INSIDE THE PHIA X THRILLSEEKER X TUBE VRCHAT RAVE

The following was written on 8/30/23, well over a year from when this video was first published.

If you came to this post, you’re probably looking for my method of how I recorded stereoscopic VR gameplay. Well let me tell you this: The method I used here was scuffed AF and I have since improved the method to be waaayyyy better. For proof, check out my more recent VR180 minidoc about VRChat’s Hip-Hop Day from earlier this year.

Around the time I recorded the Tube rave video, I had never actually been to a proper VRChat rave. But then the YouTube algorithm gods guided its digital hand to serve me Strasz’ documentary about the VRC rave scene and… I was more than interested to say the least. Coincidentally, my cousin also heard about the VRC rave scene and found a small VRC rave community to hang with. He even tried hosted his own rave within VRChat and I ofcourse had to join in; though only maybe a dozen people showed up.

I don’t know who sent the invite or how she came to know about my cousin’s event, but YO. Phiabunny, the Virtual Reality Show hostess herself, spawned in. And like… to see THE virtual girl that you watched all pandemic-lockdown long to be right “in front of you” in full 3d virtual reality presence was wild. I was unexpectedly star struck, and thought, “holy shit, she’s real.” And that validated the entire VRChat rave scene to me oddly enough. Like, if a big VR personality is in the building, then this shit’s to be taken seriously! Parasocial relationships, fan-boying and all that aside, I was just so hyped to run into Phia “in the wild.”

I tried my hardest to not nerd out, cause Angelenos try to let “celebs” live their own lives. Leave the yandere’ing to the tourists and transplants. I talked to her for a tiny bit, just tryna crack as many jokes back to back. And then she left without me sending a friend request or even getting a photo. I was a VRC noob at the time so I wasn’t fully familiar with the VR motion controls yet either. Like, I wasn’t even sure if it’d be cool to send her a friend request cause, “don’t I need to build more rapport first?” Noobie AF i’m telling you. Pero sayang na’man, bro.

Aight, so VRChat raves are real. And now I wanna go to a “big” one. I wanted to check out any of the ones Strasz had mentioned in their video – Shelter, Ghost Club, Loner, any of them joints. I had to find out what that was like. Then outta nowhere, Phia drops her own video about VRC raves and at the end, mentions her, Thrill and Tube were gonna co-host a rave at the end of the month! Hot damn, that was my chance to check it out fr.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Around this time I had started experimenting with how I could record VR gameplay, stereoscopically. As in, get VR-video of VR gameplay. Disclaimer: The following method should not be done because it’s not good. I’ll make a video about my updated (and much better) method later this year.

So how does a PC VR player do a regular 2D recording of VR gameplay? At the time, there was this OBS plugin called Virtual Output, which allowed you to monitor the feed of one of the eyes on a headset. Well, what is VR video if not both eyes recorded side-by-side? I tinkered around with it and finally got an OBS scene set up such that it would display the Virtual Output feeds of each eye, side by side, and OBS would record it all as a 4096×2048 h264 video. Little did I know that there’s way more editing post-work involved, and the Virtual Output feeds that I was getting were severely cropped by the “FOV stencil.”

Later I would discover a method to bypass the FOV stencil… but that would be almost a year later. For now, all I had was this method, and I didn’t know any better so I ran with it. And I couldn’t be more juiced, even with a scuffed method. I just thought “that must be how a VR feed looks.”

Finally, rave night.

I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t really have any VRChat friends to roll with at the time except my cousin, who wasn’t anywhere to be found the night of the event. I was hyped regardless. Solo I went. Spawned in… to an actual glowing Tube as the namesake suggests. Fucking rad. The walls were covered in “handwritten” messages from Patreon supporters, devs, and it looked like a legit venue only way more futuristic. Wall to wall lights pulsing to music. Dope. And then you open the door, and the music is BLASTING. Really cool bit of immersion there. The world was crackin, dozens of people in the room and this was already the third overflow instance. I was even amazed by the look of the crowd; lots of custom avatars and I had never seen so many full-body-tracked dancers ever. I was pretty blown away by the immersiveness and the sense of presence from everybody.

I also don’t be going to raves like that. Hip-hop is my “home genre,” so the look and sound of the whole event was a completely new vibe to me. I can thank VRChat raves for opening me up to enjoying music genres I typically would never have listened to. Thanks to VRC, I became a fan of Drum n Bass, Jersey Club and whatever gives me them Lain Cyberia vibes.

Ok, but what do you actually do at a VR rave? Honestly? Dance, 2 step, people watch, talk to folks, and consume things. Same thing as with IRL music events. I still hadn’t figured out how to manage a drink while wearing a headset, so I was just blowing CBD vape the entire time, which was a dope vibe in itself. But with a newly unfamiliar music genre blasting in my ears, and being unfamiliar with VRC audio controls at the time, I called it in about an hour later and hopped over to a Taco Bell world to cool off and reflect on what I just saw. With the world opening back up, I would eventually find myself still opting to go to VR music events when I wanna save money or if I got an early morning the next day or whatever. But the fact is that it’s still a great option to have if you just wanna vibe out and catch up with folks or discover new music.

If I were a better storyteller, editor, docmentarian, etc, maybe I would’ve had the foresight to communicate all this in the original video. But I was just so new to everything that I didn’t have the experience or lexicon to articulate it all. But now, over a year later, I can say that this event was one I’ll never forget. It opened me up to VRChat as more than a “game.” It legit replicates and even builds on top of certain social activities. It’ll be exciting to see what happens once social AR becomes a thing and how we’ll enjoy live events. Can’t wait. But till then yall, stay immersed.

~Kuya