Oculus VR is gradually approaching the possibility of a realistic display of a person in virtual reality. Announced today’s version of Expressive Avatars is the next step on this path.
New avatars can more realistically display a person’s image due to the imitation of eye and mouth movements and micro-facial expressions. Due to this, the viewer has a feeling that he communicates with a real person, even in virtual reality.
For the first time, Oculus VR announced its avatars Rift in 2016. At that time, they rather resembled ghostly translucent figures with color shades. They were a little like a virtual display of real people. Over the past two years, Facebook and Oculus VR have been actively working on improving such avatars to make them more realistic. For this purpose, the software was used to simulate the movement of eyes and mouth, as well as minor and almost imperceptible changes in facial expression.
The new version of Expressive Avatars looks like a mixture of avatars of the original design of the Oculus VR and Facebook animation avatars used in the Spaces application. New avatars can be used in the virtual living room Oculus Home and in social applications. In Oculus Home, you can see up to eight friends in virtual reality at the same time. Later this year, developers will have access to the new version of Avatars SDK and will be able to use new developments in their projects.
Together with Expressive Avatars, Oculus VR also updated Oculus Home with a set of new features in the Core 2 core operating system that controls the operation of the Rift headset. This version of the OS is finally out of beta status. Thanks to Core 2, users can individually customize their Oculus Home space with hundreds of new items and themes. At the same time, the work performed in Oculus Home has been improved, so the graphics and lighting will now look better.
