Social VR and Esports

Checking out what it's like to invite friends to watch a tournament on Twitch from various social VR environments now and what the future of this activity may look like.

Originally posted August 2019

tags: devlog social entertainment

Esports is growing rapidly and social VR brings fans from across the world to have presence while watching the game. This dev log explores what the current onboarding experience looks like to watch a twitch livestream with friends in a VR capable platform.

If I showed you any of these screenshots and asked you if you wanted to join me in watching some e-sports, how difficult would it be for others to participte?

The end of this dev log thinks about what the future of esports may turn into; from watching the game on a screen to being in the world watching the action happen in front of you.

BigscreenVR

The VR Movie Theater: Watch your favorite movies with friends & family around the world.

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Overall high friction but also high engagement - random users would pop in every now and then expecting to watch some content. It was easy to jump to different content since it was my own desktop streaming and not the direct Twitch link.

Pros:

• Good UI / UX
• Desktop stream was low latency
• Can easily change the environments

Cons:

• VR only
• Had to copy a code from computer to VR
• Friend needed to navigate through menu to find me

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Anarchy Arcade

Build worlds using your games, movies, pictures, & shortcuts.

Turn your entire digital life into a game. AArcade is a 3D desktop that launches shortcuts to absolutely anything you like. Join the anarchy of the persistent online metaverse, or remain in your own private reality. Casual in-game building features, plus hundreds of thousands of addons.

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Watching Twtich on the in-game web browser screen, spawned by the player.

Pros:

• Top notch editing system
• Persistent virtual spaces
• Easy to full screen something

Cons:

• Multiplayer lacks easy avatar customization and VOIP
• VR mode is unreleased, desktop mode only
• Hard to find where text chat is

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VRChat

Unity based social VR platform, free to play and create custom avatars and worlds (over 50,000 community created worlds).

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I first saw my friend was online through the vrchat.net website and launched the world he was in. Once I found my friend in the world, we dropped a portal into another world that had a video player.

World: https://vrchat.net/home/launch?worldId=wrld_fae3fa95-bc18-46f0-af57-f0c97c0ca90a

Overall low friction

Pros:

• Best custom avatar experience
• Most players in social VR
• Easy to invite friends to the world

Cons:

• Have to find a world with video player
• The video player lags a bit behind stream
• Fixed size and position of screen

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Hubs

Share a virtual room with friends. Watch videos, play with 3D objects, or just hang out.

Overall very low friction, easy onboarding with custom avatars and voip + easy room setup made this a winner for watching esports inside of social WebVR. https://hubs.mozilla.com/

Pros:

• Less than 1 minute to setup
• Easy to invite others with hubs.link url
• Avatar embodied P2P communication

Cons:

• No ambient lighting for video
• Few choices for custom avatars
• Must hold right-click to full screen window

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JanusWeb

A WebGL implementation of JanusVR, an editor and web browser that re-imagines webpages as collaborative 3D webspaces interconnected by portals.

The code for this world is open source: https://github.com/janusvr-examples/forest-cinema

Jumping into the world with the Twitch stream playing simply took clicking a link.

Pros:

• Self hosted and open source
• Ambient lighting with video player
• Easy to change the video source from JML

Cons:

• Custom avatar system is rough
• No gravity by default
• Lacking VR mode UX / UI

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The Future

The future trend of this medium is to become more immersive than what it is now. The progression will go something like this:

Watch the game as if you're sitting at the arena on a screen. Oculus Venues is exploring environments like this. Eventually there will be a SBS3D stream for popular games also.

Be inside the game, watching the fighters right in front of you as you cheer from the sidelines. Hear the sounds, see the animations, and fatalities in fully immersive VR.

AR will bring the game to any location, physical or virtual, to watch popular e-sports in such as Street Fighter. You are the background characters watching the fighters match.

This AR stream can then be recycled back into VR environments for mixed reality viewing.