Many readers were seriously impressed by NeosVR's new mouth tracking feature, and longtime metaverse developer Max Graf expressed its value in a social VR context:
I have to say, out of all the things that that Linden Lab tried to accomplish with Sansar, one of the things they actually got exactly right (and even pushed the boundaries of the technology in general) was the VR voice and facial symmetry they developed, very similar to what Neos has done here.
I only got to experience it a few times in there with an actual VR rig on, but when I did this was one of the things I specifically wanted to check out, knowing how much they put into it. It was not just the mouth moving when sound was present, it adapted to variations in phonetics, volume and emphasis to change the facial mesh in a very accurate way.
This is definitely among the several features that Sansar really innovated on, and I hope something can be done to this technology, notwithstanding Sansar's current limbo state. Max says the overall effect was transformative:
When people near you spoke it was not readily apparent beyond the locality and volume of the sound, but then it sort of dawns on you that the mouth is moving accordingly and you accept it without notice. It's a social behavior that easily falls in between the virtual and the human elements that suddenly come together with full VR immersion, the most interesting part of virtual worlds to me, the grey area where machine ends and humanity begins. It's where the curtains part and you see the wizard.
I had a similar reaction to High Fidelity's highly spatial audio, which is probably more scalable in larger social settings. (Another great technology currently in a similar purgatorial place.)
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