Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Cool upcoming feature for VRChat to keep your eye on in early 2022: Avatar dynamics, designed to enable for more interactivity between avatars and the world, and (even more key) avatars to avatars.

"[I]t offers a ton of new options for people to explore that are into avatar development," as top VRC community creator Lakuza explains. "For one, it'll improve the performance overall for VRChat since the in-house dynamics system they've made is made with VRChat specifically in mind. Currently people are relying on a 3rd party asset called 'Dynamic Bones' which can be quite expensive on performance. So just being a more optimized version will do great for the regular VRC experience. But the team have gone a step further and made it easier to program player to player interactions into their avatar." 

Watch the company's demo video above for examples of what this enables. Adorably, VRChat is not showing off what avatar dyanmics will surely enable by the boatload: Avatar-to-avatar sexytimes! (At least as much sexytimes as VRChat's terms of service allow, which bans any pornographic content.)

More from the VRChat blog:

Avatar Triggers: Triggers allow avatars to interact with themselves… or any other avatar! Grab your ears, give your friend a high-five, a pat on the head… or a slap in the face. Triggers work by detecting colliders on avatars. By default, all avatars will have standard colliders defined, such as the head or hands, but you’ll be able to set your own for specific interactions.

Permissions System: You’ll be able to control who you want to allow (or not allow) to interact with your avatar. You’ll also be able to opt out of the system, if you’d like your avatar to remain a bit more static!

Debug View: To make it simple to see what’s going on with your setup and uncover any problems, you can turn on a Debug View in your Action Menu that lets you see an overlay of PhysBones, Triggers, and Colliders. This view works in the editor as well as in VRChat!

Automatic Dynamic Bone Conversion: we want to make using PhysBones as easy as possible — and so the goal is that all avatars uploaded to VRChat using DynamicBones will be switched to PhysBones.

Automatic Collider System: we want to ensure everyone has the ability to interact with both Avatar Triggers and PhysBones, so a set of default colliders is added to all avatars even if a custom setup is missing.

Read the read here.