Chatboxes inside heads are unreadable | Voters

Chatboxes inside heads are unreadable

tracked

~Babo~

Chatboxes appear inside users' heads rather than "above" or "forward". Normally this means that they are unreadable to everyone in the lobby.

This often results in an awkward dance of leaning up over the other user or transgressing their personal space to "get inside their head" so to speak...

September 10, 2023

Louis_45

Just grab them and move them to your liking

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tracked

~Babo~

Seems like in some cases it can help to hide and unhide the other user's avatar which might reset the chatbox to the correct position.

Fairplex

Its happening way too often and without changing avatar or scale. If I am sit while joining a world (Avatar in crouch position), most likely people will see my chatbox inside my head instead of above

MrDummy_NL

Often happens if you blocked somebody avatar in certain ways, like Shaders and Animations are blocked, so you will see only bare minimal loaded avatar without extras and shader. This has only small problems the chatbox will placed too low and will almost go inside someone head.
So far i know to solve it in most ways is fully allow the avatar (done in menu click on player) then the chatbox will go up and is readable. 
I think VRChat devs should work on it that chatbox should keep working even avatar itself is partially or fully blocked!
Because now it feels each avatar has also chatbox script and thanks to blocked avatar function, the chatbox script seems not more working correctly - means not more correct positioning above the head.

MissingNO123

In my experience, I've seen many normal un-scaled avatars where their chatbox messages are unreadable when I have them set to "forward". 
Specifically, when the user is in desktop mode and their avatar is looking down, the top of their head shifts forwards and covers their chatbox message. 
This gets worse the closer I am standing to their avatar.

~Babo~

Related feature requests:
https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/chatbox-messages-should-be-drawn-over-the-users-avatar-in-the-render-queue
https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/chatbox-messages-should-display-above-nameplates-not-below

ʙɪɢ․

~Babo~: Thanks for the boost :]

DAG-XR

Personally, a better solution would be to have the chatbox above the entire nameplate.

StormRel

marked this post as

needs more information

StormRel

Hello!  Thanks for reporting this.  
Is this only happening with Avatars that have been scaled up/down?
Do you have an example avatar we can use to repro this issue?

~Babo~

StormRel: No, this is not only for avatars that have been scaled.

I don't know any particular public avatar that this happens with. It happened just now with my friend's private avatar which is a Rindo base I think. They were unscaled and in regular VR (non-FBT, 3 point tracking).

DAG-XR

StormRel: I have a friend that this happens to, but they are privately uploaded. With their permission, would you like me to give you the avatar IDs? Or are you only testing public avatars that this is affecting.

StormRel

DAG-XR: We should be able to work with ID's, thanks!

~Babo~

StormRel: Maybe it is somehow related to gogo loco.

~Babo~

StormRel: In the post I said

rather than "above" or "forward"

but my issue is mainly with "above" since I don't really use "forward".

With "forward" option I think I recall some cases where it renders inside of the player's chest if they are lying down. But I can't confirm this because I haven't used it much recently.

Dauw_Jonas

StormRel: Account 1: Scale up your avatar.
Account 2: Hide & unhide Account 1
or Account 1: Change avatar & go back.
Account 1: Use chatbox.
Account 2: Observe the chatbox in head.

ʙɪɢ․

StormRel: Babo has pretty much covered most of it, but I thought I'd elaborate further and note that this tends to happen on avatars with things extending past their head like hats, hair, ears, etc., but it's not exclusive to this at all. I've had avatars with bounding boxes that go well above their head/ears/hats/hair and this was still an issue. It seems to be super inconsistent whether the chatbox uses your eye level as reference or the top of your head? I've never been able to pinpoint the method used to calculate where the nameplate/chatbox is going to show up, even before the scaling update. It's very frustrating to make sure an avatar "works well" with the chatbox.
The majority of the problem, in my experience at least, is just the nature of the chatbox being rendered in world-space and it being positioned directly above people's heads. I don't think making the chatbox's position function more consistently will solve this problem on its own.
The canny posts sent here by Babo on October 8th cover this in more detail, but the basics are that if someone's avatar is 2.5m tall, and someone in a 0.5m avatar looks up at their chatbox, it will be occluded simply due to the nature of the chatbox being hidden behind the user's head from the smaller user's perspective. My example uses extreme measurements, but I've had this issue many times in normally-sized avatars because of how many people like to use really small avatars.

ʙɪɢ․

~Babo~: I can confirm that "forward" gets occluded pretty often as well, especially if lying down or using a wide avatar. It's an arguably worse option than "above" in my experience and it's frustrating that it's even an option because I'll sometimes run into people that have it set to "front" because it seems helpful/helpful at first glance but they end up not seeing my chat messages at all because it's occluded by the avatar I'm wearing or by me simply lying down on the floor.

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