VRChat Is Seven Years Old!

VRChat sent out official word via their Twitter account: the social VR platform is now 7 years old!

The company also shared the following picture of an early in-world weekly meetup. The limited selection of starter avatars reminds me strongly of the early days of Sansar back in 2017, where everybody looked alike!

I was not around when VRChat launched in January of 2014, but I first wrote about the platform on this blog on December 26th, 2017, mentioning how PewDiePie and other YouTube influencers helped promote VRChat, leading to a surge in new users which the company was somewhat unprepared for at that time (I remember that they had to pull a few all-nighters at Christmastime to handle the unexpected server loads!).

VRChat was among the very first social VR platforms I explored using my then-new Oculus Rift VR headset. In fact, my first visits to VRChat took place in February 2017, well before I launched this blog!

The central campfire of VRChat (photo taken in February 2017)

I do remember visiting and reporting on one of GM3’s first art exhibits in VRChat during the summer of 2017 on the now-disbanded Google+ social network (which means I unfortunately cannot link to it here, although I still have a set of photographs I took of the opening using VRChat’s 360-degree camera).

GM3 (a.k.a. artist Godfrey Meyer III) at the opening of his first art gallery in VRChat (2017)

Happy 7th birthday to VRChat! Here’s hoping that the next seven years will be as fun and eventful as the first seven!