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Notes -
VRChat (and most other social virtual reality worlds) allow people to choose an avatar. At the novice user level, these avatars just track the camera position and orientation, provide a walking animation, and have a limited number of preset emotes, but there's a small but growing industry for extending that connection. Multiple IMUs and/or camera tricks can track limbs, and there are tools used by more dedicated users for face and eye and hand tracking. These can allow avatar's general pose (and sometimes down to finger motions) to match that of the real-world person driving it, sometimes with complex modeling going on where an avatar might need to represent body parts that the person driving it doesn't have.
While you can go into third-person mode to evaluate how well these pose estimates are working in some circumstances, that's impractical for a lot of in-game use, both for motion sickness reasons and because it's often disruptive. So most VRChat social worlds will have at least one virtual mirror, usually equivalent to at least a eight-foot-tall-by-sixteen-foot-wide space, very prominently placed to check things like imu drift.
Some people like these mirrors. Really like them. Like spend hours in front of them and then go to sleep while in VR-level like them. This can sometimes be a social thing where groups will sit in front of a mirror and even do some social discussions together, or sometimes they'll be the one constantly watching the mirror while everyone is else doing their own goofy stuff. But they're the mirror dwellers.
I'm not absolutely sure whatever's going on with them is bad, but it's definitely a break in behavior that was not really available ten years ago.
Thanks, I hate it.
I finally took the plunge and joined an art discord a couple months back, and VR chat is a big part of their social activity. I actually have an old VR rig I've never bothered setting up, and briefly considered joining in, but increasingly think it's better to leave it on the shelf.
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