Mark Zuckerberg has staked his company’s future on an ambitious long-term vision of people carrying out much of their lives in virtual spaces through digital alter egos.
But an image Zuckerberg recently posted on his Facebook page served as something of a reality check for virtual reality, at least in its current form.
The image, which was also included in a company blog post, showed his blocky, cartoon-like avatar on Meta’s flagship social app, Horizon Worlds, the parent of Facebook, looking away with huge vacant eyes and a closed mouth.
In the background, lying on a field of green grass, were simple models of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, to mark the launch of Horizon Worlds in France and Spain in mid-August.
Online criticism came quickly. “Imagine spending billions in the metaverse and your avatar looks like this!” wrote a Twitter user. “Mark Zuckerberg Invents The Sims!” another tweeted.
Days later, Zuckerberg himself admitted the image was “pretty basic” and posted a screenshot of a more detailed version of his avatar, saying “major updates” to Horizon and avatar graphics are “coming soon.”
He promised to share more details at Connect, Meta’s annual conference focused on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality, which will be held in the fall.
The episode is the latest example of how difficult (and increasingly important) it is to create highly detailed VR avatars, even for a tech giant that has invested heavily in purchasing and building hardware and software.
Having positioned itself as a leader in the small but growing VR market, Meta faces dueling challenges: Users have high expectations of what they should be able to look like in virtual spaces, but achieving them is in many ways difficult with today’s headphones.
VR avatars should look good (or at least good enough) and work reliably in real-time and in apps that normally run on wireless headsets like Meta’s Quest devices rather than laptops or bulky but more powerful desktops.
There are many other non-technical issues at play, including that different people have different expectations about how avatars should look and act in different situations. Are avatars supposed to look like the VR user themselves, or someone else, or, say, a giant piece of butter?
“Avatars have been very difficult to make, even in the visual effects industry,” said Abhijeet Ghosh, chief technology officer and chief scientist at London-based Lumirithmic, which uses tablets and smartphones to capture 3-D facial scans. for a variety of applications, including VR.
Meta did not respond to a request for an interview about the challenges of creating avatars. In an April episode of his monthly podcast, “Boz to The Future,” CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth pointed out how vital avatars are in all types of digital experiences.
“They are extremely critical to how people represent themselves in digital spaces, within the metaverse and beyond,” he said.
The technical challenges
Meta is not alone in the blocky simplicity of its VR avatars. Microsoft’s Meta, Rec Room, and AltSpaceVR, among others, have been working for years to improve the appearance of their avatars and make them increasingly customizable.
Those who scoffed at Zuckerberg’s appearance in Horizon Worlds likely expected much more realistic illustrations from a giant company like Meta, given the realism of characters in popular video games like “Call of Duty” or “Gears of War,” Ghosh said.
“But I think people don’t understand the effort that goes into cutting-edge visual effects,” he said, which in the realm of video games can include a team of artists dedicated to modeling the appearances of characters.
At their most basic, wireless headphones like Meta’s Quest 2 still have a number of technical limitations that make it difficult for apps to deliver extremely detailed VR avatars that can also respond in real-time to the ways we move our faces and other parts of the body.
There may be limitations related to computer power, graphics processor, and amount of RAM included. Also, most people currently using VR don’t use extra sensors to track their entire bodies, so sensor-based tracking is limited to what’s built into the headset and the accompanying hand controllers. (This is also why avatars in some social apps, like Horizon Worlds and Rec Room, only exist from the torso up.)
Essentially, today’s headphones can only render some of the triangles that are used to compose 3-D images in VR, explained Timmu Tõke, CEO and co-founder of the Ready Player Me avatar creation platform, which lets people create avatars that they can use in a variety of games and apps like VRChat.
This means that if a social app wants to include high definition avatars, it can only support a handful of people in a scene.
Horizon Worlds currently suggests that developers building their own worlds limit them to eight to 12 users at a time. “More players will require more resources to render their world and may add some limitations when building,” states the company’s Horizon Worlds build tutorial.
“Creating an avatar that looks good and performs well – in a VR environment especially – is extremely difficult,” said Tõke.
Trying to cross the mysterious valley
Meta is trying, though. Since 2019, the company has been working not only on building beautiful avatars, but full-body avatars with photorealistic faces, which it considers essential for feeling immersed when interacting with others in VR.
This effort matches what Guo Freeman, an assistant professor at Clemson University, found when researching what people want when it comes to VR avatars in social settings. She’s heard repeatedly that they want an avatar that’s consistent with how they look in the non-digital world, the company said.
“What’s different between social VR and other types of games and virtual worlds is that people want to build an avatar that looks like them,” he said.
Creating a photorealistic VR avatar of the average headset user remains a monumental task, however. A person’s face and facial expressions must first be scanned to create a 3D model of their head (or their entire body, to create an avatar that looks like them from head to toe), which can then be animated.
Currently, this process tends to require a lot of equipment, including cameras, lights and computers.
Ghosh said Lumirithmic is working to make this simpler and more affordable by using off-the-shelf electronics as an array of smartphones and tablets, but it’s still in the early stages. Eventually, he envisions that people will be able to scan their own faces at home or in a mall and use that for a virtual reality avatar.
The more realistic the avatar’s face, though, the more VR experts told CNN Business who care about the Uncanny Valley issue, which is the unsettling feeling some people get in response to human representations that aren’t quite human.
“It’s extremely difficult to create a realistic avatar that traverses the Uncanny Valley,” said Tõke. “It ends up looking scary.”
And not everyone wants to look like themselves in VR, or even like a human.
A quick visit to the popular VR social app VRChat makes this clear: you can walk into a virtual bar and come across a dinosaur, a chicken, or something else entirely.
Cam Mullen, CEO and co-founder of Nevermet, a dating app that helps people get to know each other through their avatars, told CNN Business who likes to appear on VRChat as a jalapeno pepper.
“You can be a more masculine, more feminine avatar; you can be a furry, you can be a flower. You can express yourself freely,” he said. “And you can tell a lot about a person’s personality by the avatar they choose to embody.”
Source: CNN Brasil
