The Metaverse Vitalizing the Creators Market

Summary

This article is a report for Virtual Market 2021, a virtual event that took place from 4th December 2021 to 19th December 2021. I hope to give creators insight into the event experience, so that they can consider attending or even exhibiting in future Virtual Market events.

What is Virtual Market?

Virtual Market, known as Vket, is the largest creators market festival in the virtual space, hosted by HIKKY Co., Ltd. Visitors can join the event to experience and purchase various 3D Avatars and 3D models.

The event took place on various worlds hosted on the VRChat platform - 2 "Company worlds" and 22 "General worlds". You can think of "worlds" as different areas of a building in a real life conference, except that those areas have such a distinct atmosphere, you really do feel that you are in another world.

The Virtual Worlds

Company Worlds

The 2 company worlds, "Parareal Akihabara" and "Parareal Shibuya", were fascinating replicas of Japan's famous Akihabara and Shibuya cities.

Parareal Akihabara was displayed as a colorful electronic city, with TVs being displayed everywhere, and hot air balloons flying high.

Parareal Shibuya introduced the visitors to the Scramble crossing, together with many buildings with large billboards with company advertisements.

General Worlds

The General Worlds existed for the 201 creator groups to exhibit their virtual creations. These worlds included Japanese school festivals, Fantasy towns, Christmas snowlands, Battlegrounds, Japanese Edo towns and Cyber dimensions.

The amount of details the world creators placed in these worlds were amazing, along with the exquisite background music that accompanied them. Every time I joined a new world, it filled me with excitement and joy, as it felt like I entered a new town in a jRPG.

The Virtual Booths

Company Booths

Although it was expected that a number of pop-culture related companies would be exhibiting in the Company worlds, it was interesting to see companies that don't work in this industry holding exhibits. For example SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., a company that handles stock investment, built out a interactable VR roller coaster that had slopes mimicking the stock market's ups and downs.

Comp, a company selling Complete Diet supplements, was seen hosting a booth with their products in 3D. A large screen was playing interviews of a number of famous Japanese VTubers promoting their product.

General Booths

Unlike the Company booths, most of the General booths presented their fabulous 3D creations that visitors could get their hands on.

Avatars ranged from Humans, Angels, Half-beasts, Animals, Humanoids and Robots - which really sets a beautiful point about VRChat. You can be whatever you want to be.

Booths also introduced 3D models that could be used with Avatars. These could be clothes, bags, hats, weapons, suitcases, tofu ... tofu?

Other booths offered 3D homes, shaders and music, while others advertised various social VR events that they were hosting.

As long as the exhibiting groups had something that benefited the VR community, they were eligible to present these to the visitors.

The Experience

Changing Avatars

Many avatars presented in the booths were intractable, giving options for visitors to test them out. A few seconds after confirming changing the avatar, visitors could use the avatars, and test out the various emotions and optional parts (mainly clothing) it had to offer.

Experimenting Gimmicks

Many objects within the world and booths could be picked up. Objects like hats could be left in the air, where you would try to fit in with your character using mirrors. Others would produce interesting effects to the virtual world.

Communication

Although many booths were hosted in Japanese, I saw many English speaking VR Chat users attending Vket, and having fun. Unfortunately, my PCs mic was dead and there was no way for me to speak. All I could do was gesture, but that seemed to be enough for communication.

When I visited TenguTenshi's booth, there was no verbal communication between us. TenguTenshi smiled, and handed me a lollipop. I took it, and was then gestured into the booth, where TenguTenshi pointed to an avatar I could change into. After I changed into it, TenguTenshi showed some excitement, and I showed mine back. It felt really great to have that communication experience.

Thoughts

Attending Virtual Market 2021 was a great experience. VRChat is a platform with great flexibility, allowing users to create various avatars, worlds and objects. But by itself, it really only is a game platform. It's intriguing to see that HIKKY has interacted deeply with the various creators on this platform, so that some economy would start flowing. HIKKY's love for the VR creators, and the creators' love for VR community is what really gets Vket running.

Why don't you join us?

Looking at the next event

If you're thinking of attending the next event, the good news is that Virtual Market 2022 Summer is planned to be hosted (Dates TBD). You can follow their English Twitter account for more updates.

Join via VRChat

If you have a windows machine, you can join the event via VRChat, which can be installed from Steam. VR headsets aren't needed - you can just access the platform through the desktop. During the event period, the Vket worlds will be made public, allowing you to join in freely. Unfortunately though, VRChat only runs on Windows.

Join via the Browser

If you only own a Mac, or you don't want to sell your soul to VRChat quite yet, you can join through a web browser. During the event periods, HIKKY provides links for a one-step access to the VR World. You may experience more lag than PCs, and you'll find that some interactions are limited via the browser, but it certainly will be enough to motivate you to join future events through a Windows machine. At least I definitely did.

Finally

I hope to see more people in the next event!

If you want to get connected, feel free to friend me on VRChat. You can find my username as _forks