We Met In Virtual Reality review: a chaotic inside look at VRChat

Polygon’s team reports from the virtual grounds of 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. They will be reporting on the new independent films in horror, sci-fi and documentary film.

Viewers who are not familiar with virtual reality hangouts may be unfamiliar with it. VRChatYou might have difficulty understanding the value of the information provided by the user. Virtual Reality: We Met in Virtual RealityBecause there are so many distracting elements. Joe Hunting was the director and used a virtual cam tool to film the whole movie. VRChat, where users talk to him about how they’ve used the platform to get close to other people, forming relationships that sometimes cross over into real life. Some of the subjects share hair-raising stories from their lives, which include alcoholism and addiction as well as family tragedies and mental illness. It’s heavy stuff — but these conversations take place in a noisy cartoon carnival full of mix-and-match animal-robot-monster hybrids, and near-naked anime characters with outlandish anatomy falling out of skimpy fetish gear.

The contrast is dizzying, and it’s hard to keep the chaotic surroundings from trivializing what’s going on beneath the surface. The movie is meant to show viewers the true emotions that people feel when they escape to fantasy worlds. But for most viewers, it’s more likely to simply be a confusing, exhilarating, context-free introduction to the fantasy world itself.

Part of Hunting’s commitment to shooting entirely within VRChat is that he doesn’t take time away from the platform to explain his goals or the setting. The doctor just jumps into the observation of events like the showcase, where new ideas are presented by people. VRChat spaces they’re developing for users to navigate. An early foray into one of those worlds-in-progress — a driving sim where users get to traverse a scenic route along winding roads and tall cliffs — is an entertaining window into VRChat’s strengths and flaws. The car the beta group test-drives is impressively detailed and realistic, but the physics of the space are dubious, especially when the avatars’ breasts flap wildly in the wind, as if the platform is interpreting them as hair or trailing clothing.

Sequences like this also make the documentary’s strengths and flaws equally clear. The driving-sim segment is surprisingly lengthy, while not speaking to Hunting’s central ideas at all — it’s just some random users horsing around with a new toy in their virtual space. Viewers don’t get to know them personally, or hear from the sim’s developers about their intentions or process. You can read more about In VRChat, people casually speak over each other, so the scene is also a jumble of overlapping voices, reacting to what they’re experiencing in the VR space.

Virtual Reality: We Met in Virtual RealityHunting can focus solely on Hunting’s core topics and Hunting finds a place where he is able to settle into more pertinent and personal territory. They discuss the relationship between two different people and their long-distance, real-life relationships. One small group — two cartoony “space dogs,” a giant hot dog with stick limbs, and a bespectacled Mogwai — talks about the freedom its members feel at being able to present themselves any way they want. In the film’s most moving segments, a young woman identified as “Jenny” teaches sign-language seminars, discusses her harrowing past, and translates stories about an equally harrowing past from “Ray,” a Deaf friend who only communicates through sign in VR.

That duo’s connection says everything Hunting is trying to get across through in this movie. Some other stories on emotional connections may be old-fashioned at this stage, considering how many people today find their partners via digital spaces and must then navigate physical distances between them. VRChat adds a new angle, since it’s so much like remotely playing a vast freeform video game together — the couples can go on dates in virtual worlds, hang out with friends or alone with each other, even stage an elaborate VRChat wedding for themselves. But Jenny and Ray’s relationship feels less like a familiar story. They have both experienced great loss and have learned to help others.

Image by Joe Hunting/Sundance Institute

Their focus on teaching sign language — and in the process, on making VRChat more inclusive and welcoming for deaf users — feels particularly bold in an environment where most people seem focused on play. Hunting’s doc jumps around in a distracted and sometimes formless way, but in the process, it does capture a wide range of users’ amusements, whether they’re competing at virtual pool, doing virtual stage improv to entertain other users, or waggling their avatars’ anatomy in a virtual exotic dance club. Even just existing in VRChat seems like a form of performance, given the custom avatars on display, which reveal a startling amount about the users’ fixations and fantasies. This tells us a lot about the people who want hypersexualized bodies.

Within such a personally tailorable environment, where everyone’s living out some form of wish-fulfillment, it’s no particular surprise that for some users, the ultimate fantasy is forming satisfying relationships. Sometimes it is surprising to see how they managed to create them in such an unusual, wild environment. In that sense, at least, maybe the strongest message of Hunting’s phantasmagorical, often distracted documentary is that humanity has an instinct for turning every space into an opportunity to connect and communicate. This film suggests that every human connection can be meaningful and valid regardless of how bizarre or exotic it may look.

In Virtual Reality, We MetIs currently looking for distribution.