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Comment by randomdrake | Hacker News Reader

VRChat was released last year and has been picking up momentum all over the place. If you have not had the chance to see what it's like, it's worth at least checking out as an observer.

The worlds and experiences are reminiscent of Stephenson's Snow Crash or Cline's Ready Player One in so many ways. It's eery, fascinating, and altogether odd.

Add on top of this that spectators, sometimes in the thousands, watch these virtual experiences live on Twitch.tv, and you have a very "we're in the future" feeling.

You can check out plenty of live streams of people experiencing this on Twitch.tv now:

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/VRChat

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>The worlds and experiences are reminiscent of Stephenson's Snow Crash or Cline's Ready Player One in so many ways. It's eery, fascinating, and altogether odd.

It looks more like VR Idiocracy to me. Especially if you check out twitch and see donation stuff and stream overlays. It's just a platform for vomiting memes. https://imgur.com/ZkJq1cr

On the other hand, if it were super-serious-Deus-Ex-plotting-the-control-of-the-proletariat-VR-Chat, I don't think I could take that seriously either (and would be quickly overrun with Uganda knuckles anyway).

There's more to it than simply what you see at first glance. Snow Crash and Ready Player One described the experience at length. The freedom of expression, of identity of who or what you could be. The ways that people talk, interact, explore, and represent themselves in the virtual realities of those books is more than just "how it looks." Some concrete examples are pulling up virtual windows to access resources from "outside" the reality, or the multitude of sizes and shapes that people represent themselves with.

The descriptions of what earlier versions of the virtual realities in Snow Crash or Ready Player One were, line up with the basics that VRChat encompasses.

Those are some of the things I was addressing when I said it was reminiscent.

I wonder why Second Life hasn’t been more aggressive capitalizing on VR. It seems like they were perfectly positioned for it.

The founder of Linden Labs, Philip Rosedale, recently released his new VR only successor to second life, Sansar (https://atlas.sansar.com/). It seems pretty promising.

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