On Wednesday evening, I joined the XR Social Club in their weekly explorations of VRChat, and our hosts took us on a tour of three of the wonderful worlds created by a Japanese user known as ケセドCHESED. These are, without exception, beautifully crafted worlds, many featuring fireworks, shooting stars, or even aurora borealis!
The first, called simply CHESED’s Cave, is a cozy bar with a hot tub, and several outlooks over a landscape with fireworks! The particle effects are particularly well done, and everybody in our tour group marveled at the work on display. This is somebody who has some serious skills in world-building! It’s got all the hallmarks of a comfortable gathering spot, even though it is in a cave.
A look at the bar in CHESED’s Cave
The second world was the Sakura Ryokan, a wonderfully detailed Japanese inn with a communal bathing area, as well as a lovely spa carved into the rock behind it, where you can relax in the water, under a night sky filled with stunning fireworks.
The communal baths at CHESED’s Sakura Ryokan
We wrapped up our tour at CHESED’s Sea of Clouds, a cozy home built into the side of a cliff, where you can watch the fireworks amid the gently moving clouds:
Watching the fireworks at CHESED’s Sea of Clouds
Afterwards, entranced by the detail and beauty of these worlds, I went on a solo exploration of several other of ケセドCHESED’s worlds, including CHESED’s Tea Party, where you traverse a long pathway of vines, in order to reach an oversize, food-laden table! Flocks of seagulls fly under a rainbow to complete the serene scene.
CHESED’s Tea Party
Carlos Austin, our videographer, shot the following livestream of our adventures yesterday, which you might be interested in:
To see a list of all ケセドCHESED’s worlds, just visit his/her profile, and click on the plus sign next to Worlds to see all the worlds he/she has created. Also, almost all of these worlds are tagged “chesed”, to make them easier to find.
Enjoy! Many thanks to VR_Christine of the XR Social Club in VRChat for introducing me to these fantastic worlds!
UPDATE 12:36 p.m.: Carlos was kind enough to share a group photo he took at Sakura Ryokan (VR_Christine, who discovered all these worlds, is the big hot dog at the centre).
The XR Social Club meets Wednesday evenings at 6:00 p.m. PST/8:00 p.m. CST/9:00 p.m. EST in a private instance of their club. New members are always welcome! The best way to join is to friend a current member of the club (such as me, my username is ryanschultz) and request an invitation near the start time. See you there!
The good news is that have attached my Vive Facial Tracker to my Valve Index VR headset, set it up, and got it working! The bracket I ordered arrived last week via FedEx from Japan (here’s the page I ordered from, although by now you I suspect you should be able to find several other models of brackets via the internet!), and last night I put it all together. Here’s what it looks like:
The bad news? Well, it started even before I installed the Vive Facial Tracker, when I took my weeklong course in content creation in NeosVR, taught by sirkitree and Medra (highly recommended, by the way). I kept crashing out of the classroom, and Medra finally set up a private tutorial session with me in my home world, which worked fine.
But, ever since I set up the facial tracker, I have been unable to stay in NeosVR for longer than ten minutes before crashing out! It would appear that I am bumping up against the limits of the CPU and GPU on my high-end gaming computer, which I bought four years ago.
I will be reaching out to NeosVR for support, and perhaps we can troubleshoot the issue. I did turn my refresh rate down from 120Hz to 90Hz, which is supposed to help with any GPU strain, but I am still stuttering and crashing. Unfortunately, I was thus far been unable to take pictures or video of my avatar in a mirror in NeosVR, but if I succeed, I will share them here with an update to this blogpost!
It is disappointing, but frankly I knew that at some point, for some app, I would reach the upper limits of what my PC is capable. So perhaps it’s time for Ryan to start shopping for a new computer (I already have the store picked out, the same place I bought this computer, which has a stellar reputation for both sales and support). In the meantime, I will keep testing.
Keep your fingers crossed and wish me luck!
UPDATE April 22nd, 2021: It would appear that, alas, the CPU on the computer I bought four years ago is the bottleneck here. Apparently, both Neos and the Vive Facial Tracker are very CPU intensive, and even though I have a good graphics card (a NVIDIA GeForce GTX1080), I will probably have to either upgrade my CPU and add more memory, or simply trade up to a newer, faster, more powerful computer.
I’d like to thank the staff at NeosVR (especially Shift, their Quality Control Lead), and the ever-helpful community on the Neos Discord server for all their assistance in troubleshooting. Thanks, guys! For now, I will be packing my Vive Facial Tracker and its Japanese bracket (which is, thankfully, detachable) and stowing it away until I can upgrade my PC. *sigh*
I have a confession to make: I have never smoked marijuana. (And no, I haven’t been tempted since my country, Canada, legalized cannabis three years ago.) When it comes to drugs, I am an utter square, a clueless noob, a babe in the woods. Instead of associating with the druggies in high school, I hung out with the kids you used to hang out in the library (which might explain why I became a librarian, come to think of it).
In fact (aside from my prescription medications (which I take for a list of ailments that only seems to grow longer the older I get), the only recreational drugs I have ever (ab)used are caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco (and the latter consisted of a mere handful of cigarettes smoked during my gay bar days, in a failed effort to look cool).
So I am probably the least likely person to write up a blogpost examining drug culture in social VR and virtual worlds. However, since I am (at least, by my own account) somewhat of an expert on social VR and virtual worlds, I thought it would be interesting to explore and examine those places in the metaverse which celebrate getting high. Why not?
So fasten your seatbelts, and let’s take off! 😉
Second Life
A natural starting point for our explorations is the venerable virtual world of Second Life, where there are no shortage of places featuring drugs (and which, no doubt, people have visited while high).
A quick search on “420” under Places in the Search menu pulled up Commune Utopia, a bohemian, hippie commune since 2011. There were only a few people hanging around, dancing to the music and just chilling out:
Commune Utopia in Second Life
A similar, laid-back vibe pervades the Free Spirit Farms hippie and bohemian community, The notecard you receive upon arrival states:
The idea behind Free Spirit Farms, is to surround ourselves with like minded people who consider themselves, or are free spirited, bohemian, modern day hippies.
Cool, man. However, it would appear that there were only a grand total of three avatars on the entire sim—hardly a Woodstock in the making!
All alone at the spawn point of Free Spirit Farms
One nice thing about Free Spirit Farms is that (if you join the Free Spirit Farms group for free), you can set this place to be your home location in Second Life, unpack boxes, etc.
A keyword search on “drugs” under Places threw up the usual inner-city crime roleplay sims, plus the aptly named Little Brown Mushroom, an absolutely deserted nightclub with a trippy 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s music list and a suitably druggy theme.
A Very Strange Tip Acid Experience Amusement Park was likewise deserted. If there were avatars celebrating 4/20 in Second Life, I completely failed to find them!
So I turned to what I considered my most likely spot to find drug culture in the metaverse:
VRChat
Once again doing keyword searches on “420” and “trip” under the Places menu brought up a few interesting worlds. “Drug” and “drugs” pulled up absolutely zero worlds (which led me to think that perhaps VRChat was censoring the terms). However, a search for “420” pulled up the promising-sounding “420 Forest”.
The 420 forest was nice enough, a winding path through a coniferous forest, lit by green fireflies, leading to a cozy central campfire, but like the places I investigated in SL, it too was absolutely and utterly deserted:
The 420 Forest World was deserted
I did find the Create a Trip world, one of many wonderful worlds created by TheArchitect. Create a Trip was certainly trippy in a kaleidoscopesque sort of way (but you’ll need to bring your own music, and your own drugs for that matter):
I was seriously striking out here, people. It occurred to me that perhaps, square that I am, I simply did not know the right people who could direct me to the right places? It also occurred to me that, on this high holiday of April 20th (see what I did there?), perhaps most aficionados of drug culture would be toking out in real life, instead of messing around in the metaverse?!??
Undaunted, I determined to persevere, and I moved on to… where? Where could I go next? I certainly wasn’t going to find any drug culture in Rec Room. AltspaceVR? Sansar? It would be next to impossible to find a 420 world in Sansar, even if one existed. So I decided to put my Valve Index headset back on my noggin, and headed into AltspaceVR. Perhaps the home of the BRCvr virtual Burning Man festival might provide some 420 content?
AltspaceVR
Success! SUCCESS!!! I finally encountered a group of 420 people in the BRCvr world, just in the final moments before they were shutting down for the day, and indeed shutting down the virtual playa in BRCvr completely, in order to build the next virtual Burning Man world for 2021! Here are a few snapshots I took using the in-world camera:
So, as you can see, there were indeed some people celebrating 420 in social VR!
What 420/drug culture worlds have you experienced in social VR and virtual worlds? I’m quite sure I missed more than a few worlds that were designed to feel like a trip, but as I said up top, I am not an expert. Anybody have any drug-themed metaverse locations for me to explore? Feel free to leave a comment below, thanks!
UPDATE 9:07 p.m.: Well, this evening I discovered that WOMBO had uploaded a whole whack of new song clips, just to mark 4/20, so I plugged a selfie of my main male Second Life avatar, Heath Homewood, into the app, and, well…I got to see what Heath would look like, stoned! (More info on WOMBO here.)
I am way, waaay too easily amused, folks.
UPDATE April 21st, 2021: I have been informed that NeosVR does have some drug-related content:
Ahh, I see you didn’t find our drug simulators. Neos has various types of object which simulate intoxicants. There’s also a shisha setup and a vape inside Neos Essentials.
And then I had to Google “shisha” to find out what that referred to (seriously, I didn’t know; it’s another word for a hookah). Apparently, NeosVR also has a series of colourblind vapes, which I assume would simulate various forms of colour blindness. Interesting!
What do you do with a $69 million artwork that doesn’t physically exist?
That’s the question faced by the Singapore-based investor calling himself Metakovan, who made headlines last month when he bought the digital artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by the American artist Beeple at Christie’s.
The work is a non-fungible token (NFT) – a new type of virtual asset that has its ownership status and authenticity verified by blockchain. NFTs have exploded in popularity in 2021, with prices skyrocketing.
Metakovan, real name Vignesh Sundaresan, plans to put the artwork on display in four virtual world environments. He is working with architects to design gallery complexes that the public can enter via web browsers or virtual reality technology.
It is clear to anybody that is paying attention that the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) boom is sparking intense interest and resulting speculation in the blockchain-based virtual worlds where such NFTs can be displayed: Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Somnium Space (all already launched and seeing more and more business) and The Sandbox (which launched its first phase on March 31st, 2021). It seems like every second room on the hot new drop-in social audio app Clubhouse is about NFTs and how to get into the market.
Market speculation in the first three blockchain-based virtual worlds has only intensified recently, with previously unheard-of trading volumes and rapidly escalating prices as bidding wars break out over virtual properties. Here is a graphic linked to from the aforementioned Reuters article, showing just how suddenly land values have jumped in Decentraland (and I’m quite sure that early investors are rubbing their hands with glee!):
And some big-name companies are being attracted to the blockchain-based virtual world marketplace (quotes are from the Reuters article up top):
In what will be one of the biggest names to join the party, videogame maker Atari told Reuters it planned to launch its own blockchain-based virtual world and would soon announce details.
Online environments are going to be “very very big”, regardless of fluctuations in the price of bitcoin, said Frederic Chesnais, head of Atari’s blockchain division and the company’s former CEO. NFT real estate could one day fetch millions of dollars, he added.
…
Atari, ahead of its plans to open its own blockchain-based world, has licensed a retro arcade within Decentraland and is due to open a casino.
Among the people interviewed for the Reuters article was the creator of Cryptovoxels, Ben Nolan, who expresses caution in the current feverish NFT market:
“I expect that there’ll be a crypto winter in the next couple of months, the whole NFT boom will explode and then all the value will absolutely collapse,” said Ben Nolan, founder of the virtual world Cryptovoxels.
“Doing NFTs as an investment or as a way to make money is really ill-advised.”
However he does see a future for virtual worlds and NFTs.
“Do I think most people will use virtual worlds? Probably not, but I think a lot of people will and I think NFTs are a big part of that growth,” he said.
“Actually walking around with another person in a virtual space and looking at art together is a really nice way to spend time,” he added.
We can expect that more companies will enter the blockchain-based virtual worlds marketplace, attracted by the possibility of making profits from virtual real estate—whether that real estate is used for galleries to show NFTs or not.
Interesting times! I choose to remain safely outside the fray, peering in occasionally to write the odd blogpost—emphasis on odd 😉 . The following are links to all my previous blogposts written about four of the currently available (or soon-to-be-available) platforms:
Stay tuned for further dispatches from the blockchain-based virtual worlds and social VR platforms! (Yes, both Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space support VR.)
And I’d love to hear from you: Do you hold land on these four platforms? Do you think we are in a financial bubble? Feel free to sound off in the comment section!
