busybee fluffy rambles

Hey y'all, since I have the album coming out on Monday, I figure Sunday night would be a good time to actually try out Bandcamp’s “listening party” biz. It’s Sunday, March 31 at 5:30 PM PDT (GMT-0700).

Also I’ll be attending a music listening party on VRChat tomorrow night (March 30) at 6:30 PM PDT (GMT-0700) and hopefully my album will be one of the things that gets played there too! The easiest way to join that would be to send me an invite request; here’s my VRChat profile if we aren’t friends already. (Unfortunately searching for my username from within VRChat is pretty difficult but you could try pasting this: fluffy — note the funky unicode!)

So whatever happened to my VRChat avatar project?

Well, it went really well, so well that I decided to make it a purchasable base model. You can get it for as low as $25 (with a suggested minimum of $30). It also comes with extensive documentation about how to add more materials and I feel like my setup for material swapping is really well-designed and makes things much easier than I’ve seen on other avatars. So it’s probably worth buying just for that alone!

At some point I’ll probably start putting some VRChat documentation onto this site (including the material-swap guide and an explanation of how I set my system up since it’s pretty easy to apply to other avatars and makes life much, much easier). But I kind of want to do some site layout refreshing first. And I need to figure out which section of the site is best suited for it. So, quick poll, what makes the most sense?

Back when the VRChat debacle took place, I’d rambled quite a lot about the idea of a standards-based truly-distributed VR system. I probably mentioned how back in the day I was designing something like that, and was intending to use XMPP as the actual transport mechanism; in my more recent reevaluation of the idea I was thinking that using WebRTC to stream the actual realtime data (voice, character animation, etc.) would be the way forward.

Well, the Matrix folks just announced Third Room, which is the same basic concept, running on Matrix and WebRTC! They’ve also made a bunch of other great technology choices along the way.

This is pretty exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. At least from a 20,000-foot view it hits all of the right notes for me. For example, using glTF for all object interchange, focusing on in-world editing, and allowing for (apparently optional) world persistence.

Hopefully this can disrupt the stranglehold VRChat has on social VR and will also be a fun, compelling experience in its own right.