VRChat Releases Early Access Build
Hey there! First an introduction and some important information…
Since its inception almost three years ago, VRChat (http://www.vrchat.com) has transformed from a passion project to a full Social VR experience. Early this year we began to grow our team and we’ve been working extremely hard toward a version that will be launching soon on Viveport, Steam & Oculus stores.
As our community is the foundation of who we are, we decided to release an “Early Access Build” to that group for testing and feedback. That’s gone well and we now want to go a little wider which is one of the reasons we’re posting this information. We’d also like to provide more context and information associated with this release.
This version is meant to be enjoyed “as is”. It’s not finished but we’d like early feedback from users and our community to improve it before we get it up to the stores. It is still missing some features we’re working hard towards and has some known bugs or issues, but that’s part of pulling back the curtain before being done.
That said we’ve worked really hard on VRChat and we hope you will all enjoy this early look. All of us at VRChat are not only developers but we enjoy hanging out there. We want to make it as fun for us as it is for you guys to hang out there, make new friends, create new content, go to events and generally have a good time.
IMPORTANT: We are currently working on moderation tools. As such our community has always been very welcoming and helpful. We’d like to keep it that way. We would please ask that while we get these tools in place and as part of accepting to use this early test version you moderate yourself. Be polite to people, do not upload or discuss NSFW or abusive content or avatars in public rooms like the Hub or any of our featured worlds, give people personal space, be aware of your mic levels and mute yourself if you are in a noisy environment IRL, etc. In general if you think you are doing something questionable maybe don’t or ask us first. Just be decent human beings and everything will be good. If we get complaints of users causing problems they may be warned or even banned.
Our team is often wandering the world to do tests and help users. Please respect them if they are busy working (they may not be responding and standing still in a room) or if they ask you to do something like exit the world for a short time. We often need to do these things to run tests or reset worlds.
Thank you end enjoy!
P.S. Oculus Touch support coming soon ~
- The VRChat Team.
Ok, let’s get onto the fun stuff!
Most of the systems in VRChat have been completely revamped, so let’s do a quick breakdown of what’s been added:
Vive tutorial: When launching into VRChat for the first time, you will be brought into our tutorial room, which will introduce you to our holoport locomotion, object interaction, and more through a series of entertaining minigames. Gamepad support for the tutorial is currently being worked on. While we choose holoport locomotion and comfort turning for new users if you feel you can handle first person and smooth rotation these can be changed in the settings menu. Choose “Classic” for locomotion and uncheck “comfort turning”. If you get ill simply switch back or go back to the tutorial again and we will automatically set it for you there.
Avatars: Full IK is in. This means you now have a full range of motion possible with your avatar in VRChat. Realize your dreams of starting up a squatting class or duck and weave in Battle Discs. Your height is automatically calibrated during the tutorial but you can also change in in the settings menu. Do so to get your feet flat on the floor. Stand in front of a mirror, like the one in the hub to help you assess this.
Hands & Gestures: Hands are fully articulated allowing users to grasp, gesture and express themselves in ways they never have before. For example, lightly holding your finger over the Vive trackpad now displays 5 different gestures, including the ever-important rock on gesture! The grip button adds an extra gesture which extends the palm some more. The trigger grasps in an analog fashion. Moving or grasping resets the hand(s) to a default state. There are other things we are experimenting with concerning the hands that we’d like to share soon.
Mouth & Audio: Avatars now have the ability to have full visemes meaning audio from your mic is processed and mapped to realistic mouth movements. Think of this like a more believable lip sync. When you talk, the different sounds you make will be reflected believably on your avatar’s mouth. Different sounds will create different shapes on the mouth, morphing your mouth as you talk.Many of our built in avatars feature this tech. If you’d like to add it we’ll be providing a template and pipeline soon on how to go about that.
Eye Tracking & Blinking: Never feel neglected again, as select avatar’s eyes will follow you wherever you are, and now blink.
The Hub: The official hub world is in! Every time you enter VRChat, you will be brought to the hub. It is the place where people meet and move on to discover and enjoy content. Included in the hub is a mirror room, objects to mess around with, and most importantly portals. These are the primary method of transportation through the hundreds of user-created worlds in VRChat. The Hub is still incomplete and in coming days and releases more features will be added to help users get information on upcoming events, featured content, important information and more. We would please ask you be courteous in the Hub and not drop too many portals or portals to untested or broken content. Please instead use the World Menu system and invite people to your untested worlds.
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New Menus: The menu system has been completely revamped. When pressing either of the menu buttons on the Vive controllers, you will bring up a quick menu where you can do things such as mic mute, access worlds, and change avatars on the fly. The core main menu is where you can see more details on each category. Holding the trigger down you can grab menu lists to slide them left or right or up and down. Some categories can also be expanded out by clicking on the little red arrow next to the category.
Emotes & Emoji: A total of 24 emotes (animations) and emoji (hearts, thumbs up, etc.) are available to express yourself whether you are out and about or sitting around the campfire with friends. Give them a go!
Social: Add to your friends list and instantly join your friend in VRChat, no matter where they are.
YouTube Wall: Hang out together in Cinema YouTube and other rooms that use our new YouTube Wall prefab. With this anyone can pull up and play videos from YouTube in sync with their friends.
3d Spatialized Audio: Now you will be able to hear others in believable spatialized audio. Hear exactly where people are talking. It’s now possible to have multiple conversations going on at the same time in a very small space.
Featured Worlds: It’s now easier than ever to discover new worlds in VRChat. Here’s a list of all featured worlds with direct portals from the hub. You can also explore using the worlds tab in the main menu.
- Space Station
- Forest Campsite
- Battle Discs
- Rock N Bowl
- Tutorial
- Windlands
- Cinema YouTube
- Live Bar
- Moonbase
- Titanic
- Gunters Universe : Our weekly VR Talk show (Join us every Tuesday night at 7pm PST)
- Enter the VRPill
- SDK Trigger Examples (for those using the SDK that want to see how they work)
- SDK Examples is also a category in the worlds menu to help those working with the SDK
- Presentation Room ft. 3D Markers (BETA)
- Sculpting Studio (BETA)
EVENTS: Please join us at 3PM PST on Sundays for our community meetup. Here you can meet the team and community, check out new User Created Content, new featured worlds, new avatars and feature updates. You can also join us every Tuesday at 7PM PST for Gunter’s Universe a long running VR talk show hosted by our very own Gunter S. Thompson. We’ll have more events coming soon. We’ll also be updating the hub in the near future to have this information.
SDK: You can create and upload your own worlds and avatars! That’s actually the heart of VRChat. More info on that here: http://vrchat.net/sdk
CURRENT RELEASE NOTES: http://vrchat.net/release
CREATED WITH UNITY 5 https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases/5.3.4p1
JOIN US ON SLACK! : https://vrchat.typeform.com/to/eLtRDY
COMING SOON! Stay tuned, as we are busy working on a series of updates that add cooler features in the coming weeks and months. For those using a controller, Xbox controller works with touch support on the way. The tutorial for those control schemes is coming soon.
You can download the Early Access at http://www.vrchat.com. Also, we will have a new point release coming out very soon which will contain some updates and fixes to the version released on Dec 2nd, 2016
Please also check our website for more information and our latest release notes.
VRChat
