Your eyes do not deceive you. That is a 1 to 1 scale O’Neill Cylinder, in VRChat. So staggering is the scale that initially I assumed most of it was simply a skybox or something. I also assumed only the ground level where you spawn would be accessible as I’ve never seen spin gravity simulated in VRChat before.
Astonishingly, all of what you see is accessible level geometry despite this environment exceeding by many times what I thought was VRChat’s maximum draw distance. See that cluster of skyscrapers up there? You can go there. See the distant lake in the first image? You can walk to it. Or you could drive, a much more practical means of transportation within a cylinder of this size.
S_ASAGIRI, the author of the two worlds that this article will feature, included a lot of common quality of life improvements found in other VRChat maps such as these drivable cars. They’re not my favorite but they mostly work and I’ve not seen a better implementation of vehicles yet.
They’re a touch on the small side compared to most of my avatars however, I need to use my “chimp in a business suit” avatar to fit inside without my head poking through the roof. These are the kinds of strange situations VRChat often puts you in, I’m afraid.
This made for some stunning views, and a pleasantly chill/surreal experience. Cruising down the highway, which curved up in front of me. I don’t recall if the radio works but it would’ve greatly added to the experience. Nothing but your typical Sunday drive…along the inner surface of a gargantuan rotating cylinder at a LaGrange point. That’s all.
It’s in fact not dissimilar to certain scenes from Inception or Dr. Strange, only rooted in hard science fiction and thus plausible physics and engineering. Colonies like this one absolutely can be built, providing a Lunar mining/manufacturing/mass driver complex and much better robots than currently exist. Obviously even all world governments could not afford to build one tenth of this thing, if we had to launch all the material from it out of Earth’s gravity well. Hence the importance of industrializing the Moon.
Perhaps the most brain melting detail of all this is that the trains also work. You can see one of the stops above. You can, in fact, board a maglev train which runs the length of the cylinder to quickly travel from one end cap to the other. There are even trains which run perpendicular to these, around the structural support rings. Though sadly, you cannot board those. I believe there were also elevators traveling up cables to the central hub? What a scenic ride that would be.
Speaking of scenic, there’s a visitor’s center atop the hills surrounding a lake. I was about to write “man-made lake” before I realized the absurdity of it. An interesting consideration in designing the landscape of a habitat like this is that everything must be precisely balanced such that the center of gravity aligns with the rotational axis.
Failure to do so would throw rotation off balance and endanger the integrity of the structure over time. So, there’s a lake at one end of the cylinder, and another at the opposite end, as well as being on the opposite side compared to its twin. Probably the mountains are hollow as well, given the pointless nature of hauling that much rock and soil to a LaGrange point for something this frivolous. Hollow mountains would be a clever place to conceal life support machinery, water filtration and other necessities.
But S_ASAGIRI’s talents are not constrained to O’Neill Cylinders! He’s also tried his hand at modeling a Stanford Torus. Yes it actually rotates. Yes the spin gravity allows you to walk around the inside surface properly, as with the O’Neill Cylinder (“Island 4”). But in this one you can also go outside through an airlock. There’s an exterior observation and maintenance deck!
The interior is divided into living and working areas. The working areas are predictably austere. It’s unclear just exactly what sort of work goes on there as it’s just a lot of empty platforms and walkways, which so far as I can tell are not reachable. There is a working train, though, just like the ones in Island 4. This time they travel around the circumference of the torus.
The habitation areas do not disappoint, feeling something like the interior of a cruise ship. The ceiling panels, rather than being transparent windows, are electroluminescent. These deprive us of a view outside, perhaps for the best as it would be nauseating given the rate of rotation and the danger of radiation ingress, but still create a sensation of sunlight. The sort of thoughtful design flourishes that make these creations smack of realism.
The train runs below ground level. Something like a space subway. There are “urban centers”, sort of. Very compact ones with space for shops, clinics, schools or whatever other services one might expect aboard an orbital population center. Although the name of this map is “Space Cruise Ship” so perhaps it’s a vehicle and these amenities are intended to meet the needs of travelers en route to an even more fantastical destination.
I do wonder about the wasted space, though. Given the astronomical (har!) cost of habitable volume in space one would think structures like this would be divided into decks to maximize usage of that precious, pressurized interior volume. Instead most of it seems to not be used for anything except the psychological comfort of being in a large space with high ceilings.
One might imagine that all the living space in O’Neill Cylinders, in particular, would be “below ground” in the hull itself so as not to subtract from the space available for simulating nature. Supposing we’ll transplant modern cities, skyscrapers and all, as well as all the current inefficiencies of city planning and urban sprawl into something as inherently constrained as a space colony strikes me as similar to how Jules Verne envisioned flying machines as nautical vessels with gas bags.
Anyway that’s all for this time. If you check out these two space colonies by S_ASAGIRI make sure to also check out his or her other works. One of them is a sort of non-interactive ride with animated depictions of famous space vehicles and missions, including some recent ones by JAXA that I didn’t even know about. Really strong showing, an underappreciated creator on this platform for sure.
Very interesting. So, the creator of these virtual spaces, S_ASAGIRI, has a presence on this platform?
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