My year in VR or how I discovered the Cinematic Metaverse
It was Black Friday 2021 when I bought my Meta Quest 2 and started my journey into the realms of VR. After playing Beat Saber and SuperHot two games that work incredibly well in VR, I stumbled upon the first social VR app called AltspaceVR and was fascinated by the community of world builders, 3D-artists, programmers, educators, event organizers and show hosts that are already working on the thing that will become our Metaverse. AltspaceVR was well suited for beginners, but sadly Microsoft is going to shut it down in favor of focusing on its generative AI strategy.
First Steps into the Metaverse
I also realized that the Metaverse will mostly be about entertainment (not counting gaming here). You can find movie theaters that show the latest Marvel movies in 3D and you can watch them together with your friends. Many people used Altspace to host shows that you would expect to run on TV: The quiz show It’s Shark Time by Michael Forest ran nearly 1000 times since 2019, the rapper Fokis performed a roof-top concert and Reggie Watts a live comedy show for over 4000 guests back in 2016.
Together with a couple of colleagues from ProSiebenSat.1 we arranged some business meetings with Horizon Workroom and later AltspaceVR. But one of the first remarks raised by my colleagues were complaints about missing arms and legs — an issue recently addressed by Meta and when you watch videos on YouTube that are shot in Altspace you instantly recognize that the amputated limbs are a severe shortcoming for a TV broadcaster like us. Everything we can’t convert to video content is almost worthless for us ;) So I turned my attention to the other big social VR platform: VRChat, which supports arms and legs, even with motion capturing for legs if you’re willing to spend another $1000 on extra hardware.
The VRChat Creator Community
YouTubers actually love VRChat! They found 1000 different ways to use VRChat as a tool for video creation. Be it playing jokes in VR as an avatar on Omegle like TFMJonny, be it performing break dance like NoLogicDavid or even belly dance in VR perfectly performed by Dust Bunny. The VR-dancers use additional tracking devices on their feet, hip, chest and elbows to fully track the movements of all the body parts. VRChat also allows it to fully customize your avatar with professional 3D editors and add animations and particle effects. A sequined dress or a flowing gown is possible — if you know a talented avatar designer. Phia the host of The Virtual Reality Show wears an amazing evening gown to present her monthly shows. The camera system of VRChat allows you to do drone shots, adjust the depth of field and add bokeh to your VR video footage. This makes VRChat a perfect tool to turn a show event in VR into entertaining video content.
This fact was early discovered by Joe Hunting when he started to film documentaries about several communities in VRChat. The most remarkable on YouTube is maybe Club Zodiac a short documentary about a pole dance community in VRChat. His masterpiece is surly We met in Virtual Reality a 91-minute-long documentary that was entirely shot in VRChat. It features a deaf-mute community which teaches sign language in VR and Dust Bunny who is running a Dance Academy in VR. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2021 and is now aired on HBO. Several film makers followed his example and are working on music videos like BlueSkyWhale, short films like Legend50210s S.Y.N.C. and long films like Metacosm Studios Into the Metaverse.
You don’t have to put your VR-goggles away if you want to watch all these creations. There are plenty of film festivals where the new directors can show their film projects to a wider audience in a virtual movie theatre. The award ceremonies take place in impressive marble buildings like the Raindance Embassy, the virtual Venice of the Venice Immersive or a medieval village of the VRCon Film Festival.
By the way, watching movies together with your friends is a big thing too. bigscreen is a platform just dedicated to this use case. You can sit together with your best friend’s avatar on a virtual plush couch and watch your favorite movie — even in 3D. One of the most visited world on VRChat is LS Media with a library of 40.000 movies including Marvel Studios’ Dr. Strange and Movie & Chill which shows Obi-Wan Kenobi by Disney and much more.
It’s the economy, stupid
It is a lot of effort to build all these virtual worlds and avatars, to organize and host the virtual events and you may ask: Who is paying for all the creative work? It is a remarkable fact that VRChat currently doesn’t offer any kind of in-game monetization. This is in strong contrast to all other so called Metaverse platforms like Decentraland or Sandbox where everything is built around crypto currency on the blockchain. The VRChat management even published a blog post denying any future plans to integrate blockchains or NFTs on their platform. Of course there is an economy in the VRChat community but it’s not in-game, it moved to e-commerce platforms like Booth or Gumroad where you can buy avatar files or assets for your virtual world. You can also donate on the membership platforms Patreon or Ko-fi to support your favorite creator. And of course, the YouTubers — now called vTubers — monetize on the big video platforms. It would seem like a miracle if VRChat didn’t try to pull some of the value chain into the platform at some point in the future.
Virtual Production and the Cinematic Metaverse
In terms of visual quality VRChat can’t compete with virtual production tools used by the film industry. This niche has been occupied by Unreal Engine together with expensive motion capture technology. An impressive example of the capabilities of Unreal is the virtual character Blu from Xanadu which is motion captured with a suit form Xsens and an iPhone 12 for facial tracking. The rendering is done in real time by Unreal Engine. Now imagine blending this technology with a social VR platform like VRChat. Face and eye tracking is now integrated in professional VR headsets Meta Quest Pro and Pico 4 Enterprise and VRChat is constantly improving their avatar technology adding 10-point tracking, inverse kinematics for arm, leg and hair movement and avatar dynamics for interactions between avatars. Even Sony entered the game by announcing affordable motion capturing for VRChat and the Meta Quest. To me, it looks like it’s only a matter of time before we have a platform to create videos that appeal to people who don’t own a VR headset and aren’t part of the VR creator community. This would be the dawn of the Cinematic Metaverse.
What’s in for ProSiebenSat.1
In 2022 we did our first steps into the Metaverse and set up a virtual TV studio on VRChat for our daily TV series Galileo. Our reporter Claire Oelkers slipped into an avatar dressed like her real-life alter ego and she hosted parts of the show from within the virtual studio. We also hosted a virtual event in our new studio together with the German VRChat community and invited TFMJonny and Dust Bunny to perform and on our roof-top stage and give us an interview in our TV studio.
In 2023 we are looking forward to bring bigger show events into Metaverse and discussing different concepts with our TV producers. Even if the resulting video material is not usable for a prime-time TV show, it might be used for one of our channels on YouTube or for a virtual after show. It’s now the time to start experimenting with the Metaverse: So, let’s see what 2023 brings us and what we have achieved at the end of next year.
