Developer Update - 17 November 2022

Official Dev Updates
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Welcome to the Developer Update for November 17th, 2022!

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If you’d like to catch up, you can read our previous Developer Update from November 10th.

Creator Companion Reminder

We’ve released an in-app banner for the VRChat Creator Companion Getting Started guide! We’re doing this to get people more aware of the impending migration in January 2023.

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We’ll be updating the linked page with more information focusing on migration too, since most people will be migrating old projects to start.

If you’d like to read more about the VRChat Creator Companion, check the docs! You can also check out some of our previous Dev Updates where we talk about it:

SDK2 Deprecation Reminder

In addition to moving our SDK management to the VCC in January 2023, SDK2 will be deprecated at the same time. SDK2 will no longer be available for download.

At a future date, SDK2 worlds and avatars will no longer be permitted for uploads. We will support existing SDK2 content within VRChat for as long as possible.

VRChat 2023 New Years Plans!

Here’s a few more updates on the upcoming VRChat New Year’s celebrations!

VRChat NYE World Posters, Food Trucks, Storefronts

We’re about halfway through the Poster, Food Truck, and Storefront slots for the NYE world!

Things are looking good and chugging along. We’ve also been inviting lots of new creators and contributors to create content for the world.

The VRChat Entertainment Network

We made a reminder tweet for the Entertainment Network!

The VRChat Entertainment Network is a 26-hour long video stream we’ll be running! You can contribute video for us to play during the stream!

Check out this post to learn more. You can make a video and submit it right now! The deadline is listed on that page.

Please get your content in sooner rather than later!

Ongoing Development

Groups!!

A TON of the effort this week continued to be on Groups. We’ve been evaulating its state as time moves on, and still aim for at least an Open Beta this year, if not a full release.

Right now, we’re testing the (very complicatedly interwoven) systems and squashing tons of bugs. We’re also smoothing out some rough spots, as well as filling out documentation and guides.

Groups is taking up a lot of our time recently, and probably will continue to do so until we’ve got the first release of Groups out of the door. Unfortunately, that means these Dev Updates might be a little thin until we have something to show off.

OSC Trackers

OSC-driven full body tracking is coming soon!

In an upcoming release, we will offer support for receiving tracker data over OSC for use with our existing calibrated full body IK system. This has been in closed testing for quite some time, and we’re really happy with how things have gone.

We’ll be providing documentation on how to implement sending tracker data from an OSC sender application. It’s fairly straightforward! You simply send position and rotation of the tracker to VRChat, and we work out the rest.

Also, this is completely hardware-agnostic! As long as you can determine a position and rotation of a particular tracked point via any device you can think of, you can use that point to drive one of the existing calibrated full body tracking “anchors” like your feet, hips, shoulders, etc. We’ve seen internal and external testers implement OSC support for many different types of tracking hardware – SlimeVR, Kinect, a regular ol’ webcam (with some Python openCV magic), and even a Perception Neuron suit!

In fact, SlimeVR contributor Louka Lemire showed off their SlimeVR trackers and tracking server working with OSC-controlled tracking! It’s a little more impressive than us dragging around some handles in Unity. :smiley:

Notably, OSC trackers are also supported on Quest… which means Quest users can use Full Body Tracking, natively!

Of course, you’ll need hardware capable of tracking your body, and a computer capable of processing the tracking data and transmitting that data to the Quest. With those assumptions you can use the exact same tracking solution you’d use on PC on standalone Quest VRChat.

Keep in mind that the computer involved here doesn’t need to run VR, it just has to handle a tracking system and network traffic. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get this working on a Raspberry Pi…

We’ll have more info soon! No release date yet.

Conclusion

That’s all for this week! Like last week, Groups is where we’re spending a ton of our current efforts! So, not much movement elsewhere.

Thank you, and we’ll talk to you next time.

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Please look into fixing the stream cam.
Its next to impossible to bring up the “Focus” settings. And turning “Smoothed” on in the “Behavior” settings causes your avatar to appear in the shot when walking forward and filming. This is a big problem for content creators like myself.

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Will OSC fbt be limited to the same 10hz update rate as all the other OSC things? If not, will other OSC synced floats eventually get some sort of smoothing?

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Woah, OSC fullbody! Nice.

Meanwhile, stares at calendar noticing rapidly approaching deadline for VRCEE uhh… good thing i went ahead and got permission from the artist of the song I’m making my music video for. Now to actually get more footage.

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OSC tracking feeds in at max speed. It sends to other users at IK rate, same as any other tracking system.

OSC tracking and OSC param updating aren’t related-- they just both use OSC. They’re different systems.

This is a known bug, we just have to find time and resources to fix it. No ETA, sadly.

This is known too, but the solution is to make “Smooth” less… well, “Smooth”.

We’ll look into it. No ETA though.

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if im to take a wild guess, OSC Controlled Tracking will also be used to add hand/finger tracking to PC at some point in the future (well hopefully)

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OSC Trackers can update locally as fast as your can receive the data (so every frame). They’ll then appear just like SteamVR trackers appear now (you still need to calibrate to them). The pose you get from them will then be synced like any other FBT pose would be via NetIK. There’s no involvement of animators or parameters.

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Glad to see Groups progress is still chugging along healthily! Excitedly waiting it’s arrival~ ^^

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving holiday so would we expect to not see a dev update next week or just moved to a different day?

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Excited to implement native support for this in SlimeVR and bring FBT to the quest soon :slight_smile:

The demo footage appears to support both FK and IK - should we expect support of both, or of only IK?

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Wouldn’t that require anchors for each joints in the hands?

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Good question. I’ll probably skip next week!

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@tupper any plans to include udon functions to detect if a user is in certain group?

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Really hope that we get native support for eye and face tracking someday, or in some way shape or form try to find or found a standard to have standardized blendshapes for face tracking.

Would make the development easier for hardware makers as well by giving them a target amount of blendshapes to aim for,
Therefore helping to push to get the carousel in motion

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Only IK. OSC Trackers are conceptually a 1:1 replacement for SteamVR trackers. FK / skeletal pose input etc is something that we’re interested in but isn’t part of this at this stage.

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We’ve not released any technical details on group features beyond the basics, but rest assured, this one has been repeated lots of places and we know its desired :slight_smile:

It’s a bit chicken and egg, unfortunately!

If I had to bet, we’d probably push for native eye tracking first while also providing better lerping/update options for OSC integrations with Animators. From there, we could figure out a native face tracking system.

We’ve found in our own use that eye tracking is a much “lower-hanging fruit” – its way more accessible technology, way easier to implement from a user side, and IMO it is an interesting argument which is more impactful in social situations. I think eye tracking is more impactful, personally, if I had to tip the scale one way or the other.

Of course, the above is not an indication of plans or anything. Just me rambling a bit. :slight_smile:

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im sure that just added better lerping/update for prams would solve most of the problems with the current eye and face tracking setups. then once the community had a common set of blendshaps, systems and such they use over OSC it should be a hell of a lot easier to add natively.

osc smooth works in the mean time to fix the slow updates, but if you set it up wrong it can crash quest users

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This is a good thing. About the Quest I think I can create a small and cheap pc to support the trackers. I already have some slimevr devices and I’m happy that I’ll be able to use on Quest

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that’s perfect that really will useful for help. ^-^

Ongoing Development

Groups!!

A TON of the effort this week continued to be on Groups. We’ve been evaulating its state as time moves on, and still aim for at least an Open Beta this year, if not a full release.

Right now, we’re testing the (very complicatedly interwoven) systems and squashing tons of bugs. We’re also smoothing out some rough spots, as well as filling out documentation and guides.

Groups is taking up a lot of our time recently, and probably will continue to do so until we’ve got the first release of Groups out of the door. Unfortunately, that means these Dev Updates might be a little thin until we have something to show off.

I think you see so many codes around the issues are something else but will take a while well try your best your teammates Vr Chat. :+1:

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Hey, are we ever gonna get an update on world persistence?

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It sounds like you’re trying to make standalone even more viable of a choice with stand-alone hand tracking and FBT (and I understand VERY unofficial talks in these comments about face tracking) which is awesome! Any idea if this will come with the stand-alone version seeing everything (or as close to it) as the desktop version? Or with Quest 2 and Pro as it currently is that’s not wholly viable?
As I see it almost all the time people will choose being able to see and hang out with their friends over having these features.