Interview with Sheru: Part 1
Part of the "VR is Alive" Spotlight Series, Season Two
ArmaniXR: For this interview, I am fortunate to join social VR consultant Sheru in a photo competition world in VRChat.
Feel free to watch the shorter video if you have less time, or listen to the full audio track below to hear more about Sheru.
Full Audio Track (66 minutes):
ArmaniXR: First I just want to let you introduce yourself including your pronouns and what you want the audience to know about you.
Hmm… Where do I start? Hi, I’m Sheru. I’m a social VR consultant, and I’ve been playing VRChat for over five years now. I don’t really have anything for a pronoun…I don’t care about that stuff. I used to do photography in VRChat, like this world shows. But I kind of stopped doing that, and now I’m focusing on doing the consulting part a little bit more. Just helping out companies to get a grip in VR.
Speaking of five years in social VR, that's a long time! How were you introduced to virtual reality and how was it for the first time?
That’s a really interesting story. It was the Coronavirus time, 2020, th early summer. As an employee of my company, I received a bonus during the late spring. It’s basically supposed to be spent on holiday, we call it holiday money. I was like, well, Coronavirus is hitting, I’m not gonna do anything with this money to travel abroad. That would be impossible. So I decided to sink that money into a VR headset. But before that, I was already trying out VRChat in desktop mode. For a while I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to play VR games. But I was more looking into a space experience, like flying around or something…I was actually waiting for a game that would make full use of that. And so that’s why I decided to never get a VR headset until that time. I eventually just logged into VRChat with the VR headset. That was basically my introduction to VR. And so far, VRChat has been like 95% of my time in social VR.
What hardware were you using at the time and what was the time period like? You said you got PC VR at the time?
I never bothered with Android, but I did get an Oculus Quest 1. I just hooked it up to my PC, first by cable and then later on, Virtual Desktop. These days, if I use a Meta Quest, any kind of Quest, I just use SteamVR. It’s usually working. But I don’t use Quest a lot. It’s just for me, it’s a device that’s convenient to have for when I’m mobile.
Can you tell me more about your introduction to social VR specifically? Were you on other platforms outside of VRChat or how was that?
Originally, I played predominantly VRChat. The reason for that is I went to VRChat to find something. Over five years ago now, I found a video on YouTube that showed a Japanese user talking to a Western streamer. And that video confused me because I was like…this is impossible. Japanese people can’t play VRChat. The interface is in English, public instances are a disaster…I’ve been curious about what Japanese people have to gain in VRChat and that’s why I mostly stick with VRChat. I’ve been dabbling in different platforms. I sometimes go to Somnium Space. I’ve checked out other platforms like Cluster, but I don’t go there on a regular basis like I do with VRChat. For me, these days, the common rule is if there’s a Japanese community, I’ll go there. But so far, it’s only been VRChat and a little bit of Resonite, but yeah, that’s about it. VRChat, Cluster, and Resonite. But then again, predominantly, 99% VRChat. There’s more fun to be had there.
What brought you into, or what intrigued you to follow up with the cultures and different cultural differences. I know you mentioned a video, but what inspired you to keep going into that?
When I saw the video, it confused me. I had an idea when I went into VRChat. It’s like, okay, I’ll go into VRChat, I’ll find a reference from the video, I’ll find the Japanese community, I’ll probably find 200, 300 people playing that, I’ll say hi, I’ll see what makes them tick, I’ll move on. That was the original approach for me. When I logged into VRChat (around the summer of 2020) I looked around and I was like, they’re not here…I can’t find them… That confused me even more. I was so confused in not being able to find them. When I did find stuff, I’m like, it looks Japanese but I’m not sure. Is this actually made by a Japanese person? I was also struggling with the interface, back then I was on desktop. One day I met a Japanese person that sent me a friend request out of politeness, I guess. The next day I noticed he was online, so I’m just gonna go by and say thank you for accepting the friend request. I joined him, I got hot-dropped into an instance with like 50 people, all Japanese, all talking in a bar setting. That made me kind of realize…I was frantically going, why can I never find these instances? I was so confused. Then I looked at the status of the instance and realized it was Friends+! I kind of realized that probably all these Japanese instances are not public. These days you’ll find some public instances for Japanese events and stuff. But back then, a Japanese person, a proper Japanese person did not go to public instances. End of story. That’s how it went.
After that, I met up with some other people that were active in the Japanese community, got introduced to some friends, and they basically showed me the creator community of the Japanese side. Their creator community is growing like cabbage! It’s insane… I looked up the financial figures for the last year, 2024, for just 3D models on Booth.pm. They made a revenue of around $40 million! It’s just one little part of it. Then you look at the models they sell, it’s basically 99% VRChat. They don’t sell on any other platforms. The cool thing about the creator community that I met was that I’ve met a lot of them through mutual contacts. I had some Japanese friends that spoke English, they basically were making avatars, I just joined them every day, every day I was introduced to someone else. That’s also when I started my Twitter account. I was basically told, friend this person, he does this, he does that. Follow him on Twitter, do this, do that. After half a year of like the entire Coronavirus crisis, after half a year just doing that day in, and day out, I had to ask myself, will there be an end to this? No, there is no end to this. It just kept on going. That’s when I discovered the music community, as a friend of a contact of mine, R.Tone-san, was performing live at SLT (VR SpotLight Talks). And that’s also how I got to see SLT. I’ve been basically just sitting there enjoying live piano, live guitar. I’ve heard every possible instrument on the planet appear there. That was every weekend. Yeah, that was a great distraction from the pandemic at the time.
Alright, I kind of want to add some more context to this discussion, especially as we get into the different communities and why we’re mentioning them as Japanese communities and European communities and American communities. It’s based on how the servers are arranged with the VRChat instances, where you have the servers in the US and servers in Europe and then servers in Japan. They show up in the user interface like that too, so that’s kind of why we kind of talk about it like this. But following up on it, what similarities and differences have you noticed with the communities in Japan, Europe, and the Americas as their cultures interact?
Yeah, what I’ve noticed over the past five years, especially in the American side, is that the community there is very single-minded. If you go to a DJ event, you’ll encounter DJs. If you go to a STEM research group, you only find researchers, almost nothing else there. It’s all very segregated. They’re stuck in their own little spaces. On the Japanese side, what I noticed is that the amount of different backgrounds in a single group is usually highly diverse. I was really surprised when I first entered a Japanese friends group and saw a Unity expert sitting and writing C-sharp code. He actually wrote a book about it, available on Amazon. He was sitting right next to a hip-hop dancer, a 3D modeler on the other end, and a music maker. There are lots of different backgrounds and talents. It can be, especially the first time, very intimidating to be in the same instance with them. There are lots of people there that do amazing things. I remember, a long time ago, there was this guy who graduated from university. He announced that he had a spot at the very first Music Vket. Everyone looked at him and was like, you make music? And he’s like, no, I don’t make music. I just thought I would give it a go. And everyone was like, what? So it was very daunting to hear someone say that he would just pick that baton up and say, I’m going to make music now. Just experiment and see what’s happening. That’s a kind of feeling I’ve not really seen in the Western side. People actually pull through and do it. I’ve heard plenty of people shout from the top of their lungs, I’m going to make my own avatar! I usually put down a sticker. You might want to focus the camera on the sticker because it’s this one. I’m going to make my own avatar…then Unity is looking at you and Blender is looking at you and they beat you up.
Oh yeah, I got to get a picture of that, that’s funny. That’s how it is though, yeah.
But on that part, I’ve noticed the Western community is very single-minded usually and the Japanese community is in general very diverse but secluded. It’s not easy to get into the Japanese side. The European side is kind of interesting. Due to the language barrier, they have lots of separate little groups. There’s an Italian community, a German community, a Finnish community, a French community, a Spanish community. And due to the language barrier, they usually don’t really interact a lot with each other unless the country has a habit of having a second language. So you’re talking about the Dutch, Belgians, the Danish, the Finnish, Norwegians as well. They usually fragment all over the place. They usually get attracted towards the Western side so they stay up late to enjoy American events or they’re attracted to the Asian side and they go do their stuff early in the afternoon. That’s a neat thing about the Japanese community—their prime time, the period that they are active—is usually 11 p.m. and in Europe that translates to 3 or 4 p.m. in the afternoon. So especially on the weekends, lots of Europeans see the Japanese community as a place to go in the afternoon until dinner and then around 8 o’clock then the European time starts and they go do the European stuff. While the other people are focused on the American side they usually enjoy first the European stuff in the evening and then they stay up late like 2, 3 a.m. and then enjoy the American side.
That’s interesting to think about schedule-wise. In the Americas it’s like you have to wake up early in the morning for most Japanese events. It’s a common complaint too. Just thinking about how it works for different communities time zone wise.
Time zones…yeah you need to juggle that. I think about that for the Community Meetup on Sundays. For Europeans it’s usually held at 11 p.m Central European time. For a lot of Europeans the last thing they do in the evening is talk to the Americans. For a lot of Canadians and Americans it’s like oh yeah that’s something that happens in the afternoon and after that I go do my other stuff. It’s kind of weird to see that difference and then I know a few Japanese that are interested in the Community Meetup but for them it’s like 5, 6 a.m. and they’re like oh it’s too early for me so you have these Japanese that stay up all night to join the event or they try to wake up early. That’s not always working.
I know you mentioned the Community Meetup too. Can you give some context for our audience about what the Community Meetup is?
The Community Meetup is an event organized for world creators to promote their worlds and ask attention for their worlds. They make a world and they want to show it off. They usually do that initially to get feedback. It’s like the early previewing of a world. So many of the popular worlds you’ll see there first. If you log into VRChat and you look up popular worlds, it’s usually a world that has been featured at the Community Meetup and during that time you can test it out to give feedback. It’s not always fun. Lots of times we all crash because the creator made some error or some script is not working or they left in too many scripts. (laughing) But yeah, so if you’re a beginner creator for Unity, I definitely recommend to at least attend one or two Community Meetups to just see what’s happening and what’s going on there. I think it’s useful to understand.
Part 2 of my interview with Sheru is available to read here.