage. Besides, sleeping outside isn’t an option; it’s freezing, and our horses might not survive. “We’ve got to get in there,” says Dust, a gray robot sitting to my left who’s playing an elf fighter.
As a druid, I have the power to turn into a brown bear, so I tell Tim that I’m going to try to break down the door of the inn with my ursine might and chase the haughty aristocrats out of the inn—at which point my nonbear friends will rush in to save the day, and the grateful innkeeper will surely extend us some much-needed hospitality. “Sounds good,” he says. “You’re going to need to roll a strength check.”
Every game of Dungeons & Dragons, as eleven-year-old me would have been only too glad to tell you, revolves around dice. Every time you want to do something—listen for a rustle in the woods, jump across a chasm, cast a spell—you roll dice. Some of them are the usual six-sided dice you’d see in any Monopoly or craps game, but others are more exotically shaped: four-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided, twelve-sided, and twenty-sided dice all make frequent appearances at a role-playing game table. There’s even a 120-sided die, known to mathematicians as a disdyakis triacontahedron, though it doesn’t have many uses for owners beyond maybe determining what age you’ll finally lose your virginity.
In this case, a “strength check” requires me to roll a twenty-sided die: the result will determine whether the door can survive intact, or whether the inn becomes a bear sanctuary. I look around the table. No dice. I look over at Tim, and he silently points up. I look up, and I see why: dice of every possible shape are hovering over the table. I press a button on the Oculus Touch controller in my hand and select the virtual icosahedron. It falls to the table and tumbles freely, finally stopping on a fourteen. That’s one shy of what I need to break through the door, but I’m not disappointed. I’ve finally found the dream: pickup game night from the comfort of a headset.
WHAT YOU DO—OR WHERE YOU DO IT?
If you’re going to work on the future, it helps if you look like you’re from the future, and Eric Romo, the cofounder and CEO of Altspace, certainly does. It’s not because of his clothes, which tend toward business casual, and it’s only partially because he’s tall and lean. It’s mostly because he’s totally hairless. If you have to bet on someone to figure out what hanging out will look like in 2023, go with whoever’s most aerodynamic.
VR isn’t even Romo’s first bet on the future. When he was finishing up his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, a professor emailed him on behalf of two men who were recruiting for a rocket company they were starting. One of those men was Elon Musk, which is how Romo became the thirteenth employee at SpaceX. Eventually, he started a company focusing on solar energy, but when the bottom fell out of the industry, he shut down the company and looked for his next opportunity.
This was the end of 2012—exactly the time when VR was popping back up on people’s radars. Romo spent the next year and a half researching the technology and thinking about what kind of company might make sense in a new VR-enabled world. He had read Snow Crash, like everyone else in the VR world, but he also knew that our hopes for a VR future could very well end up like the famed flying car: defined—and limited—by an expectation that might not match perfectly with what we actually want. “The biggest piece of baggage people take from those books is that VR is a place that you go, and how fantastical it is,” he says. “‘Wow, it’s so cool that I can look at this club that is a big, black sphere that I can walk into!’”
VR, Romo and his cofounders think, isn’t about walking into that big black sphere. The space you’re in won’t matter nearly as much as who you’re there with. So Altspace doesn’t want you to come in, explore everything, and then leave; it wants you to come back because you liked what you did. When you connect to Altspace, there’s a relatively limited number of environments you can be in, and most of them are decidedly nonfantastical: a tavern, a nondescript nightclub, a modernist house, a home theater, a meditation dojo. These aren’t destinations but conduits, places that allow you to host a variety of activities, from D&D games to a screening of Lawnmower Man (which, as you can probably guess, has happened more than once).
Similarly, your avatar—the character you appear as—is surprisingly simple. Even the most middle-of-the-road video game these days allows you to tweak your character to look exactly how you want it to, from jawline to eye color to brow shape to facial hair to body type. In Altspace, you choose only three things: which one of six avatars you want to be, its skin tone (or, if a robot, its metal tone), and the color scheme of its outfit. That’s because customization is, in Romo’s view, a “time vacuum.” He’d rather spend time figuring out how to let you know about the things to do, and to find people to do them with.
The first part of that is at least imaginable: when you launch Altspace, a calendar pops up in front of you listing the featured events happening in the coming days, as well as the public rooms where people are hosting games or chats. The second part, however, feels like the biggest obstacle facing Altspace, and other platforms like it. Romo puts the number of users at the tens of thousands, but that’s not always the feel when you visit Altspace; more often than not, you find a handful of gathering spaces, each with a dozen or so people playing a game or just talking around a virtual campfire.
The busiest times, by far, are reserved for what Romo calls Altspace’s “marquee events,” which have emerged as the platform’s most consistent draws. During the 2016 presidential election, the platform partnered with NBC News to host “Virtual Democracy Plaza,” an environment where people could gather to watch the Trump-Clinton debates or attend talks by Al Roker or Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. Podcasters record episodes in Altspace; improv comedy troupes do shows. And perhaps most enduringly, the musician and comic Reggie Watts held a monthly residency, doing shows in Altspace every few weeks. The company even granted him a custom avatar, instantly recognizable down to its afro, beard, and suspenders. The first time he performed, in May 2016, the company touted that more than one thousand people attended the event, at the time making it the most people ever gathered together in a VR space at one time.
Watts is likely best known as the bandleader on James Corden’s late-night CBS talk show, where he asks each guest a single bizarre question. (“When you think about sensuality,” he asked Jeff Goldblum, “do you think it’s mostly about listening, or about responding in real time to something ineffable?” To Naomi Campbell, he got a bit more prosaic: “If you had to choose between muffins, cookies, crackers, crisps, or just a good time inside of a boat, which one would you choose?”) If you think his non sequiturs are strange on broadcast network TV, though, you should see them in his live show, where his improvisation truly thrives. He alternates between unscripted cerebral riffs and on-the-fly music, creating beatbox-driven songs using a keyboard and a looping machine. The resulting blend—part science fiction, part meta-comedy, and part late-night jam session—may confuse, but it always entertains.
Amazingly, the feeling of those shows translates into VR. Some of that is due to some surprising physical realism. In VR, Watts is walking back and forth on a nightclub stage; in real life, he’s at home in Los Angeles, wearing a fifteen-hundred-dollar VR motion-capture suit. Seeing his avatar move in Altspace—head nodding, knees bending slightly as he sways side to side—doesn’t increase your own sense of presence, but it makes Watts far more present than the other user avatars in Altspace, all of whom move about with a slightly unnerving slide, like so many robot butlers.
There’s more to it than mere physicality, though. Watts’s dance-like-nobody’s-watching aesthetic has always felt like the product of a single overclocked brain. There’s a connection with the audience, as with any good performer, but because so much of what he does boils down to “puttering around talking to himself and singing,” it doesn’t take more than a decent approximation of his bodily self for his other elements to come through fully. And happily, his VR act keeps the musical elements: Watts places hand controllers atop his keyboard so that he can find it while wearing a headset (just look for the floating controllers!).
For all their similarities, the real-life and VR versions of a Reggie Watts show exhibit two stark differences, both of which provide hints of what a future of shared VR experiences might entail. Just as with online multiplayer video games, allowing a large number of people to act and interact in an online space is a staggering technical lift for any company. Altspace, however, wants to be able to accommodate hundreds or thousands of people at a single time, so it developed a clever work-around: it subdivides a VR audience into groups of thirty or so, places those groups in identical VR nightclubs, and then essentially clones Watts’s onstage VR avatar across all those identical rooms. Your experience isn’t like an arena show, or even a small concert hall, but a much cozier venue with a couple of dozen attendees. While you wouldn’t want to see Metallica or Beyoncé giving everything they have in a tiny cabaret, it’s the perfect environment for certain types of performances—like, say, a musical comic weirdo. Altspace claims it can handle up to forty thousand users this way, using various types of VR environments to best suit the event in question. As for Watts’s experience as the cloned avatar, performing in dozens or hundreds of virtual rooms simultaneously, it’s not as overwhelming as you might think. He sees the crowd in only a single room.
What is overwhelming is an emerging social behavior that first took root in conventional social media, but takes on a new dimension in VR. If you’ve watched a Facebook Live video, you’ve likely seen thumbs-up “like” emoji—as well as other Facebook-sanctioned reaction emoji such as hearts and angry faces—float across the video, straight from viewers’ thumbs to your smartphone screen. Altspace enables a similar real-time response: users can send smiley faces, hearts, or clapping hands streaming upward from their avatars’ heads. If you’re one of thirty people in the room, it’s the virtual version of holding up a lighter or a smartphone screen: a perfect way to signal your appreciation without hooting into your microphone and disrupting the show.
If you’re Reggie Watts, though, you see all the emoji reactions. From all the people in all the rooms—the air thick with hearts and smiles and clapping hands, floating heavenward through a ceiling that doesn’t even physically exist.
SOCIAL VR, PERSONAL SPACE, AND AGGRESSIVE ARCHERS
As long as our computers have been able to talk to each other, we’ve been using them to do the same thing. For me, that happened my first year at college, when my friend and I learned how to “ntalk” with students at other schools. Of course, this was in 1993, when the “World Wide Web” was a mind-shattering innovation and using the internet was mostly about typing various nonsense words like “telnet.” But still, even then, the promise of meeting people—specifically, in our case, meeting women—immediately eclipsed every other reason we’d been using computers. Video games? Writing papers? Those were fine, but they weren’t going to help us hook up.
We weren’t the only ones. Over the first three decades of the internet’s existence, its evolution was marked by the rise and fall of social communication. First came “bulletin board systems” and an enormous network called Usenet (think Reddit without any graphics), then chat rooms. After that, instant messaging—basically the descendant of my beloved “ntalk”—allowed for back-and-forth conversations in real time between two people. Finally, social networks came along and mashed everything together: now platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat allow instantaneous communication between and among every kind of social group you can think of.
As our online social tools have grown in speed and scale, though, so has the ability to use those tools to be an asshole. Back in the day, “trolling” just referred to pursuing a provocative argument for kicks. Today, the word is used to describe the actions of anonymous mobs like the one that, for instance, drove actor Leslie Jones off Twitter with an onslaught of racist and sexist abuse. Harassment has become one of the defining characteristics of the internet as we use it today; a few years ago, the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of internet users—and 70 percent of those eighteen to twenty-four years old—have experienced online harassment to some degree.
Up to now, that harassment has happened at a remove. It’s words and pictures that you see on your phone or computer screen. But with the emergence of VR, our social networks have become, quite literally, embodied. What was once an anonymous commenter is now an anonymous avatar—in the form of another being standing right in front of you. What was once a tossed-off insult or slur is now the ability to invade your personal space.
As soon as high-end headsets were released and VR started attracting larger numbers of users, those users began virtually coexisting. Some people found the combination of presence and online anonymity to be an emboldening recipe. In late 2016, a woman named Jordan Belamire published an article on the online platform Medium detailing her first experience in VR—which was also her first experience with virtual harassment.
Skeptic’s Corner: Personal Space
You: Personal space? nope, sorry, not buying it.
Me: Explain.
You: Okay, well, first of all, it’s not you. Like, you look down and don’t even necessarily see legs, so why would it matter how close someone gets?
Me: So it turns out that a lot of people have thought about this for a long time. there’s even a term for the field of study: proxemics. Most of the big proxemics studies happened decades before VR came along, but in 2001 a group of researchers at the university of california–santa barbara decided to test how being in VR affected people’s concept of personal space. They designed a simple virtual room and then gave volunteers a headset and asked them to walk up to the other person they saw in the room and read his nametag. The “person” in question, though, was a virtual man, basically a simple video game character.
Like so many other psychological studies, the volunteers thought they were there for one reason (to have their memory tested), but the researchers really wanted to see how much space people would give the virtual man. And to figure that out, they programmed the character to have one of five levels of eye contact: they ranged from its eyes being closed to staying fixed on the volunteer and turning his head to follow the volunteer. Not surprisingly, volunteers gave a wider berth to the virtual man when he looked directly at them and followed them with his eyes. So yes, there’s personal space in VR.
(Male and female volunteers differed in one pretty fundamental way, though. When men approached the virtual man from the front, the distance they maintained from it wasn’t based on how the character was looking at them but on how much “social presence” the character had—in other words, how much the volunteers believed the character was actually conscious and aware of them. Men, it turns out, don’t maintain eye contact with other men and so simply didn’t notice the character’s gaze as much as female volunteers did.)
Belamire (a pseudonym) had used her brother-in-law’s VR system to try an archery game called—I’ll wait while you guess this one—QuiVr. QuiVr works via the magic of hand presence: one handheld controller acts as your bow, the other as your arrow, and you play by miming the stringing and loosing of arrows in order to snipe undead creatures from atop the ramparts of a mountain castle. After enjoying the game’s single-player mode, she decided to play the next round in multiplayer mode.
A quick overview, just in case you know nothing about video games: Multiplayer gaming is just what it sounds like, though more than one person playing the same game simultaneously can take many forms. Some classic arcade games of the 1980s allowed people to play together cooperatively; Gauntlet, for example, featured four joysticks, encouraging a merry quartet to explore a dungeon and fight against common enemies. Fighting games like Street Fighter were designed for one-on-one competition, in which two players engaged in high-flying, fireball-throwing hand-to-hand combat. However, the advent of the internet moved things online, and now most multiplayer games are decentralized networked experiences in which you play against, or alongside, people you never actually see. For a game to become a legitimate cultural phenomenon—think Halo, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Overwatch—online multiplayer is an absolute prerequisite.
However, online multiplayer gaming is also an incubator for some pretty vile behavior: not just what could be considered “unsportsmanlike” play, but virulently racist and sexist speech; gender harassment that can begin as soon as a player’s name or voice indicates the player is female; and even rape threats and other violent overtures. (It’s not all that different from the rest of online harassment, though the fact that multiplayer gaming generally includes voice communication makes the harassment significantly more visceral than images alone might be.)
When Belamire began the multiplayer version of QuiVr, she was paired with other gamers who looked exactly the way she did in the game: a floating helmet with a quiver floating behind it where the back would be, a hand clutching a bow, and a free hand that could reach back to grab arrows. No face, no hair, no clothes, no body—just the minimal elements necessary to signify an archer. If it weren’t for usernames and voices, anonymity would be complete. However, Belamire was using her microphone, and so the other players knew she was a woman. One of them, whom she dubs BigBro442, began acting creepy.
In between a wave of zombies and demons to shoot down, I was hanging out next to BigBro442, waiting for our next attack. Suddenly, BigBro442’s disembodied helmet faced me dead-on. His floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest.
“Stop!” I cried. I must have laughed from the embarrassment and the ridiculousness of the situation. Women, after all, are supposed to be cool, and take any form of sexual harassment with a laugh. But I still told him to stop.
This goaded him on, and even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest. Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.
“As VR becomes increasingly real,” she wrote, “how do we decide what crosses the line from an annoyance to an actual assault? Eventually we’re going to need rules to tame the wild, wild west of VR multi-player. Or is this going to be yet another space that women do not venture into?”
The response to the article was swift, and strong. The two men who had created the game published a long blog post expressing remorse for what Belamire had experienced and also apologizing for their failure to anticipate the episode. When creating the game, they wrote, they had designed a “personal bubble” so that players couldn’t wave their hands in another player’s face to block their view—the offending hands would simply disappear—but they hadn’t thought about extending that bubble to the body. “How could we have overlooked something so obvious?” they wrote. As soon as they read Belamire’s article, they immediately updated the game to enlarge the personal bubble.
However, they wrote, there was more to contend with:
We would like to float a possible way of thinking for the VR development community to consider as we grow. It consists of two parts. One, that we should strive to prevent harassment from happening in the first place, of course. But second, when harassment does happen—and I see no way to prevent it entirely so long as multiplayer experiences exist—we need to also offer the tools to re-empower the player as it happens.
I don’t know if we are right in this belief, but it seems a reasonable one to us—if VR has the ability to deprive someone of power, and that feeling can have real psychological harm, then it is also in our ability to help mitigate that by dramatically and demonstrably giving that power back to the player before the experience comes to an end.
QuiVr wasn’t the only multiplayer VR experience to consider such questions. A few months before, the creators of an app called Bigscreen had announced a measure much like what QuiVr’s creators promised: any user who got within a certain radius of another user would simply disappear. And by now, any multiplayer VR experience that wants to attract users—or, in these days when everything is free, investors—is introducing some sort of privacy or anti-troll measures.
Altspace is among them. After a well-publicized instance in which a female journalist wrote about being swarmed and “kissed” during her first time on the platform, Altspace rolled out its own personal space bubble. That joined other options Altspace had made available to users, such as the ability to mute and block other players, as well as making sure that an Altspace representative is available inside VR every minute of the day. “In the early days we were very pleasantly surprised that we didn’t have lots of reports of harassment or anything like that,” says Eric Romo. “But as soon as the user numbers started to spike, the number of targets started to go up—so that’s where you see things like the block and mute and moderation, and the bubble of personal space, which I think have largely started to become really effective. Reports of harassment are really way down, and I don’t know if we’ve had one in a while. So it’s been much better, but I think it’s something we have to continue to work on.”
This is more than a matter of a space bubble, though. The question that faces the developers of QuiVr, and Bigscreen and Altspace and every other VR tool that brings people together, isn’t simply how you make VR safe for all people, but how you do it now, in the technology’s relative infancy. The internet at large, and social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram especially, prioritized growth over safeguards. The result is that these platforms are stuck playing catch-up. Twitter is habitually mired in controversies around abuse and harassment, and last year Instagram unveiled a plan to use artificial intelligence to cut down on harassment in its comments—nearly seven years after it launched.
VR has a rare opportunity to keep that particular horse inside the barn. It’s an opportunity too many have squandered. The authors of a 2014 study about sexual harassment in online gaming wrote that “sexism and its expression may be driving women away from many networked games or forcing them into silent participation rather than active engagement.” Not only would such a fate be a crushing blow for inclusion and parity in VR, but it would threaten the technology as a whole.
If developers and companies are able to anticipate and even preempt this kind of toxic behavior, that fate can be averted. If they give users the right tools to empower themselves, if they’re proactive about building a positive community, and if they’re willing to enact—and enforce—policies that keep social VR welcoming to all, then presence will have a chance to become everything it promises.
Harassment and toxic behavior are the most pressing issues in social VR’s early days, but they’re far from the only ones. The dynamics and effects of the technology continue to attract keen interest from cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, and other academic circles; after all, VR gives them a way to cook up just about any scenario they can imagine.
Case in point: Recently, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of Vienna set out to see how being socially excluded in VR affected people’s mental states in the real world. Each volunteer entered a virtual environment, a sunny park, where they were invited to play a ball game with two other people. (Beforehand, some of the volunteers had been placed in a waiting room with another person and told that they’d be playing a VR game with that other person; the other half were told they’d be playing with computer-generated people. But in reality, all the people volunteers met in VR were computer-generated.) For half of the volunteers, the ball got thrown to them about a third of the time, just as expected. For the other half, though, the game turned into a middle-school freeze-out: after a minute or so, the virtual players simply stopped throwing the ball to the volunteer and wouldn’t respond if the volunteer asked why.
The immediate results weren’t much of a surprise. The volunteers who were excluded later reported significantly more anger, sadness, and uncertainty than the ones who were included—and those who thought they’d been playing with a real human were even sadder. Conversely, of those volunteers who had been included for the full game, those who thought they were playing with real people reported significantly higher self-confidence than those who knew they were playing with computer-generated partners. Already, it’s clear that social VR—experiencing presence with real people—can induce a stronger emotional response than simply interacting with a game character or another computer-generated construct.
It gets more interesting, though. After each volunteer had gone through the VR experience, an experimenter dropped a pencil in front of them; the researchers kept track of how long it took volunteers to react and then to pick up the pencil. Those who had been excluded took significantly longer to do both. That antisocial reaction had been borne out by past research; what was new this time around was that those who thought they’d been ostracized by humans took significantly longer than the others who had been excluded. Whereas with “computer people,” they might have been willing to chalk it up to a technical glitch, the sting of being rejected by virtual humans was as visceral as if it had happened in real life. (Conversely, an earlier study found that people who had become “superheroes” in VR, flying through the air and saving a child, were more likely to help pick up pens in a similar situation—just as alienation can be induced, so can altruism.)
The way we treat each other matters. This holds true online, offline, and maybe most of all in VR, where anonymity and presence create a sort of embodied omnipotence. How burgeoning social VR platforms reckon with that power remains to be seen, but even small failings right now can help shape developers’ thinking and design decisions in ways that have far-reaching effects. As new realities become an ever-increasing part of our digital lives—which themselves are merging with our “real” lives to the point where the distinction will soon become moot, if still technically accurate—the architects of those realities take on the burden of avoiding, and even redeeming, the mistakes of those who came before them.
Will they do those things? I can’t say. I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of insightful things, things that evince an earnest desire to create a space in which people don’t feel excluded or ostracized, let alone threatened. But companies that want to grow fast sometimes forget to grow smart—and sometimes the smartest companies don’t grow fast enough to stick around. So let’s take a snapshot.
AND NOW, A BRIEF SURVEY
No, not that kind of survey. Since we’ve been talking about the astounding power of social presence, it seems like a good time to take a step back so you can take in the social VR landscape as a whole. At the end of 2017, there are fewer than ten persistent social VR worlds, each with its own user communities, its own features, and its own challenges. There are dozens more VR experiences and apps that feature social presence—multiplayer games like QuiVr, or Hulu’s VR app, which allows you to connect with friends and watch the streaming service’s offerings on a 2-D screen embedded in a virtual world—but these are the ones that focus on creation and interaction:
Altspace: I’m gonna go ahead and guess you get this one by now.
Anyland: This is “open-world” VR in the most literal sense. The creation of a two-person team, Anyland puts all the tools of creation and communication in users’ hands. When you begin, you’re just a pair of hands, but you use the game’s sculpture tools to fashion yourself a head (your avatar) and your home—then you find other people to spend time with. It may not be as welcoming as many other platforms, just by virtue of its degree of difficulty, but it has a small, ardent community.
Bigscreen: This social VR app is built on the power of . . . well, a big screen. Instead of sitting around a campfire, invite other users to play games or watch movies sitting around a giant version of your computer monitor. “We aren’t building the ‘metaverse’ and our goal is not to build a social network,” the company’s founder wrote in a post on the company’s blog. “Instead, we aim to build a platform that enables people to use existing content, apps, and games in VR, and to socialize and hangout in a shared virtual space with their friends and co-workers.”
High Fidelity: If the name Philip Rosedale sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably spent some time in Second Life. Rosedale’s company, Linden Lab, founded the much-ballyhooed online world in 2003; Rosedale left the company in 2009 and founded High Fidelity a few years later. It’s one of a few social VR platforms that aims to become as big as the internet itself, inviting users to create VR worlds as sprawling and detailed as those they made in Second Life. High Fidelity is still in “beta,” meaning it hasn’t been officially released, but it’s notable for allowing user avatars with real-time facial expressions and gaze-tracking—functions that aren’t yet available with a headset, but ones that users can enable with extra sensors. In other words, High Fidelity is an alpha nerd’s paradise, but maybe a little daunting for everyday users.
Rec Room: One of the most popular social VR platforms at the moment, Rec Room is built around the idea of group games and activities. It has a cartoonish aesthetic but also an immediate and palpable sense of humor: people high-fiving creates a cloud of confetti, and if you want to join a party with someone, you simply fist-bump. We’ll spend much more time in Rec Room in a couple of chapters.
Sansar: The company that Philip Rosedale left, Linden Labs, still runs Second Life—but it also now has Sansar, a VR equivalent that’s built from the ground up. Much like High Fidelity, it allows users to design and create stunning worlds via a sophisticated game engine and envisions being as expansive as the internet itself. Also much like High Fidelity, though, it’s still in its early stages.
VRChat: Despite a somewhat steep learning curve, VRChat has a robust user community, many of whom design avatars that feel like a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen: a walking Intel microchip, well-known video game characters, Iron Man, even Jared Leto as the Joker from Suicide Squad. It’s aggressively silly, and has become hugely popular in recent months, but is less structured than a platform like Altspace or Rec Room.
vTime: Another early entrant in the social VR world, “sociable network” vTime focuses strictly on conversation: you design an avatar and then meet up with other users in environments that range from bucolic (a river in a mountain valley) to fantastic (perched atop the international space station) to pedestrian (a conference table in a high-rise office—yes, you can have a work meeting in there). This is the rare social VR app that works on just about every VR headset there is, even cheapies like a Google Cardboard.
TheWaveVR: Part social VR, part music festival on demand, TheWaveVR swaps out activities for virtual concerts—putting on shows in environments called “waves,” where users can congregate to listen, dance, or just gawk at the often psychedelic visuals.
There’s one social VR platform that I left off this list, though. It’s a biggie—in fact, it’s probably the first thing you think of when someone says the word “social.” It’s Facebook. And as it turns out, Facebook is thinking about VR and social media in a much different way than any of these other companies are. Its approach, and what it means for VR and relationships, is best reserved for another chapter. So let’s head there now.