“It feels like we’re all in the same room.”
heads up
Mark Zuckerberg’s cartoonish Metaverse is what we all teased relentlessly May It’s going to be really impressive.
On Thursday, podcaster Rex Fridman released what he calls “.First interview in the Metaverse”, he and Meta CEO converse in VR using stunningly lifelike avatars.
Gone are the dumb, legless Mii knock-offs. Here, Friedman and Zuckerbeg sit in different rooms in different parts of the country wearing Quest Pro headsets, while their in-metaverse avatars are shown in shoulder-to-shoulder 3D portraits. , set against a black background, seamlessly chatting while looking anxious. Just like their real world counterparts.
“It feels like we’re all in the same room,” Friedman said on the podcast, his avatar faithfully portraying a nearly deadpan expression. “This is truly the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
These photorealistic clones, known as codec avatars, Zuckerberg’s years of efforts.
Zuckerberg said they are created by extensive scans of users’ faces, used to form computer models, and packaged as codecs. The headset then detects the user’s facial expressions and maps them to his 3D avatar in real time.
From there, “you can basically send an encoded version of what it’s supposed to be over the network,” Zuckerberg said, claiming it’s more bandwidth efficient than sending video.
All of this obviously puts more strain on the hardware doing the rendering, but Zuckerberg says the already available Quest Pro headset he’s using here can push the technology forward. .
work in progress
Credit where credit is due. This could be a game changer if the final product is in line with the everyday use seen here.
But before you get your hopes up, please note that this is not a live demonstration. To be mean, this demo uses two girlfriends who aren’t particularly expressive.
It’s also worth noting that the avatar you see here was created using hours of state-of-the-art scanning with hundreds of cameras. This is not something that is accessible to the average consumer.
Instead, Zuckerberg said his future plans would be to use a smartphone to do “very quick scans.”
“You could just pick up your phone, wave it in front of your face for a few minutes, say a few sentences, make a bunch of facial expressions…and produce something of the same quality as what we have today. You can,” he said. said Fridman.
We imagine that an avatar created using a smartphone scan would look very different from the one shown here. Still, I have to admit that this is the most impressive of Zuckerberg’s troubled Metaverse projects.
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