Hands-on with the new Facebook Avatars

Some days ago, Facebook has distributed its new Facebook Avatars system, promising many possible customizations, a machine-learning algorithm able to reliably reconstruct the pose of your upper body, and a visual appearance that is the right mix between realism and cartoon-style. But is this true? Discover it in today’s hands-on post!

Trying out Facebook Avatars

Yesterday I’ve gone hands-on with the system, and I created my avatar while recording myself. Then I’ve tried my fresh new avatar inside Epic Rollercoaster, one of the three games that support it, and the only one that I currently own. You can see here below the video of me doing all of this on my Quest 2 while commenting on every single step with my sexy Italian accent.

Thanks to these (and other) tests, I’ve been able to understand the pros and cons of the new Facebook Avatars, and I’m going to detail them to you here below.

The Avatar Editor

I had fun customizing my avatar because Facebook has made a great job with the editor. I have developed some avatar customization systems in my life, so I know how it’s hard to make them, and I have to say that I’ve been totally amazed by how they designed this editor.

Everything starts with you choosing a preset avatar to start from: starting something from a white canvas is always intimidating (as a blogger I know this very well every time I start writing a new article), while modifying something already existing is far easier. That’s why this is a smart choice, that has also the side effect that if you just want a new avatar quickly, you can use one of the presets and go with it in seconds.

After you have selected your starting figure, you can select every characteristic of its and modify it: body shape, eyes, eyebrows, hair, etc… The way it works is similar to many other customization systems, so I won’t go too much in detail here, but what is incredible is that there are really many customizations: for instance, there are more than ten possible eye shapes, and for each one of them you can choose among 24 eye colors. You can customize not only the eye shape but also the eyebrows and even the eyelashes. You can add lines to your face. You can add earrings, nose piercings, and even the red dot between your eyes typical of some Hindu cultures.

I think it’s hard not finding something that may represent you: Facebook has clearly worked with people from all cultures to offer a totally inclusive avateering system. For instance, there are the typical hats of Hindu and Muslim people, together with the baseball caps that we western people wear outside on sunny days. Yes, something may be missing at the moment (I remember a Jew on Reddit complaining about the lack of the Kippah, the little Jewish cap), but I’m sure they are little mistakes that will be fixed in a future release. I like the idea of including everyone.

And you can even choose your true body shape: I remember like 5 years ago, “Reverend” Kyle (Kyle Riesenbeck… at that time, his nickname was the “Reverend”) was complaining that he wanted his avatar to be fat, but that was not possible in VR, because in all games, avatars were always slim. Now, Facebook also lets you be overweight in VR. This may seem insignificant, but it is very important to make more people feel represented and accepted in VR.

Facebook claims there are a quintillion possible avatar combinations, and after I have tried the system, I’m pretty sure this claim is true. I can’t even imagine how much time and money creating all these possible customizations may have cost, but it is incredible. The only thing that disappointed me a bit is the clothing section of the system. You have bazillion possibilities of customizing yourself in every minimum detail (you can even choose the lines on your face skin!), but then for your clothes, you have just a generic “outfit” section with just a lot of complete outfits to choose from. You can’t dress your avatar, you can’t choose your t-shirt, you can’t choose your socks: you have just a selection of full outfits Facebook has created for you to choose from. Again, there are outfits for men, women, Western people, Asian people, etc… it is very inclusive, but given the total freedom of the avatar customization system, I’ve found it pretty limited.

Another feature that amazed me is that you build your avatar bottom-up. There are no presets, your avatar is just made by the customizations that you add. Let me explain this better: you don’t tell the system that you are a man or a woman, you don’t tell that you come from Italy or from China… you just add your features and you build yourself. There are no presets, no basic blocks: if you are a woman, you just select a body with feminine characteristics, longer eyelashes, a pretty dress, and you will look like a woman. But you never say that you are a woman. Again, this is super-inclusive: there are people that don’t identify themselves as a man or a woman, and so maybe they would love to just appear with a mix of masculine and feminine features without even telling the system how they feel today. This is incredibly powerful and incredibly inclusive, and I can’t praise Facebook enough for this move that is great for LGBTQ+ communities.

As a techie, there is one last thing that left me with my mouth open: the system updates the customization buttons depending on your current customizations. That is, for instance, in the “outfit” section, you don’t just see the various clothes alone, but you see your current avatar wearing every piece of clothes, that is the customization buttons are updated in realtime to let you see how you would look picking that customizations. This is not easy to be done in a fast and optimized way, and it is very useful to make the experience more pleasant and usable for the final user. A great touch for the UI of this avateering system.

In the whole editor, I have found just one drawback: the representation of your current avatar is static. In front of you, you have a preview of how your avatar is, but it is just a static picture: it would have been much better if it moved following you as if you had a mirror in front of your eyes.

But this is just a minor drawback in a customization system that is otherwise, incredible: it offers many customizations, it is inclusive, it works well.

The Avatar in action

I have tried my brand new avatar in the only application in my possession that supported it, that is Epic Rollercoaster. And I have to say that the performances of the avatar have not amazed me like the editor.

The visual aspect

Visually speaking, the avatars are still too cartoonish for my tastes. And while they can be ok for Facebook Horizon, Venues, and all the applications in the Facebook ecosystem, I don’t find them suitable for many other applications. Due to their cartoon nature, they are not suited for a game with realistic visuals, like for instance Half-Life: Alyx. Imagine for a moment playing Alyx with your avatar that seems taken from an evolution version of the Playmobil toys: it is a ridiculous image… and of course, it is not usable. Even in a social VR space like VRChat I wouldn’t probably use them because they don’t fit the style of that application at all. To me, they are not suited to become the virtual identity of a VR user, but more the “Facebook virtual identity”... I see them as suitable only to the Facebook ecosystem, and maybe some other games that have a visual style compatible with it.

Carmack and Boz say that Facebook Avatars are at a satisfying point where they can be like this for years… honestly, if this is the best that Facebook can deliver in the upcoming years, I think that they have to re-consider their standards.

The half-body tracking

Even if the avatars are full-body in the editor, in game you only see half of the body, and it should move thanks to some AI black magic. Facebook has applied its machine-learning algorithms to infer the movements of the whole upper part of the body having only the data of the head and the hands from the tracking devices. The company claims a long research work has made this possible.

Well, again, I don’t want to sound harsh to the engineers working in Palo Alto, but I’ve found nothing special in this inverse kinematics algorithm. To be honest, it works even worse than RootMotion’s VRIK Unity plugin, which is one of the best inverse kinematics plugins for Unity. The pose of my elbows was almost always wrong when I moved them up or down, and the system almost never understood when rising the elbow, which was always too low. When moving my wrist, sometimes I also found the pose of my virtual hand a bit weird and unnatural. I was not expecting miracles honestly, I can only imagine how hard is it, but I expected at least something far superior to the current state of the art of Inverse Kinematics systems.

Honestly, I think there is still a long work to do to make the appearance of all the upper body of the user to seem moving naturally together with the real body of the user.

New Oculus Avatars – Final Impressions

All in all, I think that the new Facebook Avatars are an overall improvement over the previous version: the graphical quality is better, there is the half/full body of the user, the editor is much more detailed and inclusive. So it is for sure a step forward made by Facebook.

As I’ve said, the editor is one of the best editors of a cartoonish avatar I have ever found: yes, some games like Cyberpunk 2077 have superior avatar creators, but talking about Social VR character editors, this is probably the best I have ever found regarding usability, customizability, and inclusivity.

But the final result is an avatar that still has to find its place to be outside the Facebook ecosystem: we always talk about the metaverse, about being whoever we want in VR, but with these avatars, I can just be a standard person with a clean look, and not whatever I want (I can’t be an anime girl or a huge troll, or a Gundam, like in VRChat). I can only be a simple cartoon figure: a clean figure in a clean world… something that fits perfectly inside Horizon, but that resonates just with few other applications. Honestly speaking, I would never want to be that avatar in my social VR experiences, while I’m proudly a smiling milk carton inside VRChat. If you like shiny corporate worlds, where everything is clean and everyone is happy, then these can be great avatars for you, otherwise, probably you will look for something else.

Then there is the graphical style: cartoon avatars are nice, but they don’t fit well in every application: the more realistic is the application, the less they look nice inside. So these avatars can be used only in apps with compatible visuals, and this limits them a lot.

If Facebook just wanted to make avatars for Horizon and maybe some other meeting spaces, then these fit perfectly, and it has made a great job, but if it wanted to create the digital identity for all users, in all games and contexts, then the mission has failed. The theme of virtual identity is complex and I think that we still have to find a company that nails down its perfect recipe. Try again Facebook with your next iteration of Facebook Avatars.