Oculus Avatars 2.0—and now called Meta Avatars—the system brings a huge upgrade to avatar style and expressiveness compared to the company’s prior avatar systems.
The Meta Avatars SDK offers support for Unity-based VR applications on Quest and Rift, with limited support for non-Oculus platforms, like Unity VR apps built for SteamVR. Meta says that Quest apps on App Lab can make full use of the Meta Avatar SDK, just like those on the official store.
Meta Avatars aren’t yet supported in Unreal Engine, but support is expected eventually.
The company says it has built the Meta Avatar SDK “with developer needs in mind.” Developers can override the system’s positioning of avatar bodies and facial expressions if necessary to fine-tune avatar behavior for their given application.
The company also says the Meta Avatar SDK uses an interesting distributed architecture for performance. Instead of having all headsets redundantly calculate all of the positions and expressions of all avatars in a given scene, each headset performs the calculations for its own avatar and then streams that information to other participants. Developers are also free to use the system with whichever networking stack they’d like, which increases flexibility over a proprietary solution.
