As Unreal Unveils MetaHuman, Oculus/Linden Lab Vet Jim Purbrick Has Advice on Bringing Ultra-Realistic Avatars Into a Social VR World

As Unreal unveiled its new MetaHuman system for highly detailed ultra-realistic avatars, I happened to be chatting with Oculus / Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick, who's been thinking quite a lot about the best avatars to use in a social VR space.

"Increasing the visual fidelity of avatars raises the expectations for realistic motion to make those realistic features look alive," Jim notes about MetaHuman. "The more realistic the avatars look the better you have to be at tracking facial movement in VR to avoid the avatars looking dead. If you can't capture sufficient movement you have to instead be good at synthesizing it based on the social context, but if you get that wrong the avatars look creepy not because they look dead, but because they don't respond in a natural way given the social context."

Realism in social VR introduces a new challenge:

"Most of the current attention is on improving motion capture by the headset," as Purbrick puts it, "but the better that gets the harder it becomes to escape your real identity: all of your habits and movements are transferred faithfully to your avatar whether you like it or not... Short version: people don't want creepy avatars more than they want realistic avatars and it's a lot more work to make realistic avatars not feel creepy in VR."

These points are a good place to introduce a recent talk Jim Purbrick featured on his blog, largely drawing on his experiences developing avatars for Second Life:

"[The video] talks about a lot of different VR design considerations, but the one I think is most interesting is how as the fidelity of tracking increases, it's easy to reduce the freedom to explore different identities and it's something we should be careful not to accidentally lose."

While Second Life remains a successful niche virtual world, its strong user growth was stymied in part by an extremely complex user interface (including avatar customization) which inspired a growth of user hacks to further improve options.

"Second Life shows what's possible with a user generated avatars," says Jim, "but you need to think carefully before signing up to the level of user interface and ecosystem complexity that comes with it and likely contributed to limiting Second Life's growth."

As for using highly realistic avatars like those in MetaHuman in a social VR space, there's a way to account for the disconnect between the avatar and the user's movement:

"I think there is a lot of potential for VR avatar systems to allow motion filters to not only fill in the gaps where the headset can't track movement but to add and change movement to allow people to continue to explore new identities or even new forms in VR. Without that work VR interfaces will increasingly tie us to our meat puppets and avatars will look like us wearing a Halloween costume regardless of the visual fidelity."

Much more on Jim Purbrick's blog here.

Comments

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

Very interesting thoughts... and I agree with him. There's a reason if most social VR spaces use cartoonish avatars indeed.