![]() A montage shows the pair frolicking in a virtual amusement park. Dust Bunny, who teaches belly dancing, discusses her romantic bond with Toaster, a user who "unmuted" himself just to communicate with her. Jenny, who teaches sign language on the platform, speaks about her real-life suicide attempt. Shot in 2020, the film follows several users as they find a refuge in VRChat from the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. They interact socially as they might in real life, using full-body tracking - sensors that map their real bodies onto their virtual ones - to perform activities such as dancing, sign language and holding hands. Within this digitally animated world, users manifest as avatars of their choice - anime characters, aliens, animals, even Kermit the Frog. The documentary takes place entirely inside VRChat, a series of interlocking virtual environments that people access using VR headsets or desktop computers. Are humans really built to interact in virtual environments? Don't we spend enough time on Zoom already? For a closer look inside our potential future, I turned to We Met in Virtual Reality, a 2022 documentary from 23-year-old director Joe Hunting that was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and can be streamed on HBO Max. To those of us who don't even own headsets, the concept of a metaverse may seem a little out there. When Zuckerberg posted a picture of his own virtual avatar, Facebook users mocked it as cartoonish. About a year ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta and announced his plan to invite users of his social media platforms into a "metaverse" based on VR technology.īut since then, the metaverse has "had a rocky start," in the words of a recent New York Times story. ![]() ![]() Virtual reality has been touted as the next big thing since the 1990s. Hunting's documentary follows people who socialize using virtual avatars in the immersive world of VRChat. ![]()
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