The biggest reveal at Meta’s Connect event was long promised AR glassesOrion. As expected, the prototype, which is said to cost around $10,000 each, won’t be available to the public anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Meta previewed its new holographic avatars, which will allow people to talk to living holograms in augmented reality. The holograms are Methane’s Codec Avatarsa technology he has been working on for several years. Mark Zuckerberg teased one version This is when he participated in a “metaverse” podcast interview last year.
This technology may be closer than we think now. After the keynote at Connect, I sat down with Mark Rabkin, Meta’s lead Horizon OS and VP of Quest, who shared more about Meta’s codec avatars and how they might one day come to the company’s VR headsets.
“Basically, anything you can do in Orion you can do in Quest,” Rabkin said. Especially Codec Avatars have also become easier to create. While they once required advanced camera scans, most built-in avatars are now created with phone scans, Rabkin explains.
“It’s pretty much the same process in many ways as creating stylized avatars [for VR]but by requiring a different training set and a different calculation,” Rabkin explained. “For stylized avatars, the model needs to be trained on multiple stylized avatars, how they look and how they act. [It has to] Get lots of training information on what people perceive to look like and what they perceive to be acting nice.
“For codec avatars… it’s the same process. You collect a large amount of information. You collect data from very high-quality, fancy camera scans. You collect data from phone scans because that’s what people will actually create, and you just build a model until it gets better. “One of the challenges with both problems is making it fast enough and computationally cheap enough that millions and millions of people can use it.”
Rabkin said he expects these avatars to eventually be able to play in virtual reality on the company’s headsets. Currently, the Quest 3 and 3S lack the necessary sensors, including eye tracking, needed for photorealistic avatars. But that could change for the next generation of VR headsets, he said: “I think if we do a really good job, it should be possible in the next generation. [of headset].”
