Safe Spaces in Virtual Reality
Virtual reality has allowed for a truly unique form of community to form, combining the qualities of in-person interaction with the ‘borderless’ interconnectedness of online relationships.
It’s good weather, you and your friend’s enjoying each other’s company in an open cozy space. A tea house. Talking and laughing fills the room, someone is peaking out their microphone. Anime characters, bipedal bananas, a place where copyright law seemingly has yet to reach. It’s the wild west of virtual reality, allowing people to be together even when they’re hours or countries apart.
Welcome to VRChat.
Pandemic lockdowns, travel restrictions, the necessities during this global pandemic. They are isolating, separating individuals from their peers. But for those with virtual reality headsets or even just a (powerful enough) desktop computer, VRChat has offered a virtual space to enjoy the company of others online. VRChat is a social platform in the vein of Second Life, but with the increased immersion of being able to be in the space with others physically.
…like a party trick, where I can pick up my actual gaiwan outside of VR, and hold it in the place where the gaiwan exists in the VR world, and it fits perfectly.
On Reddit they are brickpanzer, but for us, their name is Brick. A software developer who used their knowledge to create what they would consider their ‘happy place’ during a 15-month internship at SketchUp.
As a part of my internship in the early days I was required to spend a certain amount of my paid working time learning how to use the program. So the world, and 80% of the models in it, came as a result of me learning how to use the program I was simultaneously developing.
The idea for the world came to me when I considered what my “happy place” might look like if I could realise such a thing into existing. The project started out much larger, closer to being a full house with baths and gardens, but for the sake of time and trying to optimise the download size I settled on one room of this house, the most “happy,” and that was the tea room. So I sort of sliced the tea room off from where I imagined it connected to the rest of the house and made some adjustments to the design to make it a stand-alone tea house as opposed to just another room in a larger place.
Brick went on to create a happy place in a game they view as the “ultimate escape”.
Little personal details from my life act as these anchors to reality, pulling closer the gap between the tranquillity of the unreal architecture, and the familiarity of my real world, which allows me to further ground myself in my surroundings and by extension deepen the happiness and relaxation it brings me.
I took extra time to add in several details to the world that make it reflect my reality 1:1. One of these details is that all the teaware in the world is modelled after actual teaware I own, with exact accuracy in size and scale again thanks to SketchUp. There is this truly odd and heartening sensation that I can evoke almost like a party trick, where I can pick up my actual gaiwan outside of VR, and hold it in the place where the gaiwan exists in the VR world, and it fits perfectly. I can lift the goggles off and on my head, checking the difference between the two, and the dimensions are exact. The same is true for a number of the objects in the world. Another, however, is that several of the textures in the world I got by taking pictures of the teaware I own. The easiest example here is the teaware boxes guests can find littered on the shelves. Not only are these entirely dimensionally accurate, but the texture of their stickers and materials were taken by my phone.
I think for me, there are two categories that the details fit in to. One is the architecture of serenity of the place — Every corner, every light fixture, and every window I designed with the intent to soothe. Light in particular was a huge component in this. As a few examples of detail, there are the spotlights in the back wall planter. These use a soft yellow light that streaks up the wall, scattered by the geometry of the decorative trusses; this backlights and fills the plants with a glow akin to a sunset, bringing out the gentle greens of the flora. These lights also highlight a part of the building that [is] softly cut off from the space by the full-depth shelves, filling what would otherwise be a dark spot in the building with a very different colour of light which ends up giving the items on the shelf a unique presentation. To contrast, there are the spotlights that run between the support beams on the roof, which are much brighter and cooler in colour. This colour instead creates a sense of space, and openness, by evoking a colour similar to the open sky. By being more forward as well, it serves to highlight the main space, where the planter lights serve to understate, using these lights to denote primary and secondary spaces in the building.
Of course, more importantly than either of these is the consideration I put into the use of sunlight in the space. Part of what creates the sense of serenity in the building is its contentedness with the nature outside. Guests will notice that only one wall visibly connects to the roof, and all the others leave a small gap between the roof and top of the wall where air can move freely, and beyond this the primary wall opens out onto a patio, and lets in the most light of the entire building, making it the highlight wall. All of this was done to evoke the kind of feeling you get when sitting under a tree in a storm; there is an intimate connection with nature, yet still safety from the elements. I’ve always felt that there was no more relaxing experience than being inside during a severe storm, especially with a window open to watch the elements. The building intends to evoke the same feeling, and a big component of how it does this is in how it captures and plays with the sunlight. As I already mentioned, the primary wall is open fully to the air, and catches an early dusk sunlight. This bathes the entire front half of the interior in warm natural light that can then bounce around the space — letting nature in, but keeping it at an arms reach, as it can be escaped by retreating into the building. The next area which I played with sunlight were the reading benches along the other windowed wall of the structure. These little nooks “catch” the rest of the light into these small little boxes, allowing you to almost capture the feeling of sitting in sunlight itself. Each one of these little nooks tells its own story with each capturing the light in subtly different ways, and relating to the main space slightly different. This ended up creating this very comforting experience of using these nooks, as they feel isolated from the rest of the space while still able to passively observe, and on the other side providing a window into the sweeping vistas of nature outside. My personal favourite is the second window from the back. It’s donned with only pillows, and it catches the most direct light. Whenever I need to simply escape, I simply come to this window and bask for awhile.
[VRChat] is the sort of final evolution of the “be anyone, do anything” game loop that’s been steadily evolving from the MMORPG roleplay scene, up to Second Life, and now VRC. I got my VR headset in October of 2020, and so for me VRC was immediately that bandaid of social interaction that I’d been in desperate need of since the start of the pandemic. Beyond that there is no small measure of mental and emotional escapism that the game can bring, by being able to represent yourself in any form you wish, at levels of immersion that no other medium can touch. When I can use full-body tracking to look in a mirror and see a reflection I don’t loath.
Brick’s Mountain Teahouse hasn’t just been experienced by themselves though, it’s a place anyone can visit. Through this attention, however, Brick found the nature of the environment as a safe space threatened through this “bizarrely stressful” experience.
It was certainly interesting. While in the labs phase there was a small but steady trickle of players, usually in public lobbies hopping from labs to labs, so you’d get to have these fun conversations with people as they visited your world, and you’d get to feel a bit royal as the world’s maker just suddenly appearing in their midst. After labs, it was pretty shocking how much its visitation exploded. It felt almost like an out of body experience to see streamers wandering around and looking at the little details I spent hours modelling and texturing.
Though as with all but ~0.1% of VRChat maps the popularity lasted about a week at best before everyone moves on to the next new map, or returns to their old haunts like Black Cat or Drinking Night. Anymore the map averages 0 users at any given time unless I’ve just come online, given that its my home world. Every once in a blue moon you’ll see an instance with 10 or so people on in private, but seeing anyone in a public instance of it is a unicorn sighting and it’ll usually just be one passing visitor, world hopping. Though if I’m honest, I almost prefer it that way. I made the world as a happy place for me, and as exhilarating as the first week was — seeing so many people enjoy something you toiled relentlessly on — the attention was actually bizarrely stressful. In fact for a while after I finished and published the map I actually fell into a bit of a depressed episode. By the end of the project I had nearly become sick of it, and a lot of small errors I let go just for the sake of being done with it after so many hours of work. It was “good enough” and I was no less proud, but at least for me every little issue drove me up the wall. As the famous saying goes, the first 75% of the work takes 25% of the time, and the last 25%, 75% of the time, and it was no different for this map. So there came a point where, no matter how much praise people gave me for the map, it never felt like enough for how much blood I spilled into it, and every nit-pick someone had — every detail they noticed that I intentionally skipped over — felt like a dagger. There came a point where I almost loathed to even look at the map. Hesitating when people asked if I could show it to them because it felt like an open wound. But after a number of months, well past the time when the dust settled on my tea house, it almost feels right that I’m the only person who visits it anymore.
I feel like I can actually enjoy it again, as if only with hindsight can I now actually appreciate the work I put into it. It feels much more personal now than it did, and the mistakes are far enough in the past they don’t ruin the little things I added that make it my happy place.
In our conversation over Reddit Brick said to me “the role of the artist I think is very unique in how much of your soul can be pulled from you and woven into your work, for better or worse.” The Mountain Teahouse encapsulates this very statement, a space for all to visit but one that very personally reflects the creator. In a time where we feel isolated, joining a world and having the opportunity to have fun with friends and strangers — or intimately reflect alone— is a powerful privilege that shouldn't be taken for granted.
