Last October in High Fidelity (before the FUTVRE LANDS VR Festival was held), there was a Best Avatar Contest held at one of the monthly stress-testing events. The winner of that contest was Chris McBride, for his Ganesha elephant god avatar. In episode 5 of the Metaverse Newscast, I interview Chris about his creations in his domain, Ozone:
Enjoy! And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my producer and cameraman Andrew William for all his tireless work in pulling this video series together.
Have you ever wondered what your virtual-world avatar could look like, 10 to 20 years from now?
A recently published article in WIRED covers the work of Facebook Reality Labs, which is developing stunningly lifelike virtual reality avatars, called codec avatars, which can recreate the full gamut of facial expressions:
Examples of Facebook Reality Labs’ Codec Avatars
For years now, people have been interacting in virtual reality via avatars, computer-generated characters that represent us. Because VR headsets and hand controllers are trackable, our real-life head and hand movements carry into those virtual conversations, the unconscious mannerisms adding crucial texture. Yet even as our virtual interactions have become more naturalistic, technical constraints have forced them to remain visually simple. Social VR apps like Rec Room and AltspaceVR abstract us into caricatures, with expressions that rarely (if ever) map to what we’re really doing with our faces. Facebook’s Spaces is able to generate a reasonable cartoon approximation of you from your social media photos but depends on buttons and thumb-sticks to trigger certain expressions. Even a more technically demanding platform like High Fidelity, which allows you to import a scanned 3D model of yourself, is a long way from being able to make an avatar feel like you.
That’s why I’m here in Pittsburgh on a ridiculously cold, early March morning inside a building very few outsiders have ever stepped foot in. Yaser Sheik and his team are finally ready to let me in on what they’ve been working on since they first rented a tiny office in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood. (They’ve since moved to a larger space on the Carnegie Mellon campus, with plans to expand again in the next year or two.) Codec Avatars, as Facebook Reality Labs calls them, are the result of a process that uses machine learning to collect, learn, and re-create human social expression. They’re also nowhere near being ready for the public. At best, they’re years away—if they end up being something that Facebook deploys at all. But the FRL team is ready to get this conversation started. “It’ll be big if we can get this finished,” Sheik says with the not-at-all contained smile of a man who has no doubts they’ll get it finished. “We want to get it out. We want to talk about it.”
The results (which you can see more of in the photos and videos in the WIRED article) are impressive, but they require a huge amount of data capture beforehand: 180 gigabytes of data every second! So don’t expect this to be coming out anytime soon. But it is a fascinating glimpse of the future.
Would you want your avatar in a virtual world to look exactly like you, and have their face move exactly like your face, with all your unique expressions? Some people would find this creepy. Others would embrace it. Many people would probably prefer to have an avatar who looks nothing like their real-life selves. What do you think of Facebook’s research? Please feel free to leave a comment on this blogpost, thanks!
Well, my earlier glowing review of Eastshade has been tempered somewhat by bugs I have encountered, which have sort of ruined the game for me. Frankly, at this point, I’m just going to wait until the developers issue an update with some bug fixes, because it’s just too frustrating to keep playing.
The first bug I encountered was partly my own stupid fault. I built a raft and got stuck on the island where the Sinkwood Inn is located. It turns out I thought I had done all I could do, and I stayed overnight and prepared to leave the next morning. But when I pulled my raft out of inventory, and prepared to board it, the game told me it was too stormy to use it! (And it was clear, sunny morning with a bright blue sky.) Even worse than that, was that it wouldn’t let me pack the raft up again! So I lost that raft. (I did not know that this particular quest, unlike the others, forced you to stay in one place and solve it before leaving. All the other quests you could do in parts, leaving and coming back again.)
I filed a bug report, and I discovered that there was a way to solve my being marooned on that island by using a special command to take me back to the starting point of the game. (Yes, it was a cheat, but the bug report form told me what to do to solve my problem, and I did it.)
The problem with that solution? Every single time thereafter, whenever I tried to build a new raft and use it, ANYWHERE IN THE GAME, it told me that it was too stormy out! I eventually gave up (this happened after four days of gameplay), I uninstalled the game, reinstalled it, and then started over again. From scratch.
This time, after racing around for several hours, I was able to retrace all the key steps to build my raft, cross the river, and begin exploring the other side. Only to come smack up against another bug in the game. In Eastshade, you can build or buy canvases on which to paint the scenery around you, which you can then give or sell to various people you meet. Several quests in the game revolve around this.
Well, guess what? After the first three canvases I built, every time I built or bought a canvas, it didn’t appear in my inventory!!! Eventually, I ran out of canvases, and I again had to give up on the game. (At least I could explore, but I couldn’t finish the game without canvases.)
Let that be a lesson to me. NEVER buy a game just after it has been released, unless you inadvertently want to become one of the software testers. This has been an exercise in sheer frustration to me, and despite the laudatory non-combat nature of Eastshade, and its gorgeous open-world scenery, I can no longer in good faith recommend this game until the developers, Eastshade Studios, fix a few bugs and glitches which impede gameplay and ruin the game. (Sorry, guys.)
UPDATE March 15th: Well, I played around with Eastshade a bit more and now I realize that the blank canvases I made and bought are still there, but only the most recent blank canvas is accessible. The way that this game handles the canvases in your inventory was confusing me. I had thought that I wasn’t getting new blank canvases because I couldn’t see any of them in my inventory. In my opinion, the game needs to handle this better. However, I was actually able to complete the main quests and finish the game.
This Sansar Pick of the Day by Shack Dougall is actually nine experiences in one! The Cliffside Overlook is a hub with eight portals to other experiences, arranged in a circle in a shady forest glade:
As a whole, they form a beautiful, extensive outdoor environment which offers much to entice and delight the explorer. A series of rope bridges swiftly take you from place to place.
