Tag: Syrmor

A Quick Guide to the VRChat Communities on Discord, Twitch, YouTube, and Other Social Media (Plus a Couple of Directories of VRChat Maps/Worlds!)

After writing up my recent blogpost about the Second Life blogging and vlogging community, I decided to investigate what social media exists around another popular social VR platform/virtual world, VRChat, which I have been writing about for four years now on this blog.

Blogs

To my surprise, there’s very little in the way of blogging about VRChat; my Google searches consistently pulled up only two blogs which discuss VRChat regularly, my own blog, and Wagner James Au’s venerable blog New World Notes, which has branched out from its original coverage of Second Life to write about other virtual worlds (here’s a link to all of my VRChat posts, and a link to all of Wagner’s).

Discords

As for Discords, there are any number of popular Discord communities:

There are also the following Discord servers, which have a VRChat section or channel:

Directories of VRChat Worlds

As I have written about before, it can be difficult to find good directories of VRChat maps (i.e. worlds) to explore (other than the Worlds listing in the VRChat client itself).

There is a Japanese-language website called The World of VRChat, a website directory for VRChat worlds (if you turn on Google auto-translate in your Chrome web browser, it works well enough). I don’t know how up-to-date it is kept, however, and I have been unable to find any other website directories like this one.

The World of VRChat Website

Also, VRChat user CatRazor has created a very useful Discord server called VRChat Maps, where users can post their favourite maps to various channels. Check it out!

The VRChat Maps Discord server

If you know of any other VRChat map/world directories which exist outside the VRChat client, please drop a comment, thank you!

Of course, it was the Twitch and YouTube livestreamers who first brought attention to VRChat, so it only makes sense that the overwhelming majority of the social media out there about VRChat is on Twitch and YouTube.

Twitch

There’s a very active VRChat community on Twitch, with dozens of livestreamers. Your best bet is to go exploring, and see whose content appeals to you!

Just a small sample of the VRChat streamers on Twitch

YouTube

There are hundreds of people who regularly post videos about VRChat to YouTube. Feedspot maintains what it claims is an up-to-date list of the most popular VRChat YouTubers, but I have discovered that many of the people on this list haven’t posted VRChat videos to YouTube in many months, if not years (for example, Nagzz21 is listed, but he stopped posting videos about VRChat a year ago, citing the U.S. FTC’s COPPA legislation).

There are so many VRChat videos on YouTube that it is possible to create subcategories! For example, there are many YouTubers who focus on slice of life or “man in the street” interviews:

Here’s a couple of examples of YouTube videos from iListen and iamLucid, to give you an idea of the content you can expect in these interview videos:

Other VRChat videos tend to be edited or unedited recordings of shenanigans happening on the social VR platform. Your mileage may vary; some of funnier or others, but overall it comes down to your personal sense of humour. Here’s the results of a keyword search for “VRChat” on YouTube; dive in! If you’re looking for the most popular VRChat videos, start here (but be warned; some of these are not for the faint of heart!).

Do you know of any resources which should be listed here? If you know of a Discord server, a YouTube channel, or a Twitch channel, or some other social media that should be included in this blogpost? Then please feel free to leave a comment, thanks!

Syrmor Takes a Look at the Hard-of-Hearing and Deaf Community in VRChat and Their Own Version of Sign Language Used to Communicate In-World

Still image taken from the first video below

Syrmor, whom I have blogged about before, is well-known for his YouTube video interviews with various people in VRChat.

Yesterday, he released a new video about the hard-of-hearing/deaf/Deaf community in VRChat (abbreviated to d/Deaf/HoH). For those of you who are not aware, a distinction is made between lowercase-d deaf, which refers to the medical condition of hearing loss, and capital-D Deaf, which is the term used to refer to the culture, society, and language of Deaf people, which is based on Sign language. (Deaf is capitalized just as American or Canadian would be, since it is a unique culture.)

And yes, there is a version of Sign language (capital S, because like English and French, it is considered a proper language) used in VRChat! Actually, there are several versions: one for users of the Valve Index hand controllers, which allow for individual finger movements, and another is intended for users of hand controllers without individual finger movements.

Here’s a six-minute VRChat Sign language introduction, showing you some common signs:

The video states in a disclaimer:

All signs are based off of American Sign Language, however due to the limitations of VRChat, most of the signs have been changed and/or combined with similar words. Always look up the proper sign before using anything taught here outside the game.

Here is Syrmor’s video, which was posted yesterday, and has already had over 215,000 views as of this morning!

Symor first stumbled across this community when he encountered a Sign language interpreter at an in-world church service (as shown in the video). Through this contact, he discovered a VRChat world called Helping Hands, where you can teach yourself sign language, including some signs which are unique to VRChat (for example, the use of the portal sign to refer to “world” rather than the ASL version of the term).

More information about Helping Hands is in this document, including links to some d/Deaf/HoH VRChat worlds.

Helping Hands Mission and Vision Statement

Syrmor is doing an absolutely inspiring job as an embedded reporter and documentary filmmaker in VRChat, giving people an opportunity to present their stories to the wider world. Syrmor actually earns a living from advertising on his popular YouTube videos (he currently has 697,000 subscribers to his channel) and from his Patreon supporters (here’s a link to his Patreon page if you want to throw some financial support his way). In fact, he was even the focal point of a real-life meetup of his fans in Toronto, Canada, dubbed Syrcon 2019, which people attended from around the world!

Gee, where can I find some groupies? I’d like a convention, too! 😉

“The Beyoncé of Virtual Reality”: VICE Interviews VRChat Video Maker Syrmor

VICE interviewed Syrmor (a.k.a. Canadian VRChat video maker and livestreamer Sherazee Syrmor) in a recent episode of VICE News Tonight:

If you’ve never heard of Syrmor before or viewed his work, this video is an excellent introduction to who he is and how he got into the habit of interviewing various people he encounters on the social VR platform VRChat.

Syrmor actually earns a living from advertising on his popular YouTube videos (he currently has 647,000 subscribers to his channel) and from his Patreon supporters (here’s a link to his Patreon page). He is also an active livestreamer on Twitch. He was even the focal point of a real-life meetup of his fans in Toronto, dubbed Syrcon 2019, which people attended from around the world!

The interviewer and he share a joke in this VICE News video that he has become “the Beyoncé of Virtual Reality”, because he is now so well known for his video interviews that he can’t venture out in public without getting accosted by his fans! Syrmor tells the interviewer that he receives thousands of emails from people who want to be interviewed for the videos in his series.

If you are interested in reading more about Syrmor and his work, there is an excellent March 27th, 2019 article on the Kotaku website, which I would encourage you to go over and read in full. Here’s an excerpt:

Syrmor notes the most memorable experiences he’s ever had in VRChat and the subject of one of his most recent videos. The subject explained that he was a kid suffering from epidermolysis bullosa, or “the butterfly condition,” a lifelong genetic disorder that makes your skin as “fragile as a butterfly’s wings.” (In some cases, it can even lead to amputations.) Everything, from crawling on your hands and knees to taking a bath, can be very, very painful. He told Syrmor a story about daily battles with the disorder through the guise of a sprightly Piglet avatar.

“What really got me is that he talked about his dad very highly, because his dad is his caretaker. I said something like, ‘Your dad sounds like a cool guy,’ and he actually got his dad on the microphone,” says Syrmor. “Having this very burly, 40-year-old male voice coming through Piglet in virtual reality, talking about his son’s disease, and what life was like for him, was just not something I ever expected to encounter in video games.”

Thanks to Wagner James Au of the blog New World Notes for the heads up!