Oculus is starting to roll out redesigned avatars that are better, more expressive and customizable. This is the first upgrade that Oculus has done on avatars since 2016.
The avatars will appear starting Apr. 23 in just a few games for the Quest VR platform, including "Epic Roller Coasters," "PokerStarsVR," and "Topgolf with Pro Putt."
Soon, they will appear in "Synth Riders," and later in the year, a new game called "ForeVR Bowling" would feature them.
Oculus Avatars Updated
The avatars will have legs in the editor, but they won't appear on your avatar in VR. The new avatar editor apparently allows for a quintillion possible combinations of hair, eyes, body type, facial hair, piercings, clothing, and other features.
There is no gender toggle, nor are there pre-baked batches of face presets. Instead, the editor lets you dive into each facial feature, down to the nose, wrinkles, and makeup, much like a glorified character creator from an RPG.
You can make an avatar that looks similar to you or just one that reflects how you want to be seen in VR spaces.
By the end of the year, Oculus will have opened its new avatar SDK to all developers, and these VR personas will be supported in Facebook Horizon, the company's own expansive social VR playground.
Although the games are just one application for these refreshed avatars, Oculus stated that the avatar that you create would appear in some form within the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, and more--but only if you want to.
Oculus would not divulge any specifics on how exactly your avatar would appear in those apps or when.
Mike Howard, the product manager for avatars at Oculus, told The Verge that they are at the start of a long journey.
Avatar Design and Launching
The avatars first launched on the Oculus platform in 2016 was just very simple. Howard stated that all of the avatars from the past few years had eyewear on because they were not trying to simulate realistic facial features, especially the eyes.
The big breakthrough with avatars is hand movement, since Oculus launched its Touch controllers for the Rift.
The design of these new avatars builds off the learnings from the Facebook Space, which is now discontinued.
Howard added that these new avatars are oriented in their design toward delight with attributes from animation techniques. The expressions may look a bit exaggerated, but they do look great.
Furthermore, Oculus studied behavioral traits, like how people blink, how people shift their eyes and look around, in order to make the new avatars seem more grounded in reality.
Aside from the avatars, Oculus is also working on a new Quest headset that Mark Zuckerberg recently talked about in his interview with The Information.
Zuckerberg said that he is excited for the future versions of the headsets that are getting eye tracking and face tracking features as he wants the devices to have all of the sensors to animate realistic avatars and have players communicate in that way.
This article is owned Tech Times
Written by Sophie Webster
