Facebook Reality Labs (FRL)
believes AR and VR will be the primary way people work, play, and connect in
the future. Dubbed ‘Codec Avatars’, the Pittsburgh office is using what they
call groundbreaking 3D capture technology and AI systems to generate lifelike
virtual avatars that could provide the basis of a quick and easy personal
avatar creator of the future. The company says at this point these sorts of
real-time, photorealistic avatars require quite the gear to achieve. The lab’s
two capture studios—one for the face, and one for the body—are admittedly both
large and impractical at this point.
The ultimate goal however is to
achieve all of this through lightweight headsets, although FRL Pittsburgh
currently uses its own prototype Head Mounted Capture systems (HMCs) equipped
with cameras, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, infrared lighting, and
microphones to capture the full range of human expression. Using a small group
of participants, the lab captures 1GB of data per second in effort to create a database
of physical traits. In the future, the hope is consumers will be able to create
their own avatars without a capture studio and without much data either.
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