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Do you remember when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to show his company's cumbersome Spaces VR technology by taking a virtual hurricane tour of Puerto Rico in 2017? It's nothing like that.
The company has quietly developed a revolutionary system to create virtual avatars of people who closely resemble them in their features and manners. It's not ready for prime time, but as Wired noted, it's already surprisingly sophisticated.
The company calls them codec avatars and is working on the technology that underlies them in their installation of Facebook Reality Labs (FRL, formerly Oculus Research) in Pittsburgh. Here is an example of the effectiveness of this system. in the clip below, two people wearing a VR headset and in conversation are on the left of the frame, while their avatars are on the right:
To achieve this, the FRL team uses a craft called Mugsy. It is a dome with 132 camera lenses and 350 lights, all directed to the center, where a subject must be seated before the features of his face can be mapped in one hour. A second area with even more cameras captures the movement of your body to animate your avatar even more realistically.
We do not know yet when or if we will see a consumer product coming out of this Facebook project, but it's an important step for modeling human behavior in virtual environments. You can read more about this technology in the Wired article, where Peter Rubin explores its implications and shares his apprehension about how it could be misused in this new era of misinformation.
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