Today, High Fidelity issued a press release:
High Fidelity, the open-source VR software platform, today released Virtual You: 3D Avatar Creator on the Apple App
and Google Play stores. It enables people to produce a customizable avatar ready for High Fidelity in less than five minutes.Powered by VR/AR developer Wolf3D, the free Virtual You app generates a 3D avatar from a selfie. Users can then choose from thousands of wardrobe combinations and customize every aspect of their appearance, such as hair, makeup and body shape. Virtual You avatars are sent directly to a user’s High Fidelity account and are compatible with any virtual environment that uses its open source software.
“As VR begins to transform our daily lives, we will often want to easily appear in virtual worlds as we do in the physical world,” said Philip Rosedale, CEO and Co-founder of High Fidelity. “Avatars have always been a pillar of VR and virtual worlds, but unless you’re a dedicated enthusiast, creating them hasn’t been easy. By making 3D customizable avatars available through a mobile app, we’ve cleared an important step towards bringing VR to billions of people.”
Now, obviously, you’re not going to get the high quality results you would see with a multiple-camera, full-body scanning service such as that offered by Doob, but it’s still an attractive option for a somewhat personalized avatar. So I decided to give Virtual You a spin, using my trusty iPhone SE.
I downloaded and installed the app, following directions to take off my glasses and slick back my hair to get the clearest possible face shot. The app then walked me through choosing my hair colour, hair style, eye colour, and style of glasses. You are then presented with a first draft of your avatar, so you can make various adjustments to skin tone, body shape (height, weight, etc.), head shape, eyes, nose, lips, hairstyle, hair colour, makeup, eyebrows, glasses, and clothing:
Here is the final result:
I was then asked to sign into my High Fidelity account, and it sent my avatar off to High Fidelity!
I had to wait a while for the “Sending your avatar to High Fidelity” to clear. From start to finish, the process took me fifteen minutes!
Then I signed in to High Fidelity to see my avatar in-world. The avatar was immediately available in my inventory:
And here is what my customized avatar looks like! I am actually rather pleased with the results.
It’s hard to take good selfies in HiFi; there’s a mirror mode (which I used to take these pictures), but there doesn’t seem to be a freecam mode to allow me to zoom in on the bottom half of my body, or take a side view of my avatar.
There was once a service in Second Life that generated a classic system (i.e. non-mesh) avatar skin based on a single selfie, but the results were pretty abysmal, as you can see from this old photo I took, comparing the original photo of actor Jake Gyllenhaal with the resulting avatar:
I created this avatar to play Jack Twist for Brokeback Mountain roleplay in Second Life over a decade ago, and I thought the result was good enough at the time for that purpose:
The create-an-avatar service eventually shut down, and I never found a replacement for it. I only used it a couple of times. I also made a Heath Ledger-lookalike avatar to play Ennis Del Mar, but the results were even worse than they were for Jake:
I couldn’t find a really good, well-lit full-frontal facial photo of Heath Ledger, so the result doesn’t really resemble him at all, in my opinion!
So you might just want to download the Virtual You app to your iOS or Android mobile device and try it out for yourself! This is a service that I would like to see more social VR and virtual world companies provide. Perhaps Wolf3D could be convinced to export its app-generated avatars into other virtual worlds? I do think that there is a market for this.
