The biggest reveal at Meta’s Connect event was the long-promised Orion AR glasses. As expected, the prototypes, which reportedly cost around $10,000 each, won’t be available to the public anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Meta has introduced a new holographic avatar that allows people to interact with vivid holograms in augmented reality. The holograms are Meta’s Codec AvatarIt’s a technology that’s been studied for years. Mark Zuckerberg made fun of it. Version This happened last year when he was interviewed on the “In the Metaverse” podcast.
The technology may be closer than we think. After the Connect keynote, I sat down with Mark Rabkin, vice president of Meta, who leads Horizon OS and Quest. He talked more about Meta’s codec avatars, and said that one day they’ll be coming to the company’s VR headsets.
“Generally anything you can do on Orion, you can do on Quest,” Rabkin said. Codec Avatars in particular are much easier to create. Rabkin explains that while advanced camera scans were once required, most in-game avatars are now created from phone scans.
“In many ways, it’s pretty much the same process for creating a stylized avatar. [for VR]“But the training set is different and the amount of computation required is different,” Rabkin explained. “For stylized avatars, the model needs to be trained on many stylized avatars and their appearances and movements. [It has to] “We get a lot of training data on what people look like in their own photos and what they look like moving well.”
“For Codec avatars… it’s the same process. You collect a ton of data. You collect data from really high-quality, beautiful camera scans. You collect data from cell phone scans, because that’s how people actually create, and you build models until they get better. And one of the challenges with both of those is making them fast enough and computationally cheap enough that millions of people can use them.”
Rabkin said he expects these avatars will eventually be playable in virtual reality on the company’s headsets. The current Quest 3 and 3S lack the necessary sensors, including eye tracking, needed for realistic avatars. But that could change in the next generation of VR headsets, he said. “I think it’s possible in the next generation, if we do it really well. [of headset].”
