frosty (Icedog) ❄️🐶

a green and blue fractal geometry tunnel

cool world recommendation if you like pretty things synced to music: Audio Optics by Poof.

vrchat.com/home/world/w...

spent last night listening to a full louis cole album while poking around with all the different shader options in this world

i liked setting the motion speed to slow

Would be cool to have it be a bit sustainable. I kinda cycle between the two

It can be tough to figure out a balance point between the two extremes: working myself way too hard vs. being completely unproductive.

I haven't cracked the code on that yet - dunno what a good balance looks like for me

HAPPY 4TH ANNIVERSARY TO S4!!!

The first S4 was on AUGUST 8th, 2021!

Sunday Service
2025-08-10
Host: atomicpeach (feat. MC Strawbs)

Lineup: (times BST)
7p - Violet Thunder
8p - Kittz
9:30p - Strawbs Protato
10p - Icedog
11p - Whitty
12a - Pineapple - DEBUTT
1a - Dua
2a - Bleatr

twitch.s4vr.net

i think this applies to more than just music and color. any artistic work has meaning applied to it based on an amalgamation of components that form it - shape and form, word choice, movement, line thickness, typography, instrumentation, shot selection, object material, lighting - they all interplay

there are no fully correct answers, but maybe there are some don't work as well together. color choice can amplify a certain feeling tangled within in a song, or conversely, can end up canceling out the effect. they can provide constructive or destructive interference towards a particular effect

i feel like songs, sections of songs, and even individual chords all want to be paired with different colors. some need more saturation, some need greyscale. some need a single strong color, or clashing or confusing colors, or comfortable and inviting ones.

I got new M50x headphones - and I have no idea wtf i was smokin when i said the 770s had more bass response. New pair of m50x's are way punchier. My old M50x's were probably just wearing out and degrading lol

i feel like i need a new idle activity besides opening youtube and scrolling the homepage. scrolling past dozens of clickbait thumbnails all fighting for my attention doesn't feel very good for my brain

YouTube video by Alexander Panos - Topic always breaking, always healing

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0lr...

field of spheres 2

A perspective camera gives a much better sense of how infinite this pattern is...

Also added basic cubemap reflection :3

#shaderart

me irl

next on the to-do list:
* perspective camera instead of isometric camera
* shadows? (soft shadows hopefully?)

~ field of spheres ~

infinite domain repetition in a raymarched fragment shader.

I love infinite repetition. It's a perk of using ray marching over standard 3d rasterization methods.

I think this will make for a good reference scene to slowly refine and add more features to ^^

#shaderart

another day, another day

the other night we were talking about pooltoys, and somehow i ended up looking up information about the density of different types of liquids, specifically sodas

did you kno diet soda is less dense than water, but sugary soda is denser? interesting.

so anyway yea, pooltoys should drink diet coke

The Psychology of Virtual Reality | Harvard Magazine Harvard’s Steven Pinker on the psychology underlying the experience—and limitations—of VR

It's not a particularly thorough source, it's just a few brief excerpts, but here you go -

www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harv...

It's possible he has only been exposed to material about meta's social VR offerings, in which case I would understand where his perspective comes from... horizon worlds isn't exactly the most compelling social environment

The amount you have to suspend disbelief for something like VRchat is less (if you're using a headset) than older platforms, but I think it's still something that just wouldn't click for a lot of people. For some people the premise is weird enough that they wouldn't be able to take it seriously

I suppose making deep genuine connections on a platform like this takes a little bit of a suspension of disbelief, an unspoken agreement that despite aspects of this thing that are weird or kind of silly, that we're treating this space genuinely, respecting each other and keeping an open mind

I was thinking about something along these lines a bit recently. I was watching someone I didn't know interacting with VRchat and treating it like any other silly game, messing with people and not taking anyone seriously. And it felt super off-putting to me

"damn it would be cool if we had eye tracking for social vr. It's too bad nobody has thought of that"
"imagine a couple hypothetically dating in vr. an interesting thought experiment but it wouldn't work of course"

A screenshot of an excerpt from an article about the psychology of social VR: 'One of the easiest ways to generate common knowledge is not necessarily by thinking (“I know that she knows differently”), but by establishing eye contact. “When I look into your eyes, I’m looking at the part of you that’s looking at the part of me that’s looking at the part of you—and that instantly generates this set of recursive knowledge states,” says Pinker. These knowledge states are impossible to replicate when wearing VR headsets, even when interacting with the most sophisticated avatars, which underscores the limitations of VR in replacing real relationships. Pinker gives the hypothetical image of a couple sitting together, each wearing VR headsets and conversing with simulated versions of each other. While technically feasible, this scenario feels emotionally hollow and devoid of intimacy.'

i was curious to read this article about the social psychology of vr...

this article was written this year, in 2025.

It continuously perplexes me that people writing about VR have literally no knowledge of what we've been doing in platforms like VRChat for years.

do you think a good drinking game rule would be "any time amazon products or services are mentioned"

i have a soft spot for movies that are awful

maybe i'll check it out lmao

i just skimmed all of this, is this movie bad enough to be funny or is it just bad enough to be bad

Also looking back i'm recognizing that my phrasing of "Early days of VR" is super inaccurate, lol. Pretend i said "early oculus era"

That's really interesting - looked up VRML, I had literally no idea about web VR standards going that far back. In a way, kind of reassuring - i wonder if standards will be reassessed again if there's another future public surge in VR interest

And now, though Chrome and Edge support WebXR (the evolution of WebVR), Firefox doesn't support it at all.

It really feels like a shame to me - a missed opportunity for people to openly share their own VR worlds, not locked to any specific platform, using technology we've already had for decades.