Stuff! And things!
Hello! It has been a hot minute! I should probably post things here!
Furality Umbra: a brief review
Furality is the largest virtual furry convention, which takes place annually in VRChat. This past year (Umbra) was also the most highly-attended furry convention of any kind ever, with a whopping 21,000 attendees!
I’m just a nobody when it comes to furry stuff, especially cons, but I figured I’d share some of my observations, good and bad, especially in comparison to the other two Furality events I attended (Luma Festival and Sylva).
February updates
Bigscreen Beyond day 2
I wasn’t planning on getting into VR tonight but I ended up doing it anyway.
The Bigscreen folks suggested washing the facial interface gasket with soapy water, and that seems to have fixed the skin irritation. So there must have just been some residue left over.
I also printed a Vive DAS adapter so now I have a much easier time putting the headset on and setting up the audio and so on. It ends up not sitting on my head quite right, though, and adjusting the fit to my eyes is a little more fiddly. Unfortunately the design of the BSB doesn’t make it easy to put on a top support strap (the DAS adapter has a little dealybop for the DAS’s top strap but I couldn’t get it to stay attached with double-sided tape and I’m not yet willing to use permanent adhesive) so my choices are either off-axis lenses or having it so tight it gives me a headache.
I also ended up removing the lens inserts for now, and I’ll wait for the QC-passing ones to arrive.
Everything is just so sharp now. I like it.
Bigscreen Beyond
My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.
SlimeVR
Today my SlimeVR trackers finally arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. I bought the 7+3 kit. I’ve got them set up pretty well, I think. Here’s some observations.
Random updates
Just a few random updates about the stuff going on right now.
The new Apple AR goggles
My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:
- Really cool tech
- Kind of a solution in search of a problem
- I look forward to seeing what people do with it
- I look forward to it becoming affordable and usable for a lot more than just running fancy versions of iOS apps
- I will be way more interested if they let you apply filters to the external screen; why show a video feed of your boring human eyes when you can be your fursona or a protogen?
Things, present and future
A real smorgasbord of things to ramble about/catch up on.
Lack of VRChat build progress
Recently a couple of folks have asked me if I’ve made any progress on my VRChat avatar, and no, I haven’t. There’s a bunch of reasons for that, but a big one is that I just don’t really feel like the amount of time/energy it’d take is worth it in the end.
In particular, VRChat’s avatar system requires a lot of fiddly work to go into it, and a lot of very hyper-domain-specific knowledge, because a lot of things in VRC are very shoddy hacks on top of the “expression” system which was clearly built for entirely different purposes than what it’s being used for.
The more I work on modifying the Winterpaw mouse for my needs, the more I learn about just how… weird VRC is, and given that the future of the platform itself is easy to doubt, I’d rather focus on building stuff that’s a bit more transferable between systems. So for now I’m just modifying the mouse.