The Request:

Allow world creators to place a trigger volume in the world that causes avatars in it to be shown to all users, bypassing local avatar culling settings.

The Benefits:

The Detailed Rationale:

Many types of events in VRChat involve performers, hosts, teachers, presenters, guild leaders, instructors, panellists, interviewers, etc; that should be visible to attendees when in certain locations. Often these people are at a distance to the audience and get hidden by avatar culling.

While we can manually show avatars, which is wonderful, it does have numerous drawbacks and is either insufficient or overkill in many common situations. And wouldn't it be nice if you just didn't have to micromanage settings so often?

Here is a strong example:

Kaleidosky has an in-world camera that projects dancers into the world as visual art. Currently, many users do not know when there is supposed to be a dancer on the camera as they may be at quite a distance, and dancers can change moment-by-moment, so they miss the performance entirely.

Even if a user wants to show the dancer, it takes time and effort and preexisting knowledge to fix the situation, and you have to do it all over again every single time someone new is up.

To make matters worse, sometimes the lack of a visible avatar causes the sky to strobe wildly. This causes frequent discomfort and risks harm to photosensitive users.

Then, you're left with dozens of manually shown users and your performance degrades permanently until you do the work of looking one-by-one through everyone in the instance to see if you should un-show them. As a result, users sometimes disable the culling bypass permanently because they're "too far gone" and have hundreds of people shown across many events. Now they can never force-show anyone, anywhere!

Another example:

Raindance Immersive events have long, tedious, introductory explanations about how to show the performers. And they all have to line up, and everyone has to jostle around to try to get a clear line of sight to select every one of them one-by-one... and then double-check you didn't miss any. It takes ages, feels ridiculous and drags down the experience every time; and new users get a terribly confusing and awkward experience as their first impression.

A very common example:

You load into a club and there's 79 people between you and the DJ. You want to see who is up but there's a bunch of avatar capsules blocking your pointer. You realize you're not going to show them anyways as it'll cause 30 other Very Poor avatars you've manually shown in previous events to all show up at once if you turn on the bypass. So you look at some empty decks and feel rather silly.

Hey, more example:

A jazz band walks out on stage at VKET and nobody sees them. Then everyone sees a whole lot of their menu after sniping a bunch of capsules. Eventually they get to enjoy themselves.

There's countless other examples from industry panels to ASL classes to yoga instructors to dance recitals and on and on. Many are not so severe, but they would all benefit from the platform being easier to use.

Some Questions/Concerns:

"What if someone puts a zone over their entire world?"

World Creators can already easily sabotage their own world's performance through much simpler means, like copy-and-pasting an object a whole bunch. I don't see much risk here. Beyond that, I think it's valid that some niche experiences would want to enable visibility as a default (e.g. a game/puzzle/social worlds where you are separated physically but can see each other at a distance/through a wall/through a camera). Of course, users can already disable their culling, but what if they didn't have to micromanage settings all the time? Wouldn't that be cool? I think it would be cool.

"Would this bypass manually hidden avatars?"

That's probably a bad idea! But it would be great if these zones acted like a force-show-avatar unless you had actively chosen to hide that user/avatar. I think that would streamline/simplify things the most in most cases for most users.