The First Completely Virtual Reality-Made Short Documentary

Just Met in Virtual Worlds sets new standards for VR filmmaking and offers an optimistic perspective on the metaverse's potential.

When Facebook changed its name to "Meta" and declared that it was ready to open up new realms of virtual reality, the concept of the "Metaverse" began to enter common discourse in 2021. Commentators were mostly unimpressed or unconvinced by their suggested metaverse, which resulted in a tepid reception. Updates on the company's alleged plans for VR have been sluggish to arrive since then. Snow Crash still seems to be a ways off. However, there are currently available immersive online communities. The most well-known of them is Second Life, albeit its heyday has passed. VRChat is an engagement platform with a comparatively full set of tools for avatar and world-building. It is one of the more well-known metaverses that people actively use and like. A YouTuber who discovers human interest tales by speaking with players in games like VRChat has been covered. With the creation of the first wholly in-game, feature-length metaverse documentary, a filmmaker has now taken that concept to a new level. Thankfully, We Met in Virtual Reality is not just a noteworthy first but also quite pleasant on its own.

After directing several short VR-based films in the past, Joe Hunting has developed this genre of film into one of his specialties. He spent a year living among several VRChat-based subcultures for this project, working actively with them, and eventually documenting their activities while conducting interviews. And when I say that the documentary was entirely shot in-game, I also mean the actual filming. The camera feature in Hunting was created as a VRChat avatar asset, therefore a significant portion of the production process involved getting used to the learning curve it presented. Before now, most VR films were based around screen capture and sharing, similar to the model set by video game streaming and uploads. This establishes a new benchmark for the medium and allows much greater visual dynamism.

The fact that Hunting is clearly acting more like a traditional documentarian in this instance is another small but important distinction between screen recording and employing an in-game camera. This sometimes unfolds in an eavesdropping manner, much like what would occur if Frederick Wiseman lived in a sci-fi setting. This is a fitting vibe considering that none of these people bat an eye when an anime girl (there are a lot of anime girls on VRChat) starts chatting up a demon. The aesthetics serve as a visual reminder of how commonplace everything is, an extension of everyday human interaction.

But it's impossible to ignore the particular advantages of that virtual component. In We Met in Virtual Reality, many of the subjects talk about how they like the platform because it allows them to express their gender freely, engage in risk-free sex work, or simply socialize without worrying about contracting COVID. And that's not even mentioning how games like this can let people in wildly different corners of the world communicate with each other when they would probably never do so otherwise. One of the more famous of these tiny groups, an American Sign Language study group, is extremely charming. This is the kind of application that a chatty host notes VR is particularly well suited for, as the controls enable a level of hand gesture precision that other video games do not, and the use of anonymous avatars helps reassure users who may be wary of video chat.

We Met in Virtual Reality presents a vision of the metaverse that is, almost to a fault, much more upbeat than most of what we see in nonfiction. There isn't much discussion of VRChat's drawbacks or users' nasty behavior. Everything important is mainly implied here; when the safety rules and procedures for a digital strip joint are listed, we may assume that prior transgressions necessitated the necessity for them. But I believe there is enough negative press about the metaverse that we can accept a more upbeat portrayal. Because of Meta's unserious and unappetizing notion of virtual worlds, we may lose the real potential that