I spoke with Anders Fray (aka Ders) & Starheart about Natura’s Queendom as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of Rain Dance Immersive 2025, today's episode is with a piece called Naturist's Queendom by Anders Frey and Starheart. So Anders Frey is a level designer with Call of Duty, and his spare time is coming into VRChat to create art and connect to a community. And finding ways of using his video game and art production skills to be able to build this really vast world for this avatar that he created called Natura, which is kind of a hand painted female avatar that he wears, but also has all these custom expressions so that you can customize it. And so when we did the guided tour of the Natura's Queendom, everybody jumped into the avatar of natura and then was able to customize it so it just felt like you're a part of the larger community of this species of natura but the whole world was created with the prompt of like what would this world of this avatar that he created and made publicly available a lot of people are connecting to it what's the backstory to where did this avatar come from and so it's kind of like this fairy-like world where you're going in and connecting to all these different plants and mushrooms and having these interactive climbing aspects. But it's really just a vast place. It also has these kind of biomes and different sections that are, as you go into different parts of the world, then there's different music cues that are being triggered. And so when I went through this as a group tour, we were guided through and doing these different interactions. And then at some point, Star Heart gives a live performance of this song that's around identity. And so... Yeah, just a really powerful piece. It ended up winning the Rain Dance Immersive Best Art World this year. Just a really strong piece. And also it's going to be featured as part of the World's Gallery of Venice Immersive. And I'll be starting to dive into a sneak peek here in a couple episodes, talking to the curators of Rain Dance Immersive about the entire selection. But yeah, that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of Voices of VR Podcast. So this interview with Anders Frey, also known as Ders within VRChat, as well as Starheart, happened on Wednesday, July 9th, 2025, as part of my Raindance Immersive coverage. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:29.185] Anders Fray: I am Ders in VRChat. I also... Well, my real name is Anders Frey. I like to straddle that line between social VR and real life and kind of use a nickname of my real name. You know, some people like to separate those things, but I kind of like to have that transparency across those realms. But I am a VR artist. Well, also specifically, more often a professional video game developer. I work on Call of Duty, actually, making levels. Well, a level artist making multiplayer maps, actually, for my profession. And in my free time, when I have, well, the time and energy and the passion, I make crazy, weird experimental stuff in social VR, too. That's kind of the basics. I just I'm always making art. VRChat gives me this place to express myself in a way which I just haven't. I feel like I haven't really been able to do in quite a while. You kind of get into the repetition of a job and deadlines and the things you need to do to pay the bills. And discovering VRChat gave me this outlet for that. Connecting directly with the community of people that I make art for, it's a very special thing. I think that's the basics.
[00:03:58.441] Kent Bye: Nice.
[00:03:59.656] Starheart: Cool. My name is Starheart. I'm a VTuber, and I came from the whole world of composing music for indie games before I found virtual performance. So the last three years, I've been performing live shows in VR chats. And then eight months ago, I debuted on Twitch, where I've been streaming three times a week. making music, playing games, finally just released some music on Bandcamp, Spotify coming in a week as of this recording. And yeah, I love writing original songs. I love performing for people. And it's, yeah, it's really fun.
[00:04:33.091] Kent Bye: Awesome. And maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR and VRChat.
[00:04:39.750] Anders Fray: Sure, I'll dive right in, yeah. Well, like I mentioned, I have been making video games for a good handful of years now. Back in 2007, I graduated from the Art Institute of Portland with a Game, Art, and Design degree. And maybe a month after I graduated, I was able to get my first job. working in video games. And that was like an art outsource company. So we had all these clients coming to us saying, hey, we need this, this, this, this, this. And we kind of always said, yes, we'll do it. No matter the deadline, no matter the request. So I had to deal with all these different requirements, all these requests, clients, and deadlines. And it was a bit... Well, I kind of realized the reality of game development at that time. I had kind of built it up in my mind as this perfect thing, I guess, you know, I'm going to be a game developer. And so I had all this passion. And within that first kind of environment of, yeah, first few years of game development, it kind of lost some of that meaning of, you know, what a professional video game developer is. it became something a little more frustrating to deal with. So I had to kind of deal with the realities of that. And then I kind of kept making video games for a while. And I think as a means to take a break from that, I was kind of unsure if I wanted to stick with video games. because it kind of lost some of that original magic that I was looking for. So I actually ended up going back to school. I started taking some drawing classes in my free time after my job. So I started drawing with charcoal again. I got back to like physical, traditional media. And I started just interacting with students again. And I kind of rediscovered that motivation. and passion that students have, essentially. So I went back to school. I got an architecture degree, actually. I was very busy, again, for like three years. I kind of did it for fun, actually, but it was a lot of work. But I essentially started doing architecture, so working with my hands. Making little models. I already had that like background and building things in three dimension on my computer. So I had a pretty good sense of how to do that with my hands. And I basically got an architecture degree, a green architecture degree, just working with all these passionate students who want to change the world, make it a better place, you know, create cities that are eco-friendly, sustainable, that makes sense for people. You know, it's not just a building made for a quick turn of a profit. So then I kind of, yeah, got, long story short, I could compress that a little bit. But so I kind of got that motivation and motivation. Yeah, back in me. But I decided to stick with video games because there's a certain amount of creative freedom that comes with that. And going down the architecture route, it's kind of like becoming a doctor in a sense. It's like a huge commitment, just internships and thousands of hours of... doing every facet of designing a building and understanding the physics of it. And you can't make a building that collapses and kills people. That's not a good thing. So it's a very rigid kind of profession, at least from what I kind of learned about it. So basically, decided to stick with video games, kept doing that. And then I, well, I bought a VR headset because I was actually working on a demo of a, well, it was more of like a prototype game for VR called Depth VR. There was a very popular indie kind of Steam asynchronous multiplayer game called Depth, where it was like, I think it was two sharks. for divers, I think. It's been a while. But it's basically, yeah, sharks versus divers. And I was working on that for three years. And then they were doing a prototype game of a VR version of this. So I got my headset. And basically, yeah, through buying my headset for working on that prototype, I discovered VRChat. And kind of when I discovered it, I got addicted to this social side of it. I had played around with a few different VR games and apps at that time. Not very many, actually, but once I found VRChat, I just... I went full in. I was just there all the time. Like every day after work, I would just religiously put on my headset and go through every single new world that was published, you know, that day. This was in 2017. So it was a much smaller community before the memes and the knuckles. And there were some other things that happened around that time, some popular streamers like PokeLolz. and YouTube videos, and yeah, the Knuckles. And before all that came about, I kind of found VRChat a little bit earlier than a lot of people in 2017, and kind of discovered being able to reconnect to the community of people that I wanted to create art for. Because that's what I did in high school. That's how I found video games. I made multiplayer maps for a first-person shooter It's kind of funny. Years later, I found my way back to first-person shooters for my job. But just making your maps, uploading them online, making a website, sharing them directly with the community. And I kind of rediscovered what I discovered back in 2000 and 2001 in high school. And then it just turned into this outlet of... not just rediscovering my passion for creating art and sharing it with people, but also I realized very early on you could use it to essentially become a better person or have experiences that you've never had before in your life, interact with people you've never met. And it just, it's kind of sucked me in. And then I was just, every day after work, I just... I was working, working, working on my first maps and I discovered, well, worlds, and I discovered OpenBrush and started to experiment. And, well, it's been, what, 2017? Seven, eight years or something? now, and I'm still coming back in. I don't spend as much time, but I have many thousands of hours, and I'm going to keep coming back because just the people and the events and the things that happen there are very magical. It's very real. It may be a digital life, not physical, but it's still real life, and the memories we create there are important. Yeah, that's the basics.
[00:11:25.600] Starheart: Yeah, so I know we talked last year when I was talking about my music video for I Still Love You, but brief backgrounds. I got into VR technically. The first headset I tried was DK2. I had a friend that had one and tried out Elite Dangerous in it and was completely blown away. I got really, really into that and then kind of forgot about it. I went off to music school and studied electronic production for... as a goal of learning to compose music for video games. I was a vocal major. I got in on singing, but I wasn't really passionate about singing at the time. I was like, I want to make music for games. But yeah, so I finally found my way back. There had been hints. I'd been following some of the industry stuff for new headset releases. But yeah, I had tried at GDC 2019. I had tried Moss by Polyarc. I was very blown away by a third-person perspective of this world, and you playing as the mouse and this sort of third-person view. So I was like, oh, that's beautiful. I thought that was going to finally convince me, but I'm like, ah, buying a computer, it's a big investment. I had been producing music on Mac, so I'd have to start from scratch building a PC. But what finally convinced me to get into VR like thoroughly was VRChat because I had been super into Vocaloid and VTubers and anime and seeing that people were able to DJ and perform live music in VR for 80 people dancing in full body motion capture today or like three years ago, really. all simultaneously in real time. I didn't think that was possible yet. And I needed to be a part of that. And I was so excited to explore this intersection of art and performance. And, you know, the technology finally enabled us to do that. So yeah, my background, before I decided to go to music school, I was like really excited. I wanted to learn about filmmaking, but I would keep burning out on film projects. Like I did some stop motion projects and some live action stuff, like little projects, but music's the thing that always kind of glued it together. I'm like, okay, I think this is my in into the industry, but yeah, I, I kind of stopped pursuing the indie game stuff as soon as I found out about this world. And so I have been pursuing it as full-time as I'm able to.
[00:13:53.255] Kent Bye: Yeah. Awesome. Well, we're going to be diving into later in the conversation, the Natura's Queendom, which is a collaboration that you two worked on. But before we dive into that specific experience, I'd love to get a bit more context from you, Duras, in terms of the development of Natura as an avatar, because it seems like a lot of that world was born out of the creation of this avatar. You'd mentioned getting into Tiltblash slash OpenBrush and starting to make art. Can you give a bit more context as to at what point did you decide to go from going and exploring these different worlds into starting to create your own art, your own avatars, your own worlds? Just give a bit more context for the development of this avatar that's so distinct, the Natura avatar.
[00:14:38.001] Anders Fray: Yeah, well, I immediately, well, when I found VRChat, I was actually, well, I discovered VR and I was like, okay, this is great. You know, this is new. I remember going to the Seattle Science Center when I was a kid. I don't know how many years ago. It was quite a few years ago and experienced VR for the very first time. It was like this fantastic. that was attached to a crane and it was above your head and you had to pull it down. So I rediscovered that vague memory from when I was a kid and I knew I needed to do something. And at that point I had already made, you know, some art and maps for other games. So I was trying to decide, okay, what do I do? I remember... There was VRChat. I hadn't spent much time with it yet. And then there was a first-person shooter. It may have been Onward. And I was like, okay, I can make a first-person map, like a shooter map. I've done that before in VR or VRChat. So I was like, hmm, I don't know. But then there was this one moment in VRChat when I remember, so... I can be a little shy at times. I don't really instigate conversation so much. I would consider myself an introvert. And then there's this one point which I, well, I don't vaguely remember. I very specifically remember I was sitting at a bar, well, in the Great Pug on one of the stools, just kind of mind my own business. I observe a lot of what's going on in VRChat. I don't always interact. But then this... This young woman, I remember saying hello to me and I was just, I didn't expect it. It was like completely out of nowhere. And I just kind of like, I got really shy and I so much so that I didn't actually respond to them even though I heard them because it just triggered this real reaction of like me actually at a bar with somebody not expecting them to say hi. And that was that one moment that kind of clicked to me where it was real, you know, it felt very real. At that point, I was just in VRChat all the time, observing what's going on around me. And I think for at least a year or maybe even longer, I was wearing just some decomposing skeletons, kind of scary skeleton. There's like this Book of the Dead kind of like embedded in its chest. It's one of the default VRChat avatars. from years ago, back in 2017. So I would just wear that. I never thought about even looking at myself in a mirror, really. This was early on, I was interested in making a world. Then I discovered OpenBrush and started squiggling in there and realized I could import it into VRChat. But still at that moment, Yeah, I hadn't thought about avatars, making avatars at all, or being inside of a different body and having a different face. I didn't think about that at all. I didn't realize that it is a thing that can actually unlock something inside of people and make them feel more comfortable. Yeah, so well, immediately, yeah, I started making worlds. I think after maybe a year or two, I was like, okay, I think it's finally time to make an avatar. So during those first few years, it was me kind of observing a lot, being frustrated with all of the... toxicity that came flooding in from VRChat becoming popular because it kind of destroyed the events that I would go to, which were my main reason to go into VRChat because there was a specific place for me to be and specific thing for me to do. I wasn't just coming in to hang out and socialize. So the first few years were making worlds and kind of showing them to people at the Sunday meetup, which I think I believe VR Pill hosted. Some of the VRChat devs were very active and, you know, face to face with the early kind of VRChat users. And that was where my passion came from. My story in VRChat, it's changed a lot over the years, essentially. It started from me just coming in, not really even knowing what a meme was. I've been working with computers since I was a little kid, but apparently I was just completely out of it in regards to certain things like internet culture. I haven't really watched much anime, so there's all these anime avatars. which was completely new to me so a lot of those for a few years were watching and observing and then adjusting to the anime aesthetic and then at some point where i was adjusted to kind of the culture of vr chat i decided to make my first avatar which actually started as a kind of a generic anime avatar not completely made from scratch i should point that out Just because I think the last avatar, well, character I had made and rigged was back in school, which had been like seven or so years before that. I didn't want to do something from scratch that seemed a little too scary at the time. So I decided to do my interpretation of an anime avatar. So I started with a very generic base. And then I just started working on her. And she kept changing and changing. And I started wearing the avatar. And I think that was the first time I'd really worn a female avatar before. And I felt very comfortable in it. And for a lot of guys, well, everybody in VRChat, that's very normal and very comfortable. And yeah, it doesn't necessarily have a deeper meaning. It's just, well, there's a lot of different complexities to this subject. But for me, I was completely fine with it. It felt natural. I had never grown up in an environment where that... expressed how important it is to be manly or or you know i've always been an artist so i just started wearing this female avatar and i started working on her and changing her along the way and that was a very enlightening process it's pretty amazing to be able to wear art that you are making yourself and embody it and transform it along the way. Wearing the avatar was definitely a very, yeah, important piece of that process of making it. But I, I, yeah, essentially became comfortable with some things I never thought I would be like wearing a female avatar. And I kind of got, uh, what, what could I say? Um, There's a lot of people in VRChat who are very cozy and comfortable with each other. They like to say hello by giving each other head pats instead of shaking each other's hands. There's a dynamic to the VRChat culture that I saw that looked amazing. And I was just kind of this tiny little avatar hiding from people running around like this mini... mini little observer. And I saw that a lot of this, these wonderful friendships happening in VR chat. And I wanted to be a part of that too. And the avatar actually helped me be more comfortable with, I don't know, being kind to people. Just, I realized that if I wanted to be treated well, in this way that I was observing other people's treat each other. I realized that if I want to be treated a certain way, I should be treating others that way. And I just started giving people head pats and hugs. Some people just need that attention. And so did I, just being an introvert. And through that avatar, I was able to be more comfortable interacting with people people in a much more open and less reserved way than I'm kind of used to in my real life. So working on the avatar and embodying her was actually an important step in my VRChat life, if you could say, as it kind of changes over the years. And as I worked on her and she transformed, so did I. I became more comfortable. Yeah. just being all kind of people and cute with people, you know. It's totally acceptable in VRChat. And it's, yeah. And then I am, well, I kept working on worlds and developing my style. And she turned into the catalyst of defining my style. And at one point, I made her public. And now other people can wear that avatar. And She has also affected other people in a very positive manner. I don't want to go into too many specifics because I've had some people tell me some very personal and beautiful stories about how she has helped them in their life. But yeah, it's been quite a journey. It's been, what, seven or eight years now. And she's more than an avatar nowadays. She's more of an idea of... Well, we can be whoever we want to be. It's a celebration of, I guess, breaking down the norms of, you know, what society expects of us, what we're kind of inundated with on a regular basis of, you know, man should act this way, woman should act this way, and just... being able to celebrate not having to fit within a box, essentially, and just my journey of feeling comfortable, getting outside of that construct of how I usually act on a day-to-day basis and just, Yeah, learning along the way. And now, yes, now she's an avatar that other people can wear and feel pretty in or she's unique in herself, even to this day, even though she is technically a good handful of years old now. But every now and then I get a new story that comes from somebody saying that, oh, they love her, her avatar. the avatar and they always wear it. Like I met a man and a wife that they only wear that avatar together as a couple. And the guy, he's this like psychedelic strobing version of it. Like it's faceless. And somehow he adapted to finding an identity in this like pulsing abstract, surreal, like colorful kind of neon, neon pulse. And his wife also wears the avatar and I keep getting these stories. So she keeps, uh, coming back to me and I keep becoming inspired. And now I have even a world for her, which I try to bring this story of me coming to VRChat and discovering these things and give it a little bit more narrative for her. Yeah.
[00:25:09.219] Kent Bye: Yeah. So at the beginning of the guided tour that I was on, you started to share that, you know, you were getting these stories from different people. And what was really striking to me was being in Natura's Queendom and have everybody in that same avatar, but you have some really great ways of being able to customize the, and make it look actually quite different in terms of people's own personal style. And so Starheart, I'm just curious from your perspective, when did you first encounter either Durs or the Natura avatar? I'm just curious to hear how you got introduced to Natura.
[00:25:41.024] Starheart: Sure. So I believe we met after Raindance 2024. So last year I got introduced by a mutual friends and we were at like a world hop group. So we were exploring and yeah, just like, I think I actually went up to Darius. I was like, your avatar is incredible. And then you're the person that actually made it. I'm like, oh, no way. I don't know. I love seeing, I love meeting the creators of like, there's so much cool stuff in VRChat, but it's like such a pleasure to actually get to speak with the people that make it. Anyway, yeah. So I think that was our first interaction. And then I know we were talking about potentially like our mutual friend was, was it Maria? I'm trying to remember who brought it up originally to potentially have me make music. Cause I know you're working on the world that was potentially going to be for rain dance. yeah so wait no we actually met in like january of 2024 i totally forgot and then yeah we didn't know each other that well until much later after raindance but um yeah so i think that was the origin
[00:26:50.543] Kent Bye: So it sounds like that you were maybe already working on this world before Star Heart came on in collaboration to help with the music. So you have Natura, you have this avatar, you want to start to build out like a whole vast story, mythology, world building. Talk about that turning point when you had the avatar and you wanted to actually start to build out the world.
[00:27:10.558] Anders Fray: Yeah, I can do that. Actually, so the very origin of the world is I made it as a quick kind of sketch with an open brush actually for a music experience that PK made in collaboration with a handful of other people. But PK made this replayable music show called Equilibrium that actually won, what, Rain Dance Immersives Best Music Experience in what, 2023, I believe? Yeah. And PK is a friend that I've known for years now, quite a few years. He was into VRChat very early on, 2016 or 17, and tried out some music stuff years ago. But VRChat was at its very beginning. So he kind of let VRChat grow and then came back years later. And then he started the break events, which... are pretty crazy psychedelic music adventures with animations and all these crazy shader effects and particles and everything and so my first kind of sketch of the general layout of the world was something i did for that show a couple years ago it was completely different other than just the generic layout it was not a world in itself but it's more just a simple stage And through that, I had, yeah, I kind of had this structure to work within. After the Raindance 2023, I wanted to keep working on the world to, at the very least, put a portal to Equilibrium. And I always love PK shows. I want to be able to get more people to see them. So I had started fiddling around with it more. I figured it would be another world to let myself experiment with lighting and define my style that I had started to define in VRChat back in 2017. So I just started playing around with it some more. At that time, I wasn't working on the world as... a world specifically about Natura. But through talking with Maria some more, we, well, we talk a lot. She's super helpful. I was thinking about making something for Raindance immersive, what, 2024. So we had kind of started talking early on about turning this world into something even more special than Natura. what I was going to make. I was just going to experiment and go on whatever tangents and, you know, publish it. But yeah, we decided it would be a great opportunity to add some, well, narrative to it, some story, then give myself a better way to, well, justify my decisions as far as how do I, you know, add things to the world. I typically just go on all these tangents and just do whatever I feel like, but through narrative, it would give me this larger structure and reasoning behind my creative decisions. And we found that, yeah, my story just kind of coming to VRChat and appreciating these things that I was experiencing for the first time, like embodying an avatar and how that can unlock parts of you which you may not expect. I thought that was a very good idea. It was a very special thing to do. So actually, I started talking more with Maria and some with Joanna, who's a scriptwriter at Rain Dance Immersive, and they were able to offer some feedback from their perspective and experiences also, while also being just honest with them about my experiences of feeling comfortable in a female avatar and just the healing power of social VR and just how important it had become to me. Because all it takes is one person every now and then. Like, if I just meet one person, every month or a couple months or a couple times a year or something that just comes up to me and say hey like your world well well most recently a few months ago i even talked to somebody who i never talked to before and on my first world it turned into an oasis for them for when they were drinking too much in college and they're having a hard time in life and there's this one little corner in the spot in my world they go to to disconnect from it all and Every now and I hear these really special stories about how my art just affected somebody in a deeper way that I never thought I would be able to do. And that just became so much more important to me than, say, making something for a game that has millions of downloads. Numbers don't really matter when you get to a certain point, at least to me. It's more about directly interacting with with the people that I can positively affect. And I was able to talk with Maria and Joanna some more, and we started to come up with more of a structured narrative of the world becoming her home. If that is her home, then how do we translate these ideas into a world that can be kind of told through the environment? So like she has those flowers on her dress, which are also represented in the flower garden. So I started to connect the avatar to the world also. And then some of the narrative of reclaiming the flowers or rescuing them at the start, it kind of gave us something physical to do during the tour. And it was a kind of analogy for, well... rescuing some of the people that the Avatar has helped in a certain sense, and people that have told me their stories. So I was able to bring these personal stories into that tour. And, you know, her heart is shown. She has a kind of a gem heart, which has always been there. But, you know, how do I now connect that to the world? Like the Avatar was there before the heart charge station was. So I now had to find a way to connect these two things together. And then, of course, Starheart came along and then she was a perfect... Personal work with her. Yeah. She has some lore too. And a star heart. So it worked out really well. She's a celestial being from another world. You can talk about that more if you like. But the collaboration seemed like a perfect... Perfect mix. And we just kind of worked through things, talked a lot over a year and kind of established those key points of the tour. And this personal story turned into environmental storytelling tours that we took together. Yeah.
[00:33:52.759] Kent Bye: Yeah, Starheart, love to hear your perspective of coming on. And it sounds like the story was set at a high level. Maybe it was continuing to evolve or develop, but just talk about your process of creating the music for these different scenes. One of the things I really noticed as we were exploring around would be that there'd be these music cues that would then help to set a larger tone for exploring a little more biome section of the natura's queendom and then later you also have a live performance that you had in the live exhibition portion of the natura's queendom with the guided tour that you took everyone's but love to hear a little bit more about the process that you went through and developing the music and co-developing the story and also writing a song that you were going to perform
[00:34:36.397] Starheart: Sure. So, yeah, this was a really, really cool experience because I love environmental storytelling. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons I love VRChat Worlds is you can tell so much through the environment. I didn't even need there to be a literal story to connect all these environments. I felt so connected as they were, right? But I think the tour gave it a really nice structure and an arc And yeah, like let people experience each of these like main features of the world in sequential order. But yeah, like many composers before me in recent years, I was very inspired by the implementation of the music in Breath of the Wild, the second to latest Zelda, main Zelda game. Is it the third to the? Anyway, you know, the one on recently, because basically open worlds to create continuous looping music It's quite tricky to not make it get old really quick. A lot of pixel art sort of style games, you'll only be in a level for so long. You know, and it's more action oriented, so you get different action audio to break up some of the repetition. But a world like this, where it's supposed to be more exploratory, just having... A general sort of ambient loop, I think, is not necessarily conducive to people being So I loved just doing these linear cues that just, they trigger when you enter a new area and you get to sort of enjoy this little vignette of music to introduce you to this other area, to reward you for exploring. So that was sort of the approach for the technical aspect of it. We did have a loop at the spawn, which I didn't realize, you know, while people are waiting for everyone to join the instance for the tour, people would be there for 30 plus minutes. So I should have made that loop a little longer, but... Maybe I can extend that a little bit for the release. Yeah, and then as people explore the flower garden, I felt, especially walking through there, I felt this incredible nostalgia for exploring as a kid, like a forest, and seeing everything felt so magical through a kid's eyes. And so I felt like Durs really captured the nostalgia of that. So the way I started writing these music cues was almost in a sort of fairy tale Alice in Wonderland. It's very fantastical. This is not a very realistic... It's a very stylized forest and biomes and stuff like that. But I think that lets your imagination just run completely wild rather than being like, oh, those PBR textures on that tree are a little off. I don't know. At some point, realism kind of takes away because it ages really quickly. Or you... are comparing it to the real thing so this one you're not comparing these gigantic mushrooms to real mushrooms that you put in an omelet right you're like no these are just magical whimsical giant mushrooms that i get to walk on top of and it's you know the size of a house So anyway, walking into this flower forest, I really wanted it to feel like you were opening the storybook and what your imagination would sort of help people's imagination feel like they're... So yeah, so I was tapping into sort of these chordal structures that were reminiscent of old fantasy style scores that I really enjoyed and... Instrumentation being sort of bell-like pianos, very close-miked, very organic. And yeah, that was another challenge trying to figure out how much synthesis I should use versus how much organic textures. Fantasy tends to be very orchestral, but I think this one had such an alien, such a fantastical art direction that I also tried to weave in some of those more synthesized elements to emphasize that. So yeah, as you're exploring, we have like a more adventurous theme as you're crossing this big arch as you're climbing to give that a sense of excitement. And yeah, to have contrast throughout the journey, to not just make it feel like it's all ambient, it's all safe, right? We have some weird, weird chords to build that tension.
[00:39:12.213] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. And Durs, I think I can really see some of these influences of architecture, studying architecture, just because the way that everything's laid out, you always have something interesting to look at wherever you're at. You have something in the background and also just the scope and scale of this experience was so large that just give me the sense of awe and wonder as we were exploring through it and discovering it. And I think part of the thing with open brush is that you do start to run into some very hard limits in terms of how big you can reasonably make some of these different worlds and experiences in it. It seems like that with your background and making these other maps and your day job that you're able to also apply some of those skills of being able to kind of stitch together to create things that most people wouldn't be able to do if they were just using open brush out of the box. So love to hear a little bit more around both like the architectural influence of the design of the space of nature's kingdom, but also the optimization that you had to do in order to enable the scope and scale that you're able to achieve.
[00:40:14.574] Anders Fray: Yeah, gosh, it is. Yeah, it is kind of hard. OpenBrush is a very fluid painterly program. It's not the kind of program software you would think you would want to make a functional, collatable world with. But that was kind of my... experiment that I started yeah back in 2017 I just I took some initial squiggles just sketches and I put collision on them and I scaled them up but then now you're running running along a paint stroke I thought that was just super magical in itself unfortunately Optimization is not easy and you have to be very careful about how you build these kinds of open brush worlds, which I did build things very carefully. I did do some bad things, of course, but I try to find ways to make things work. If I'm going to be more expensive, doing one thing that i'll need to be cheaper about doing another thing when i just try to cut corners where i can like for example the line of sight in the world is very open that is not a good thing to really do if you want to unload parts of the world and kind of push through people in more more like a room like fashion where you just push them through like one hallway to the next room and then you can unload the thing behind you and That's kind of a gamey thing that you do a lot of the time. But unfortunately, I always make these larger open worlds, which makes this tricky, because then you can see everything all the time. But one of those tricks that I do to help with optimization is I have fog within the world. That also very much helps me control the busyness of everything. Because with open brush, you can get a lot of complexity going on. And then all of a sudden, you're just overwhelmed with too much to look at. But with fog, you can just start to come in and then be at a full 100% fog at a certain distance. And once you hit that 100% fog, then whatever is past that distance, you can start to unload, which is kind of an old video game trick of just... Yeah, if you don't have rooms to kind of load and unload, then you can just have fog and then everything past that distance, you just start to unload. But yeah, it's very tricky because OpenBrush doesn't have tools that are very good for modeling like anything. It's more drawing these very fluid curving lines mostly, but the one tool I used the most was the hole brush, I would say, which is this completely convex shape, which you draw in three-dimensional space. And then you actually have a solid form. And with that, I actually made most of the ground and collidable things. You have these long squiggly brushes that turn into the branches of the huge tree that's above you. And then I basically just... I mostly just... Okay, the biggest downfall, I would say, with open brush is the transparency overdraw. It's when you're drawing with these brushes, they have all these natural-looking painterly edges. And that natural painterly edge comes about because it's like a transparent texture. So the geometry that's actually there is larger than what you see for the paintbrush. And it's dropping out... those visible parts of the high poly kind of squiggly stroke. And when you overlap all this transparency, which a lot of people do, that just kills performance like immediately. And yeah, the downside of open brushes, a lot of the time people, paint in a painterly way where they're just layering and layering and layering, layering, much like you would on a canvas in real life, painting thousands and thousands and thousands of little, little strokes, little squiggles and lines. But when you do that, it just stacks and stacks and stacks that transparency and then it kills things. So Performance, yeah. FPS gets terrible. So I had to be very deliberate about that, which is why there isn't as much stuff kind of scattered around the environment as I could put. Because once that all starts layering, depending on the view you get, wherever you are, it can really just... Yeah, FPS can be terrible. It's a huge fallback to the painterly style of open brush. So I just try to be very deliberate with the strokes and lines that I make. Try to be confident in those instead of doing that layering method where you just have thousands or hundreds of strokes and lines. I do do other things too, kind of other game-dev-y things, some LODs. And I have some triggers throughout the world that unload certain parts of it at different times. But to be honest, most of the world is visible most of the time, which makes it a little bit of a struggle. I could probably gain some FPS back. But it's tricky. I kind of approach things from the history of optimization that I've had to do in the past, but without getting too technical with it. Because if I start trying to get too technical, then I'm treating it too much like a job. And this is supposed to be fun and whimsical and surreal and inexact. It doesn't need to be realistic. If I start getting too caught up in these tedious tasks, then I'm not going to want to do it for fun as a free time project. So I try to approach things carefully, but I also try to be loose about it. But yeah, it's a bit of a fallback to OpenBrush, how high poly things can get because of the curving lines. And then the transparency, I think, are the killers mostly. But I think it works out well enough. I could do better, but...
[00:46:16.138] Kent Bye: Yeah, makes sense. You don't want to create like a whole other second job that you don't even want to be doing.
[00:46:20.702] Anders Fray: Yeah, exactly.
[00:46:22.364] Kent Bye: Makes sense. Starheart, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share a little bit more around the song that you're performing live.
[00:46:28.490] Starheart: Yes, I forgot to share about that. Yes. So during our tours, I actually got to perform an original song that I wrote inspired by the world itself. So it's called Sanctuary. And it's basically a song talking, or just a way for me to express my appreciation for worlds much like Ders' world as well. That I found so much peace and so much calm and a sense of self in. The world outside is tricky right now. Especially for... yeah i i don't i don't necessarily want to talk about that specifically uh we we could if we want to but um yeah i think vrchat allows us to escape it which can be a good calibration for being like okay we're okay we could do this we can make it through this it's a sense of community it's a sense of seeing that there still is beauty in the world despite all the darkness and sometimes because of the darkness we need to make more beauty and so things like this just make me so happy and yeah I think there's different opinions whether escapism is problematic to ignore the problems and I talk about this on my streams as well it's like We all need different roles in our life and sometimes you need a healer. Sometimes you need a place to recharge and sometimes you need to be reminded of what we're protecting in the first place or what we're fighting for in the first place. Like if we're talking about like a video game lineup of different roles you have your healer and your tank and your like the different RPG roles or whatever and Yeah, but they're all functions towards a goal. And to dismiss that you don't need healing, I think is insane. so anyway yeah i wrote this song sort of just as an appreciation for this side of of art and the second verse is talking about how i kind of gave up singing i used to be in a rock band back in college and i had been writing like my jazz sort of pop stuff before the band and As I was explaining before, I didn't really totally resonate with expressing myself creatively through singing. I got into school on singing. People appreciated my voice a lot, which felt great. But I think what was tricky about that was... Voice is such a personal thing. I talked about this last time when we chatted on your podcast, Kent, that as a trans woman, I have been struggling with identity for a long time. And I think because voice is so personal, it didn't feel like an authentic way to express myself. Especially with my old voice. So I found my ability to express myself with one step removed, composing music through other people's stories and other people's visions. I felt just so incredibly free to put all of my emotions into other people's work. But here I am in VRChat finally figuring out this identity stuff. So the second verse, I think, encapsulates that, that I had given up singing because I was just like, I don't think it's for me. It goes, I once thought that I... I'm trying to remember my own lyrics. I could sing it, I can't say it. Once thought that I had sung my very last words, but once I found a place to fill my weary lungs, and then go back to the chorus, I found this sanctuary and Yeah, it's pretty mind blowing to actually figure out that I do have the ability to express myself very creatively through singing. And it just took the right environment, just took the right group of people that were very art driven, very creative. Yeah, and a level of anonymity to let you experiment without that risk of failure, or that risk of judgment, where you want to try on a dress in real life, people are going to judge you. If you want to try on a female avatar, whether it's exploration of gender or not, it's just a click of a button, and you're like, oh, this is fun, or not. Maybe that's not for you, but it's a really... easy way for people to even ask these questions, which I love. I love that. Yeah. So that's sort of what my song was referencing in that aspect of it. And yeah, so I thought Darius's World was the perfect beautiful encapsulation of, of my favorite types of VR chat worlds, these stunning works of art that you get to explore and you get to enjoy and escape, but also meet and friends and create memories and all of that.
[00:51:40.815] Kent Bye: Hmm. Nice. Durs, I just wanted to follow up on, because you talked earlier around, you know, being a male, wearing a female avatar, and that wasn't necessarily an exploration of gender. And, you know, I've heard you say also before, like, a lot of what you're trying to do with these worlds is like bring back in some feminine energy. And so, you know, just curious if there was any, you know, because it seems to be a part of the VRChat culture to wear... female avatars, if you're male, and it, it not necessarily be an expression of gender, but sometimes it is. And so just curious to hear a little, any more elaboration on that for your, your journey and kind of exploring maybe more of a feminine side or just tapping into something that doesn't necessarily have, have to be about gender, or maybe it is. I'm just curious to hear about that, that journey for you.
[00:52:27.830] Anders Fray: Yeah, it wasn't necessarily an exploration of gender in itself. I just felt very comfortable in a female avatar. And, well, just starting off in VRChat, well, even nowadays, I think... I don't know if I've ever found a male avatar that I didn't put on, and I just felt like an idiot in it. Like, just the style of... I mean, everybody likes whatever, you know, they like. It's not a personal attack for people who like specific things. I've just never felt that I found a male avatar that resonated with me, that just felt comfortable, that didn't feel like kind of fake or just awkward. Yeah, I found that just resonated with the female avatars more and I felt comfortable in them. And I think that allowed me to be less shy and more open, which I never expected to happen and be more kind. And I've just met so many wonderful people through, I think, that exploration of just Well, early on when the knuckles were coming in, when VRChat was blowing up and they didn't have any security settings and people were like blasting your eardrums out because they could overcrank the decibels or whatever they were doing. It was chaos. It was chaos and crashers. And they really frustrated the hell out of me. And there was just so much toxicity that came in. There was a lot of really wonderful things going on and people laughing and joking and memes came to life. And internet culture just kind of boomed and became a real reality within VRChat. It's like the internet and all this media and culture, it's just... It turned into a real thing. There was like a cat band that would just, there's these cat band raids and they had their own group and then they would just group up in their cat world and then they would come into the Great Pug and raid it, you know, but by raiding it, they would just march around playing music. It was super cute. There's these groups that did really positive things. And there was also the Knuckles that invaded. They would come through a portal and just run around and create chaos. Some people weren't as chaotic. But basically, that frustrated me, I think, when I had my quiet kind of VR chat experience with events and the small community that was there. It frustrated me watching this toxicity come in. But then a lot of people just came in and started just... making fun of people who were wearing female avatars, essentially. It was mostly desktop users, I think, at the time. And it just pissed me off so much that all these people were coming in and just trolling and being toxic, like a lot of people do on the internet. And I think part of that had to do with a lot of them being on desktop. They weren't fully immersed. They didn't feel the realness of the environment. And they found these YouTube videos and they just brought... This toxicity with them, which frustrated me a lot, actually, just I watched that for like hundreds of hours, just in the great pug. And I think through that frustration, I was very annoyed and I wanted I didn't I didn't want to be that. Well, I wasn't that way, but it frustrated me enough that I. I just started to treat everyone like family, essentially. There's a lot of people that, you know, not only are they making fun of like, oh, you're a guy in a female avatar, but like, how old are you? When you're behind a mask, well, when you're an avatar, you don't know the age of the person. So there's this kind of gray area of how do I treat this person that I just met? Because you don't know their age and you don't necessarily want to ask them that. So there's this kind of weird gray area of who is this person? How old are they? And how do I interact with them? Because we can't see their physical body and their face and their age. And through some of the frustration of watching people be toxic about that also, I just realized... Don't worry about it so much. You don't have to worry about it as much as you're emphasizing, as long as you are just treating people with respect, like family, like you would a family. You're not treating them a certain way, age, or hitting on them. There's people that come in and they're flirting with people and they don't know their age, and that's weird. You don't know who they are, but you can avoid all this toxicity and frustration by just being a good person to whoever you're interacting with and not changing the way you act based on your assumptions about their age. So I just, yeah, I started treating people like I would just friends and family without even knowing how old they were. If they were a guy or a girl or like some people are mute, some people don't talk. because of whatever reason, maybe they're just super shy. So you just have to treat them kindly without hearing their voice, without knowing anything about them. Yeah, I essentially, the avatar, well, Natura was my way of interacting with people in a kind of way. I was thinking about her at the time, even at the very start as Mother Nature. She eventually turned into Mother Nature's daughter from a narrative standpoint, but I wanted her to be a friend to all, a friend to people, to animals, to... She was kind of that representation of me wanting to avoid this shady mess of toxicity of people just being terrible to each other. And through that, I, yeah, I got very, well, friendly and started giving everyone head pats. And I actually, one of my favorite things turned into, well, I had a much cozier group of friends years ago, and that has changed over time. But like one of my favorite things was just, I had some friends that just needed some attention. I guess they don't, I don't know what there was going on in their life, but Just hanging out in front of a mirror and giving somebody headpats and having them fall asleep within social VR, because that is the thing. People are comfortable falling asleep in VR. I was able to comfort some people through VR and through this avatar. I think wearing this avatar helped me enable that kind of supportive behavior of VR. meeting people to this day some of the people i just i don't know really who they are or how old they were but i treated them as friends with respect and didn't make any assumption about them and yes through the avatar i just yeah it wasn't necessarily a purposeful avenue for gender exploration but i just found that i i could be a better me by using the avatar, I guess you could say, a kinder, softer me. But yeah.
[00:59:47.216] Kent Bye: Yeah. Thanks for that. And I know Young has talked about the anima and animus, so just kind of like different masculine feminine that we all have. And so it doesn't necessarily mean in terms of gender expression, it could also be, you know, integrating just those more masculine feminine aspects of ourselves, which it sounds like that's a little bit more along the lines of what you're saying in terms of bringing more feminine energy into your life. So, yeah. Great. Well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and art within VR and what it might be able to enable.
[01:00:21.434] Starheart: You want to start, Deuce?
[01:00:23.016] Anders Fray: Go for it, Star.
[01:00:24.972] Starheart: Okay, it's a big question. I think the... I know last time I talked about how the technology of live performance being possible over in Japan because of their low latency internet and people meeting their bandmates in VR and forming groups. So I still do think that latency infrastructure stuff in the future is going to enable just this huge explosion of really, really cool art all over the world. As soon as that's, you know, viable to an extent, you know, speed of light will limit to some degree. But yeah, so I'm super excited about that aspect. And I think I'm just excited for a second chance at shaping the music and film and video game world within this place. I think one thing that I've thought about a lot recently is... as a musician as a live performer the ability to own and create my own venues for people to watch concerts in rather than having to go through Ticketmaster through these like Ticketmaster owned venues out in the real world you know there's there's a sense of you know, bringing back control over our own means of distribution. Distribution has always been a huge limiting factor in all aspects, right? I think the internet allowed for a distribution of music files, but not live performance. So this is the next stage of accessible performance. So yeah, I'm just excited to see what people make in that world.
[01:02:10.834] Anders Fray: Yeah, well, I do love... Well, my favorite thing nowadays is events and the potential of... All these amazing things that are going on. Usually, you'll see me at music events nowadays. I love immersive theater. You know, feeling like you're a part of a movie is amazing. Just live performances. It's all amazing. And I love it. And it's what keeps me coming back to VRChat, I think. Like, Raindance... When I have a very kind of specific thing to hop in a VR chat for is what I appreciate, I think, the most. But I think the ultimate potential, which is kind of what I had discovered over the last, what, seven, eight years of social VR is... The thing I appreciate the most and what I hope social VR can help out with is just this melting pot of redefining social norms within this very complex virtual space where you essentially have people from every part of the world, you know, some places more so because of accessibility with technology and being able to have a headset and a PC. But Just the potential of us being able to exist within a digital space together and the things that are happening there, the things that are normal there that just aren't in the real world, we can redefine just social norms on a whole like this cross-cultural mix of people that exist together like in one world you could be with your western friends in another world all of a sudden it's basically all japanese people and the environment kind of changes you need to get a feeling for what environment you are in at any given time and just The mixing pot of people and things that are happening right there is very... I've just never seen it before. Where we are really just face-to-face with people, sure, it's digital, but it's all very real. Our memories are real. It's... what happens in vr it's real life it's it's digital but you know people dream about it it creates these memories it helps us grow and then eventually i think a lot of people uh well yeah a lot of people even myself we end up meeting each other in real life we we get to know the person for their most genuine and honest self through vr chat a lot of the time a lot of the time people just show themselves as they really are. They're able to, even though they're kind of putting on a mask in a sense, I wouldn't really call it a mask, but putting on a different avatar and a face ends up helping them take off that mask that they wear in real life. So a lot of what happens in VRChat is just, people being the most authentic person they can be. That's not everybody, of course. There's people that are at certain points in their life where they're doing the opposite and they're being fake and they're trying to discover who they are. But for the most part, it's just such a complex melting pot of cultures and people and events and interactions that we just kind of normalize. And everybody is so tolerant of somebody that's different and to them. And if you meet those people that don't get along with somebody that's different from them, then they're just going to ostracize themselves, stick within their toxic group, and you can actually just make them completely disappear. So it's such a potential of just breaking down barriers, I think, across borders, across cultures, across assumptions and these boxes that we all kind of live within. And these positive things eventually go back out into the physical world and can, I think, directly affect the physical world through this melting pot of social. It's quite a social experiment, but I see that it has the potential of affecting the physical world in a very positive way as we try new things within this digital realm across worlds and cultures.
[01:06:39.130] Kent Bye: Nice. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:06:44.513] Starheart: I'm good. Good.
[01:06:48.155] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, there's an star heart. Thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to share a little bit more around the creation of nature as Queendom and Yeah, each of your journeys into VR and some of the creative process, exploring these different themes and building out the world and telling a story. I just had a really amazing time going through the world and being filled with awe and wonder. And I love the music and the performance. And yeah, just overall really stuck with me in terms of an overall journey that you're taking us on. Yeah, and also the avatars, I think, was a distinct experience to have everyone wearing the same avatar, which you end up doing a lot, but just the way that each person could customize their avatar. So it really felt like everybody in the same type of avatar, the same species or whatever, but having each individual flair that people were able to do. So I just thought that was another extra part of the journey as we're going through this world. Yeah, so looking forward for other people to eventually have a chance to go through it as well. And yeah, just really enjoyed having a chance to get through the guided tour and the live performance aspect during Rain Dance. So yeah, just thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[01:07:54.099] Anders Fray: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the world will be public at some point. I'm going to do a little extra to it, I think, and then finally push it out. I'll probably add some more things later on, have a little more fun with it, which will be great.
[01:08:07.375] Starheart: Might add a couple more tracks as well. Yeah. Release the soundtrack as well. I'm so excited.
[01:08:13.658] Anders Fray: Yeah, sure. Did you have a social Star Heart?
[01:08:18.340] Starheart: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could check out my videos and streams and stuff at Star Heart VR. And then the soundtrack will be available at Falling Star Heart.
[01:08:28.925] Kent Bye: Awesome. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
