clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

We Met In Virtual Reality opens a startling window into people’s most surreal fantasies

It’s tough, personal, intimate stuff — conveyed by near-naked anime girls and a crowd of janky monsters

Two VRChat anime-style avatars, a girl with long pink hair and a dark-haired catgirl, watch illuminated lanterns float into the air in We Met In Virtual Reality Image: Joe Hunting/Sundance Institute
Tasha Robinson leads Polygon’s movie coverage. She’s covered film, TV, books, and more for 20 years, including at The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, and The Verge.

This review of We Met In Virtual Reality was originally published after the film’s premiere at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s exclusive release on HBO Max.

Viewers not intimately familiar with the virtual-reality hangout platform VRChat might find it difficult to take in the importance of what its users are saying in the documentary We Met In Virtual Reality, because there are so many startling distractions. Director Joe Hunting used a virtual camera tool to shoot the entire movie inside VRChat, where users talk to him about how they’ve used the platform to get close to other people, forming relationships that sometimes cross over into real life. Many of his subjects tell hair-raising stories about their pasts, featuring alcoholism and addiction, family tragedies, abuse, mental illness, even a suicide attempt. It’s heavy stuff — but these conversations take place in a noisy cartoon carnival full of mix-and-match animal-robot-monster hybrids, and near-naked anime characters with outlandish anatomy falling out of skimpy fetish gear.

The contrast is dizzying, and it’s hard to keep the chaotic surroundings from trivializing what’s going on beneath the surface. This is a movie meant to introduce viewers to the real emotions people bring to their escapist fantasy worlds. But for most viewers, it’s more likely to simply be a confusing, exhilarating, context-free introduction to the fantasy world itself.

Part of Hunting’s commitment to shooting entirely within VRChat is that he doesn’t take time away from the platform to explain his goals or the setting. The doc just jumps straight into observing events, like the showcase where people introduce new VRChat spaces they’re developing for users to navigate. An early foray into one of those worlds-in-progress — a driving sim where users get to traverse a scenic route along winding roads and tall cliffs — is an entertaining window into VRChat’s strengths and flaws. The car the beta group test-drives is impressively detailed and realistic, but the sim’s physics are dubious: Characters protrude through the car in all directions, and the avatars’ breasts flap wildly in the wind, as if the platform interprets body parts as trailing hair or clothing.

Sequences like this also make the documentary’s strengths and flaws equally clear. The driving-sim segment is surprisingly lengthy, while not speaking to Hunting’s central ideas at all — it’s just some random users horsing around with a new toy in their virtual space. Viewers don’t get to know the participants personally, or hear from the sim’s developers about their intentions or process. In VRChat, people casually speak over each other, so the scene is also a jumble of overlapping voices, reacting to what they’re experiencing in the VR space.

We Met In Virtual Reality does finally settle down into more relevant and emotional territory when Hunting gets his core subjects alone for serious talks. Two different couples discuss how they met on the platform, and how they navigate their real-life long-distance relationships, especially during COVID quarantines that have kept them from visiting each other. One small group — two cartoony “space dogs,” a giant hot dog with stick limbs, and a bespectacled Mogwai — talks about the freedom its members feel at being able to present themselves any way they want. In the film’s most moving segments, a young woman identified as “Jenny” teaches sign-language seminars, discusses her harrowing past, and translates stories about an equally harrowing past from “Ray,” a Deaf friend who only communicates through sign in VR.

That duo’s connection says everything Hunting is trying to get across through in this movie. Some of the other stories about emotional connections are old hat at this point, given how many people now find their partners through digital spaces, then have to navigate the physical distance between them. VRChat adds a new angle, since it’s so much like remotely playing a vast freeform video game together — the couples can go on dates in virtual worlds, hang out with friends or alone with each other, even stage an elaborate VRChat wedding for themselves. But Jenny and Ray’s relationship feels less like a familiar story. Both of them have survived immense loss and pain, and through a virtual fantasy space, both of them have found uplifting ways to support and help other people.

An anime-style virtual catgirl avatar dances for her catboy boyfriend in a desert in VRChat in the documentary We Met in Virtual Reality Image: Joe Hunting/Sundance Institute

Their focus on teaching sign language — and in the process, on making VRChat more inclusive and welcoming for deaf users — feels particularly bold in an environment where most people seem focused on play. Hunting’s doc jumps around in a distracted and sometimes formless way, but in the process, it does capture a wide range of users’ amusements, whether they’re competing at virtual pool, assembling a virtual improv night, or waggling their avatars’ anatomy in a virtual exotic dance club. Even just existing in VRChat seems like a form of performance, given the custom avatars on display, which reveal a startling amount about the users’ fixations and fantasies. The sheer volume of wildly exaggerated, hypersexualized physiques tells its own story about how people want to imagine themselves.

Within such a personally tailorable environment, where everyone’s living out some form of wish-fulfillment, it’s no particular surprise that for some users, the ultimate fantasy is forming satisfying relationships. It does sometimes feel surprising that they were able to forge them in such a weird, wild setting. In that sense, at least, maybe the strongest message of Hunting’s phantasmagorical, often distracted documentary is that humanity has an instinct for turning every space into an opportunity to connect and communicate. The film certainly suggests that all human connection is meaningful and valid, no matter what kind of outlandish skin it wears.

We Met in Virtual Reality is now streaming on HBO Max.

news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news
news