Welcome to the Developer Update for March 19, 2026.
Today’s featured world is by Waiting ⁄ 待ち by _Harim.
Announcements
Space Jam 3 is Here!
Space Jam this year is a World & Film Jam! Submissions are open from Feb 18 to Apr 5 2026 at 11:59pm PT.
Please check out our forum post to learn more about the judging criteria and prizes.
2026.1.3 is in Open Beta!
2026.1.3 is now in Open Beta! It’s a huge beta, featuring Avatar Accessories (see more below!), the ability to change your loading screen, the exclusive inventory, impostor updates, and so much more.
You can read the Open Beta notes here.
Avatar Accessories!!!
Of course, the headline feature is Avatar Accessories!
(Note: need a transcript? You can find one here.)
Avatar Accessories are… exactly what they sound like! They’re accessories that you can put on your avatar: think a hat, or sunglasses, a halo, a tail, or, well, you get the idea. There’s a lot you could do with a system like this!
But let’s just cut to it: yes, you can put cat ears on any avatar. Or Googly Eyes.
No, seriously – any avatar. If you can use the avatar, you can throw Accessories on it.
The Open Beta is something of an “early access” view of this feature. We’re still very much developing it, figuring out where things go, smoothing out the user experience, and so on.
We also want folks to focus on the feature and not so much the content, so we’ve given Open Beta testers access to a few Accessories we feel let folks explore the system, to really see what it can do (and hopefully push it a bit, so we can discover some weird edge cases).
Of course, we’ve received a lot of questions about it.
If you’ve watched the Dev Update above, you’ll see that some of those questions are repeated here (although we’re going to add a little more detail, based on added questions folks have had).
First: the big one – who will get to make Avatar Accessories?
To start, it’ll just be us. However, we’re already working with some Community creators to build some accessories with us! We’ll likely privately invite more to collaborate with us moving forward.
As far as opening the system up beyond that, well, we’re still talking about it! To be precise, it’s something that we’d like to do – likely in a system similar to the Avatar Marketplace – but there are a few questions we need to answer first, like…
How does this impact the performance rating system?
First: we’ve done a lot of work to ensure Accessories are pretty performant! By limiting the number of them you can have on your avatar, as well as carefully managing the specs of each accessory, we can be pretty precise about how much they impact performance.
But what happens when you throw a few accessories on an avatar that’s right on the line, approaching very poor? Wouldn’t that, traditionally, push it over? Well, yes – but the current system doesn’t account for that.
We think that’s okay, for now… but that’s a perilous “for now.”
We’ll likely continue to iterate on Avatar Accessories’ performance. However, it’s also likely that we’ll take a good look at the performance system in general. While that system is okay, there are a lot of ways it could be doing its job better.
In the near future, we’ll be tackling this. For now, things might be a little wonky, but we’re aware of it, and absolutely have to tackle it before we can move Accessories to some form of “UGC.”
What, what about Items!!!
Okay, so quick aside – we’ve been getting asked a lot about when Items will turn into “UGC.” Someone asks in the comments of every video! We get it. A lot of people are excited about them.
So, nothing has changed: we’re still figuring things out. The thing is, Accessories are part of figuring those things out, too. One of the earliest requests from the Community was for us to have “wearable Items” – that, it turns out, led us down quite the rabbit hole. Following through with that request meant answering even more questions – you can see how something like Items and all that they affect in VRChat can be, well, complicated.
This is what we meant when we said that we’d need time to evaluate Items – Accessories merely shows the complexities of one potential part of that system! Seriously, whenever this question comes up, we can’t emphasize enough how complex it is to add a new type of UGC to VRChat.
In short, it’s still going to be a bit, but we’ll keep you updated as we figure things out.
An added note here: we’ve certainly seen the messages on social media around this – essentially, a lot of folks feel as if us holding back here is solely for the sake of profit via selling our own content.
While that’s understandable, we want to reiterate that we’re moving slow on this intentionally, as we stated we would do from the very beginning.
Releasing a new form of UGC has an almost unlimited number of potential second order effects. It’s our job to try to plan around that, to try to think as far ahead as we can, and to try to map out every potential problem we can.
On the other hand, it’s much easier (and more controlled!) for us to put Items out ourselves. With every Item we ship, we learn a little bit more. The same can be said for every type of content we put out, including Accessories!
But Wait, What’s Different About Items and Accessories?
Well, you can’t wear a Shopping Cart.
But seriously: outside of the simple fact that you put one on, and one… uh, you don’t do that, there are several other key differences.
For one, Accessories have no scripting attached to them. They’re not interactable in the same way Items are.
They also don’t have the same limits that Items do – so, for example, worlds can’t limit their usage. Likewise, they travel with you between worlds, unlike Items. You don’t have to “spawn them in” every time you travel to a new instance.
Accessories are also separated from the Inventory, as we thought it makes sense to put them with your Avatar… which, you know, you’ll be putting them on.
Will Avatar Accessories Have a Cost?
Out of the gate, we’ll be throwing some at everyone. Some will be for sale. Some might come in a Shop bundle. Some might be just for VRC+ subscribers. We’ll see!
What About [Insert Avatar / Shader Setup Here]
We know there will be edge cases where Accessories will look funky. Point them out to us! We’ll try to fix some of them, but there will be cases where things just won’t line up. When you give folks the ability to use… well, basically any shader, you open the door to potential jank.
We’ll see what we can do!
For the curious, by the way, Accessories use our Toon Standard shader – we’ll be adding some additional functionality to it for the sake of customization, which will hopefully benefit Avatar Creators as well.
Can Worlds/Groups/Individuals Turn Accessories Off?
No. But they are hidden when you hide/block an Avatar. They’re designed to be part of an Avatar.
Creators Roadmap Update
We have updated the Creators Roadmap for March 2026!
What’s new? Box colliders! Avatar raycasts! VRCTween! World Analytics!
And, yes, of course: Soba. We have a lot in there about Soba. You should go check it out!
Box Shaped Contacts
This was mentioned in the updated Creator’s Roadmap! We thought we’d add some additional detail.
In a future SDK release, we’ll add support for Contacts that are box shaped to go alongside the existing sphere and capsule shapes. This will be available for both avatars and worlds. You’ll be able to define the width, height and depth of the box independently.
Additionally, box shaped contact receivers will come with an additional way of calculating proximity: you can either have it calculated as the distance from the sender to the center of the box, similar to the existing model, or you can calculate it as the distance from the sender to the positive Z face of the box.
We’re hoping this will benefit situations where you want a more controlled contact shape that a sphere or capsule can’t easily model, like a pushable button or a virtual touch screen.
Here’s a short demo video of box Contacts being used in a world!
A Followup on Avatar Raycasting
In last week’s Developer Update (and in the updated Creators Roadmap!), we mentioned a new raycast component for the avatars SDK that will hopefully make it easier to perform raycasting on avatars.
We had some feedback in that update that it would be useful to be able to raycast against any layer, rather than just predefined sets of layers for worlds and players.
We’re now looking at ways of allowing that while still keeping the premade sets, since it’s reasonable that there may be some advanced uses of the component that need to manually specify the layers the ray will hit.
Thanks for your feedback!
Conclusion
That’s it for this Dev Update! See you in two weeks on April 2!
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