Edo Kiriko is a Japanese glass-cutting craft that dates to the 19th century. A craftsman holds a piece of coloured glass against a spinning abrasive wheel and cuts patterns into it; because the colour is a thin outer layer over clear glass, the cut areas go transparent and the pattern appears as light against colour.
It is also unforgiving in a specific way: the wheel removes material, and material does not come back. Every cut is final.
Mituhashi is a 3D artist who makes Edo Kiriko as a hobby, and has built Mituhashi Glass Crafts, a VRChat world in which you can do it too.
What the world gives you
The simulation is more complete than the premise suggests. There is a rotating glass cutter that cuts both flat sheets and three-dimensional objects — vases, wine glasses. You choose your coloured glass, and the areas you cut turn transparent, as they do in a real piece. You pick a glass shape, and you can adjust the wheel’s settings, including cutting angle and depth.
Then there are the parts that are only possible because it is not glass. You can turn on cut assist and guides. And you can save and share a finished piece — exported as code or as a 3D object, or imported into a Kiriko generator for Unity, to use, as Mituhashi puts it, to “import them into a Kiriko generator for Unity, export them as 3D objects, and display them in your own world.”
The world also uses glassware assets by RARAlabo to simulate pouring liquid from a pitcher into glasses, which is the detail that turns a cutting exercise into something you have made an object with.
The interesting decision is the assist
A simulation of a craft faces a choice that has nothing to do with rendering: how much of the difficulty is the point?
Edo Kiriko’s difficulty is substantially about the irreversibility. A master’s value is in knowing, before the wheel touches the glass, exactly where the cut goes — because there is no undo and the material is expensive. Remove that and you have removed the thing the discipline is built around.
Mituhashi’s answer is to make the assist optional. Guides and cut assist are a toggle, not a default, which means the world can be a thirty-second toy for a visitor and a genuine pattern-design exercise for someone who turns them off. That is the right call, and it is the same call the better music and drawing applications make: keep the hard version available rather than designing only for the first five minutes.
The export is the other good decision. A VR craft world where the output stays inside the world is an activity. One that hands you a 3D object and a code representation is a tool — you can cut a pattern in VR because cutting in VR is a better interface for it than a mouse, then take the geometry somewhere else entirely. That is a real argument for VR as a modelling environment rather than a display one, made by implementing it rather than by writing about it.
What we do not know
Our reporting here comes from a single article, 80 Level’s piece by Kseniya Serebrennikova of 20 October 2026, plus the world and asset links it provides. That article does not state Mituhashi’s country or day job, does not say how long the world took to build, and names Unity and the RARAlabo assets but no shaders or other tooling — and the mechanism by which a cut surface becomes transparent on a 3D object is the technically interesting part we cannot describe, because nobody has published it.
The article embeds three of Mituhashi’s own posts, whose contents are not reproduced in it. The quoted line above is 80 Level’s wording of what Mituhashi says about exporting, not a verbatim statement we have independently sourced.
Why it is worth your time
Most craft simulations are either marketing for the real craft or a mini-game wearing its costume. This one appears to have been built by somebody who does the actual thing, which shows in the specifics: that cut areas turn transparent rather than white, that wheel angle and depth are exposed as parameters at all, that colour selection comes before cutting because in real Edo Kiriko the colour layer is the whole constraint.
And it answers a question that VRChat world-building keeps circling — what is a virtual world for, if not socialising. One answer is: a place to practise something whose real version costs too much to practise.
Mituhashi Glass Crafts is live in VRChat; the world link is below.
Sources
- Taking a Real-Life Hobby into Digital Spaces: Mituhashi Made a VRChat Glass Cutting Experience — 80 Level
- Mituhashi Glass Crafts on VRChat
- RARAlabo glassware assets on BOOTH
- The process of making an Edo-Kiriko — SUIGENKYO on YouTube