Custom avatars in social VR add a lot of fidelity of identity expression and creative flair in applications like VRChat or High Fidelity. Morph3D is a custom avatar solution that offers a number of free avatars within VRChat, but they also have a custom tool where you can customize your own virtual avatar. I had a chance to catch up with Chris “DeepRifer” Madsen, Morph3D’s head of VR/AR at GDC where we talked about some of the reactive avatars that they’re working on. Madsen has tried to explore something new in VR every day for the past four years, and he also shares some of the highlights of his social VR experiences from the last four years.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So with the recent closing of AltspaceVR, one of the things that I noticed that was lacking at Altspace that I've seen in other social VR experiences is the ability to fully express your identity through your avatar. This is something that's been a main feature of a social VR application like VRChat or High Fidelity, where they allow you to upload your own avatars and really express your creativity in that way. And I think it makes a huge difference. And today I talked to Chris Madsen of Morph3D, and they've created a platform to be able to customize and make your own avatars so that you can export it and import it into either VRChat or High Fidelity. And Chris is somebody who's made doing virtual reality a commitment. He tries to do something new every day for the past four years. And so he spent quite a lot of time in these different social VR applications. And so I get some of his stories and anecdotes of these adventures that he's been having in social VR. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Chris happened at the Game Developers Conference on Tuesday, February 28, 2017. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:29.015] Chris Madsen: So my name is Chris Madsen. I'm the director of AR VR for Morph 3D. Morph 3D specializes in creating digital avatars for really two markets. One is for game developers that want to populate their worlds with human characters or humanoid characters and the end users who want to build themselves an identity to roam around in the metaverse for social VR experiences.
[00:01:56.032] Kent Bye: Great. So yeah, I want to dive into some of your experiences in social VR and then unpack this Morph 3D in terms of the identity and what that is going to give to people. But maybe you could start with how you got into VR.
[00:02:08.856] Chris Madsen: Yeah, so I had a 20-year career in mental health, working with people struggling with various disorders. And the first time I put on a headset, what has it been now, about four years ago, I realized within five minutes that this was a new way for humans to communicate with each other, and experience things in an experiential way as though you were there. And I realized this was going to change the world. So I pulled off the headset after five minutes, looked at my wife and said, I'm doing a career change. And she's like, what? I'm like, yeah, this is going to change everything. So it's really at that moment I decided I'm going all in on VR. And I did. I immersed myself in this community. What a great VR community we have. Everybody working together. And, you know, it was Riftmax Theater with Mike Armstrong built what I believe is the first social VR experience that was open to all of us. That anybody from around the world that had a DK1 could hop in and experience social VR. I remember trying that for my first time. I found myself in a hallway in Riffmax Theater looking around wondering what this was all about and there was Mike Armstrong in the hallway. He walked up to me, got a little bit too close. I had to back up a couple of steps and that made me realize Wow! Look how real this is. He just invaded my personal space bubble and I actually backed up. This is amazing. And just to be able to look into what was then a pretty rough avatar, you know, it was one of the earlier avatars, but to even then be able to look into the face of that avatar and realize that there was a person behind that face, a real live person, and that we could communicate, and that we could do our head nods, and you could, you know, even though the avatars weren't perfect back then, you could still gather a lot of information, even from those subtle head movements, and eventually, you know, for those of us that had the Hydras, we were able to get our hands in the experience too, and that just really upped the game, as we were now able to shake hands, high five, manipulate objects, so much fun. And then of course we had other social VR experiences branching off. We had Alt Space, which was the first one to bring social VR to the Samsung Gear, which was a pretty incredible feat. We had Converge, which was a favorite platform for many, where we were getting crowds of, you know, 60, 70, even 80 people in that forest together, which was exciting. VR chat. I remember the very early days when you'd appear when we were first developing that in T-pose. Everyone's walking around in T-pose until we could get those arms working. Just absolutely amazing communities for all of them, you know. And then in the background you've got High Fidelity doing their thing with Philip Rosedale, creating their own platform. Now we've got Project Sansar. Just all of this explosion of virtual reality, which I think is really going to get a lot of traction in 2017.
[00:04:59.451] Kent Bye: Yeah, you know, I got my Rift on January 1st, 2014, and then, you know, I was really just consuming as much information as I could, and, you know, I was just hungry to learn everything, and I just was waiting for the first physical gathering, and so when I went to the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in that May, I had a day and a half, and I thought, you know, I'm going to talk to people here rather than have the experience, and so I did 46 interviews in a day and a half, And I did hardly any of the VR experiences, so I took it from more of an intellectual mental presence type of perspective of covering the space. But over time I've started to have the experiences and then use my own direct experience of the VR experience and then base the interview about that. What I find fascinating about your journey into VR is that from the very beginning, you've taken an experiential approach of almost creating a daily practice of trying to do something new in VR or just do something in VR every day for three or four years now, which I think that of all the people that are out there, you're one of the ones that I could point to as saying that you've experienced probably some of the most VR, even more than I have. So I'm just curious to hear that practice of exploring all these different worlds and what was really motivating you to take this experiential approach.
[00:06:09.705] Chris Madsen: Well, I think, you know, virtual reality is capable of so many things. And my motivation to just diving in, like you said, I try to get into VR almost every day. And it's about seeing where VR is going in all the many different dimensions, right? Like, some of the artist stuff coming out, one artist in particular I can throw out there, Khabibo. one of my favorites. You know, he made My Little Donut and Loon, an experience that actually changes with the phases of the moon. I remember doing Loon for the first time and just being able to create this structure around me. And you don't know what's coming next through the whole experience. You're just trying to figure it out as you go and you're creating this structure with these ethereal poles that appear once you put them in place. And then the sky basically falls in on you and it covers you in almost this astral sheet. And it flashed me back to when I was a kid making those forts, you know, with the kitchen chairs, right? And this is what's so cool about VR. It triggers these memories about your past. Google Earth VR does the same thing. I mean, I've explored my old neighborhoods. It's like all these memories that I may have never even had again in my whole life suddenly were triggered by that experience. I think VR is capable of so much. So I'm just really enjoying exploring all these creative and different ways that VR can impact our consciousness. I mean, really, this is what's so cool about VR. When people ask me, what is VR? I like to say it's a device that's able to transport or teleport our consciousness to shared virtual experiences. And that's absolutely amazing.
[00:07:45.282] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you mentioned some of the first social VR experiences. In the course of going to SAVR, I've heard some of the people talk about Minecraft VR was some of their first social VR experiences. So I don't know if that predated in the timeline of the history of modern consumer social VR, but the longest experience that I had, you know, very early on was on Gunter's virtually incorrect. It was like a four-hour roundtable discussion that I had with Revin, Kyle, and two other people. And I just remember that experience of having that conversation around that table with those four other people. So it was us five people sitting around a table having this conversation. And it just, I had a memory of that conversation. And, you know, I just remember meeting some of the other people that were on that panel for the first time in real life. And it was just kind of like I had this sense of knowing them already. So you've had that experience as well, I guess, you know, being into social VR and having all these experiences and relationships cultivated, and then meeting face-to-face for the first time. What's that like?
[00:08:41.930] Chris Madsen: Right? So, you're bringing back lots of memories from those early Riftmax days. I remember Reverend Kyle, I think, was the first one to really do, like, an authentic talk show with a virtual reality, with our virtual reality headsets on. I was fortunate enough to be the drummer in that experience We had the NPC band off in the corner, right? and I was the only live person all the other guys were like NPCs and I remember playing the drums and at one point Mike brings in a Thunderstorm and the lightning bolt comes from the clouds and blows me out of the drummer's seat unbelievable I was like, this is the craziest thing I've ever done in my life. So yeah, I So many cool. Okay. Let me tell you like education for example It's gonna be so cool as a social VR experience. One of the coolest educational experiences I did was actually in alt space there's a volcanologist by the name of Sam Cosman who explores these volcanoes right and We showed up in this room and Sam Cosman was there leading a group of our avatars and we had hard hats on and the whole bit and and he had used photogrammetry to capture the actual volcano that he had explored. So he was able to take us out to the base camp as a group, rappel us down into the crater of this volcano, show us the lava down below, but what was so special about that is you have a professional that's had experiences that nobody else has had, and he's allowing you to relive those experiences with him, telling those stories of how they were trapped on the side of the volcano, as a huge thunderstorm rolled in, dropping torrents of rain and almost sweeping them off the cliff. I mean, terrifying stuff. And you're there living those experiences with the professional. And I just see this making education so phenomenal. You know, and speaking of Mike Armstrong, you know, now he's gone off with immersive VR education. He's doing the Engage platform where you can do just that. You can have the professionals of the field in there teaching us these amazing things and showing us and letting us experience them.
[00:10:40.728] Kent Bye: Yeah, talking to different people in the field of virtual reality, Jesse Jodry in VRChat is one that comes to mind in terms of, did an interview with him talking about this idea of social storytelling, of being able to have a meetup and be able to, as a group, go through these different worlds together. I actually had a chance to do that for the first time within VRChat and one of the things that was really striking to me was both the worlds that we're exploring but also the avatars that people were having and how much creativity, crazy, like people made out of five cats and like giant robots and just all sorts of pop culture references but it's an expression of their identity and they're able to embody themselves in this costume in a way and bring out different dimensions of themselves and that I think was really striking to both be exploring these worlds as a group and to be collaboratively constructing the narrative based upon what people are experiencing and the stories and the relationships that are developing within the people but also that expression of identity that people had, VRChat in particular, all the people that have been able to really start to do their customized avatars and explore in that way. I'm just curious to hear from your perspective of, you know, both from your history in VRChat and seeing this different avatar embodiment expression, but also, you know, what Morph3D is doing now.
[00:12:02.518] Chris Madsen: Yeah, avatars are so incredibly fun and you're right, you know, watching people use their creativity to create these amazing avatars is one of the great joys of social VR because people are expressing who they want to be. And this is what we're doing at Morph3D is we are creating tools that allow people to customize their own avatars. We want to give people as much leeway as possible to build whatever comes to their mind. Now we are specializing in humanoid bipedal Experiences, you know, so we don't do the four-legged horses and things like that, but we do do anthropomorphs Which by the way, I think you're gonna be a really big deal people just love anthropomorphs. What are those? So it's a mixture of human and animal. So one of my favorite characters on VRChat is this, people are calling her a giraffe gazelle girl, and it's an anthropomorph. And she's absolutely awesome. And there's a bunch of those roaming around in VRChat right now, that we've used the morph system to dial those out. So what we have at Morph is base figures and in each of these base figures there's hundreds of body shapes and you can overlay a user interface to take advantage of all those body shapes. So you can literally stretch noses, elongate the body, grow your fingernails, completely change yourself just moving these hundreds of sliders around. And we have both the desktop version that we're releasing this week, where people can jump in right away and start playing with that. And we have a VR version as well, where you can literally go into what we call the ready room, dial up a character using your hands, using these menu systems, and step through a portal into one of our partner's worlds. So that would be high fidelity in VR chat right now, where you can now take your avatar and show them off.
[00:13:48.057] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that one of the things that I found to be a lot different between some of the different social VR experiences, you know, there's Oculus Social has a certain limited amount of things that you can do to customize it, as well as big screen VR and, you know, alt space VR is very minimal. I think all of these systems are going to get more and more complex over time, but yet I feel like it's kind of like this homogenous feeling where you're kind of like an anonymous masked figure, but you don't have any of your own personality that's able to really come out. But at the same time, when I would go into some of these experiences like High Fidelity or VRChat, to kind of have one of the custom avatars, it starts to mark me as somebody who's a newbie. And it's like, I want to sort of have a certain amount of social stature of expressing my identity of who I actually want to feel like, but yet, not having the time or technical capabilities or the initiative to be able to do these custom avatars, it hasn't been able to have that full expression. And so it almost creates an opposite effect of not having that. But with more 3D, it sounds like it's starting to try to democratize that a little bit.
[00:14:53.891] Chris Madsen: Absolutely. The last thing we ever want to do in social VR is meet our doppelganger. It's just like, oh, I'm not unique anymore. We all want to be unique. We want to express ourselves the way we want to express ourselves. And we want to give people the tools to do that. What's really cool about Morph as well is, you know, it's all about the artist community for us. We have over 800 artists around the world creating awesome content. We have thousands more signed up expressing a desire to create these custom contents. We just released what's called Artist Tools, which now allow people to create on whatever platform they want, whatever platform the artist is used to, you know, Maya and all of that, to create their stuff and import it into the Morph character system so that then we can take advantage of that Morph character system. And what I mean by that is, you know, we have smart clothing. So whatever your body shape is, whether you're a 400-pound man or a small child, that clothing is going to auto-fit all of those shapes. So you don't have to worry. That's taken out of the equation now, which is great. One size really fits all. So yes, you can go to our extensive library and download awesome content that people have already made, or you can make your own now. And so we're excited to see what people come up with. I think we're going to be very surprised, and I'm looking forward to that.
[00:16:09.608] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that I've noticed in going into social VR and having different experiences of embodied presence where you actually feel like you're in the character is that I feel like that really helps to have a mirror and to have some time to move my hands around and to let my mind know that because I'm in first-person perspective I can't always necessarily see what I look like but being able to look at myself You know, because when I look at myself, I know what I look like and I sort of have this mental projection of that, but yet when I go into a VR experience, I think it helps to have that moment to be able to check in with yourself and see what you really look like to really deepen that sense of embodied presence.
[00:16:45.633] Chris Madsen: Yeah, so in our ready room, we actually have a mirror in there, of course, because it's so powerful to be able to look. It does something to your brain, right? It's like something clicks in your brain of, wow, I'm seeing my reflection. It's reacting to every move I make. This is really me. Your brain just accepts that. And it's awesome.
[00:17:04.607] Kent Bye: Yeah, in the academic world, it's called the virtual body ownership illusion. And there's a couple of ways to invoke it. One is to just have hand tracking be matching exactly. And I think, you know, having an inverse kinematic solution right now, because you're just tracking the hands, it's really hard to get the full body in there. You know, it almost does an opposite effect of breaking the illusion of the virtual body ownership illusion when you don't have your elbows exactly where they're supposed to be. And so I think that technology is going to get there eventually, but I think that's one of the limitations of embodiment right now in virtual reality. especially having the feet tracked as well. I think once people have feet tracking, I know there's going to be some experiences this week that I'm going to try out where people are starting to use the pucks from HTC Vive to be able to start to experiment with doing the feet tracking to be able to get the full embodiment. But having had just one real experience of full embodiment at Sundance, the real virtual reality, where I was able to actually see my feet and walk around this sci-fi world in an untethered way, So without the tether, with having the hands and feet tracked, you know, The Void was doing some stuff with kind of like an inverse kinematic, but it wasn't really like as solid as this experience called Real Virtuality that I did about a year ago now. But that sense of embodied presence that I had was the deepest that I ever have, and I think that once we get that in consumer VR, I think it's just gonna blow people's minds away.
[00:18:27.708] Chris Madsen: Yeah, I did that same experience at Sundance and it was extremely powerful. I think people are going to be very surprised how powerful feet tracking is, that it really takes that level of presence up, doesn't it?
[00:18:39.961] Kent Bye: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's proved out by what they found with the virtual body ownership illusion. Now the other thing that invokes that is a mixed reality passive haptic feedback. So being able to get actual haptic feedback from reaching out. And if somebody's touching your body and you see the virtual object, and if you see a virtual finger and a real finger touching you at the same point at the same time, That haptic feedback is also really important. So I think passive haptic feedback devices and having that level of maybe mixed reality I think is going to take it to even the next level. But right now we're kind of just waiting for the technology to get there. Also, you have this system within your Ready Room, but as virtual reality creators, how are they going to create environments that allow people to see themselves and get that sense of embodiment, or what is the ritual going to be for you to really kind of get embodied. Probably one of the best examples I saw this year at Sundance was Chocolate, where they gave you like 20 to 30 seconds to really just kind of orient yourself to this, you know, crazy robot that you have with like eight arms, but you're moving them around and kind of you're able to control it. But it gave me such a deeper sense of embodied presence in that way.
[00:19:50.517] Chris Madsen: Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, we're doing so much progress in the way of avatars. Eye tracking is another big one, right? I would be surprised if generation 2, and at the very least generation 3 headsets, are going to have the eye tracking capabilities. Right now, you know, people are using randomized and simulating that eye tracking, which in itself is quite powerful. But to actually have your physical eyes tracked, I think is going to be amazing. Also, the mouth, the lip syncing, right? Using those visemes, the phonemes, to simulate the way your mouth actually moves. VRChat does that really well. High Fidelity's implemented that. Super powerful experiences.
[00:20:26.462] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was just thinking of VR Pill as this avatar that has like a giant ball head and the mouth is huge, but that same sort of mouth tracking, I just remember that that was one of the first times I saw really exaggerated correlation between what he was saying and what the animation was. There's the McGurgan effect, which is, you know, if you say va or ba, and if you are hearing that same sound without seeing the visual feedback, it sort of changes how you hear it. So, yeah, just those little subtle things give that additional layer of sense of presence. So, for you, what are some of the next steps for Morph3D?
[00:21:04.077] Chris Madsen: Yeah, so like I said, we've released the artist tools, we're putting the creativity in people's hands. We have a lot of steps over this next year. So once you download this tool, you're going to be seeing updates to this on a regular basis. We've got so many cool things to implement, you know, projection mapping, where you can put tattoos and textures on your body. One cool thing about Morph 2 is you can do these morphing techniques in runtime. So if a platform is actually using our API, you can do crazy things like Look, there's a potion over there. Let's go drink it as soon as you drink the potion Maybe you age 40 years or you hit your hand with a virtual hammer and it swells to twice its normal size You can do all of these things real time and that you can only imagine the cool things you can do with that one of the ideas I have is creating maybe like this Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter tea party right where everybody's seated around the table and you're serving these foods and every time you eat a food maybe it does some randomized effect on your body that nobody really knows what it's gonna do so half the fun is just watching people eat these things and just have their body do all kinds of crazy random morphs so much fun you can have
[00:22:14.884] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when you mentioned tattoos there, it made me think of this principle of identity, which is that it's really expressing your values and who you are by, you know, how you appear. And so having things like customized tattoos and being able to really draw and take it maybe beyond what is customized way. So what is that process of being able to add that extra flair or clothing if they want to make it something that is completely and totally unique beyond what anyone else has at all?
[00:22:43.632] Chris Madsen: So you mean with the artist tools? What are those like? So yeah, like I said, it allows artists to create on their whatever platform they're already comfortable with and then the artist tool just makes that work with the morph characters. Now with the tattoos and whatnot, some of the ideas we have is like even having a tattoo gun. Maybe you can hand me the gun, Kent, and I can come over to you and just start drawing tattoos on your body. We can have all kinds of fun with that.
[00:23:08.620] Kent Bye: Right. And so in terms of the optimization and performance, what are some of the constraints that you're using in order to make it such that these avatars don't make the experience start to drop frames?
[00:23:18.282] Chris Madsen: So we have level of detail sliders. So it really is as simple as grabbing the slider and dropping it down if you need to, say, create for a mobile platform versus a desktop. So we handle that. We have multiple levels of LODs.
[00:23:33.350] Kent Bye: And so with this integration with VRChat and High Fidelity, what's the way to start to customize and create your own avatar? Do you go to morph3d.com, or how do you start to actually customize it and get it into these experiences?
[00:23:45.216] Chris Madsen: So yeah, come to morph3d.com. You can download all the stuff there to get started. We're going to have everything available by the end of this week. And eventually, though, we want to get these tools actually onto the platforms themselves. So if you're cruising around one of these social VR platforms, you can walk into a Morph store and access all of those tools right there. And what we're really excited about is seeing these marketplaces spring up on these different platforms where artists can start selling these items and maybe even make a living doing so. Of all the artists we have, so many are making a full-time living just creating 3D content. And they love it.
[00:24:22.569] Kent Bye: And so they may create a completely customized avatar and clothing and everything?
[00:24:26.745] Chris Madsen: That's right. And something I should say about our base figures, too. I believe you've seen our Nikkei style, which is a very stylized, more of the cartoony side, which people seem to really enjoy. But the cool thing is we're expecting artists to create their own styles. And what's cool about that is once we dial in what makes that a style, kind of like those style filters you see from Prisma and stuff, imagine that. So you can create your own style. Once that's dialed in and we know exactly what that is, now you can create an infinite number of avatars based on that style.
[00:24:59.054] Kent Bye: Super cool. And does this handle like a clothing system? So you have like a base body, but you're able to change your clothes?
[00:25:05.678] Chris Madsen: Yeah, all the clothing will fit automatically with any of those body styles. Now, obviously, you know, there's going to be some types of clothing that might not look as good on another type of style. But we imagine that as people are developing these styles, there's going to be clothing that's built specifically for that type of a style.
[00:25:23.387] Kent Bye: So people are going to need to have not only an avatar character, but a whole wardrobe, it sounds like, virtually.
[00:25:29.735] Chris Madsen: Aren't we all going to have multiple skins hanging in our virtual closets? If I want to go to that board meeting, I'll get in my suit. But otherwise, I think I'm going to go as an anthropomorph.
[00:25:41.457] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was the thing that was really striking with some of my experiences of VRChat was just how often people were changing their avatar in the middle of the experience, which I think, you know, you have in some of the experiences there's different philosophies. I know high fidelity is against sort of having the floating bubble of the name of who you are, and then there's the VRChat where you have your name above you so that you can kind of fluidly change your avatar very quickly but yet you have your personal identity tracking you around but in High Fidelity it seems like it may be a little bit more like people pick a certain body to have that continuity otherwise it may be just a little bit too confusing as to if you're constantly changing your avatar all the time but And the experiences I had with VRChat, having your name above your head allowed you to just change through a dozen different avatars to kind of show off people all the different crazy embodiments that you want to have.
[00:26:30.300] Chris Madsen: And I encourage everybody to show off. That's my funnest thing, is going in and just seeing somebody stepping in as a cool avatar. I'm the first to rush up and just say, you're so awesome. Keep up this amazing work. And you can just see them shine as they're getting the compliment. And people are having so much fun parading around. I mean, seriously, hang out at one of the incoming portals on High Fidelity or VRChat and just watch this menagerie of awesome characters parade through. It's so entertaining.
[00:26:59.305] Kent Bye: Awesome. So what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:27:02.909] Chris Madsen: What do I want to experience in VR? I want to experience everything in VR. What I want to experience I don't think has reared its head yet. I think we're still in this exploration phase. We're at the tip of the iceberg. We haven't seen what this holds. I'm looking for experiences that have an impact on my consciousness, that can change the way I think, that can give me insight into myself and the world around me. I think this is why I'm so keen on the educational VR as well, because to be able to experience what it's like to be in a molecule just opens up your mind in new ways. It's almost like VR can let you experience things in a way that even a caveman would understand what's going on because it is experiential. Our brain is actually interpreting it as a real event, which makes that retention of that information huge. I mean, this is what we were made to do is experience the environment. VR allows us to do that.
[00:28:00.430] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:28:08.452] Chris Madsen: The ultimate potential is that it's limitless, that we are in a new frontier that's not bound by the laws of physics, that we can create whatever we want, that we're going to be able to share our hopes and our dreams and our ideas and our attitudes by creating our own spaces. This is no longer going to be in the hands of professional developers. We are all getting these amazing tools that will allow all of us, regardless of skill set, to start creating our virtual worlds that reflect who we are. So, in the words of Terrence McKenna, true intimacy means come to my world, see my dreams, my hopes, my fears, and by the child is the age of 10, 12, they've effectively built an environment the size of Manhattan reflecting who they are and what they're about.
[00:29:04.827] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, that just reminds me of, you know, my similar mission of VR, of going to VR and to learn more about yourself and to connect to others. And, you know, I think, you know, because you have this background in therapy and being able to actually go deep with people, I think that this inner self-reflection, but have it expressed in a way that's an architecture that you can actually be embodied and to share with other people. I think that's a vision of a level of intimacy that we can't even imagine yet. Being able to see, like, I think we already start to see it in VRChat, of the people that go in there and create these worlds. It's like a little bit of a reflection of them. And we're able to get a taste of what's going on in their mind. And I think that it's less about just consuming these worlds, but also creating your own and being able to share the metaverse, that dream of everybody kind of doing that, but also doing that balance of consuming and creating, of listening and talking, kind of like this where everybody is kind of living into their gift.
[00:30:01.362] Chris Madsen: Yeah, it's amazing. There's so much to explore out there. I encourage everybody to, you know, make some friends in social VR. Create your own little social group and explore what you can do in a virtual environment. One interesting thing I saw just the other day in what's called the Great Pug. It's a bar in VRChat. And it's run by these two guys, Owlboy and Rom30. And these guys are fantastic. But they've dealt with a few folks that have maybe pushed the boundaries a little bit on what's acceptable in social VR. So they were trying to think of a clever way to deal with that. and Ron brought in a gun to the bar but it had the opposite effect of what he thought he thought it would be fun to have a gun in the bar but really it actually disturbed him he's like this doesn't feel right this is kind of like the opposite effect that I wanted to have so we like spent like a half hour like you know pointing guns at each other and just experiencing and exploring what that was like to have that in a virtual environment and it's powerful and I think we all need to be careful on one hand of what we do in virtual reality we need to explore and figure out what's okay what's healthy what's not I mean we could go off on a whole conversation on that Kent.
[00:31:16.017] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, no, I've experienced that objectification and the distance that happens when you're, you know, because there are these Capture the Flag games where you're shooting each other, but, you know, it's kind of like a context is right, but yet when you're in a bar, it's more about creating a context of intimacy and communication and connection than having the gun in that bar. It's just kind of interesting to see that, yeah, and actually, you know, there's certain contexts that we go and maybe There's some very gory experiences in VR that I've seen here. Kill Incursions VR, for example, just a lot of blood and gore. And it's just super intense. And yet, it's a context where if people want to go into that state of mind, they can have that experience. And that may be therapeutic for them in some way. It may be kind of working something out. But yet, it's interesting how important the environment is to that. That's what I'm really noticing. You're in the bar, and the gun. It's the context that changes it.
[00:32:08.207] Chris Madsen: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:32:10.255] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:32:11.750] Chris Madsen: You're very welcome.
[00:32:13.551] Kent Bye: So that was Chris Madsen. He's the director of AR and VR for Morph3D. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I think Chris is absolutely right when he talks about this feeling of awe and wonder that you get when you see people come into either VRChat or High Fidelity with their super crazy different avatars that they have. There's just something about the ability to have these different levels of embodiment. I could tell you about it, but until you actually experience what it's like to see somebody walk around in a cat suit or turn into a giant robot or walk around as an anthropomorph, which I think is super interesting to see that there is this trend towards trying to use these different animals, which could have a whole range of symbolic meaning for people, and make these combinations of different animals with these anthropomorphs And that's one of the trending things that people are doing because they want to embody something that is different than just being a human. So when the social VR applications like VRChat or High Fidelity allow you to do that, you can actually see this crazy spectrum of different types of avatars. And that, I think, becomes a part within itself of seeing what other people are embodying. There's also a certain amount of social status that comes based upon how cool your avatar looks. And you know, that's something that when you go into a social VR space, there is a little bit of a stratification in terms of like, if you just have the default avatar, and there's other people who have just this really fleshed out, creative and innovative avatars, then it changes the social dynamics of your interactions. It'd be kind of like going into a super fancy dance club and you're just wearing your street clothes. And so there is this challenge because there's this block between your technical capabilities of being able to actually generate some of these avatars versus the feeling that you get when you actually do have an avatar that really matches your identity. So in looking at Second Life and the history that they've had, you know, virtual worlds for over 14 years now, avatar creation, that identity, is something that people are willing to pay for. They're willing to have other people do that creativity if there's different technical tools that they need to be able to do. It's just something that changes the social dynamics within these social VR experiences that people end up being willing to pay for. And so I think Morph3D is trying to fill that gap a little bit, allowing people to go in and customize and create an avatar that really reflects who they are. And there's some default Morph3D options that are available on VRChat, but there's also options to be able to, you know, customize your own and then export it and import it into these two programs. I also just really respect Chris's dedication towards creating virtual reality as a daily practice, something that he tries to do something new every day. And he's ended up spending quite a lot of time within social VR. You know, one of the other things that Chris has told me is that the people that have been creating these social VR worlds, as well as doing these avatar experiments, kind of like the merry pranksters where they're trying to push the limit of what's possible within these social interactions and creating this somewhat of a psychedelic space in some sense where you're just having experiences that you've never been able to have before. I mean the thing that comes to mind is this avatar that I saw that was made out of like five cats and it's like these five cats that are combined together and it's just something that I've never even seen before. I never even thought about like taking cat bodies and then turning that into my sense of identity, or embodying any number of different characters from your favorite movie or comic book. One of the features that Chris mentioned that I think is super interesting is having the ability to change different aspects of your avatar that's interactive within the experience. So being able to change the size or shape of different aspects of your avatar based upon your interactions within the world. And Chris and I agree that once you have like full body tracking, like full on tracking where your entire body's within virtual reality, then it takes the level of embodied presence to the next level. And we haven't really necessarily seen that within consumer VR yet. I think you have to either have additional tracking for your feet for the Vive. And I think that from what I've seen in terms of a lot of the AI algorithms and being able to do this skeletal tracking, I think that, you know, the camera based tracking within the Oculus Rift is going to be much better suited to be able to make that switch into doing this full body tracking within VR. And once people have that, it's going to be such a huge difference of actually feeling like you're embodied in these virtual worlds. When you have this one-to-one correlation to having your full body tracked within VR. Right now, there's just a lot of times where you just have the ghost of a hands within VR because bubbles are very difficult to track within the inverse kinematic algorithms. And so it's actually better to not do the tracking because it ends up breaking presence when there's a disconnect between your proprioception and what you're seeing within VR. But once some of those challenges are solved within camera based tracking and being able to have your full skeleton within virtual reality, then having a full sense of embodiment and your avatar is going to become even more important within social VR. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening to 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. I've got a few events that I have coming up here. I'm going to have a live stream question and answer period on Friday, August 11th. That's going to be for my $5 Patreon members. And then I'm going to be doing a webinar on a number of different topics, either on the philosophical implications of VR, emotion and storytelling in VR, or the ethics in VR, or moving from the information age to the experiential age. So you can go and vote on which one of these topics that you want to hear the most on my Patreon. And I'm also going to be having more gatherings within social VR. I think on September 5th, I'm going to be having a gathering within social VR for my Patreon members. So you can become a member to my Patreon today to check out these events as well as to just support this podcast. It's a listener-supported podcast and I wouldn't be able to do this type of coverage without your support. So become a member today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
