At Meta’s Connect event, the biggest announcement was the unveiling of its long-anticipated augmented reality (AR) glasses, Orion. As anticipated, the prototype, each reportedly valued at around $10,000, is not yet ready for public release.
Meanwhile, Meta provided a preview of its new holographic avatars, which will enable users to interact with lifelike holograms in augmented reality. These holograms are a product of Meta’s Codec Avatars technology, which the company has been developing over several years. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously gave a glimpse of this technology during a podcast interview conducted “in the metaverse” last year.
Following the Connect keynote, Mark Rabkin, a Vice President at Meta overseeing Horizon OS and Quest, provided further insights into Meta’s Codec Avatars and their potential integration into the company’s VR headsets. Rabkin stated that nearly everything achievable on Orion could also be accomplished on Quest. He noted that creating Codec Avatars has become more streamlined; while advanced camera scans were once necessary, most internal avatars are now generated using phone scans.
Rabkin detailed that generating stylized avatars for VR involves a similar process to Codec Avatars but requires a different training set and computational efforts. The model needs significant training on various stylized avatars to understand their appearance and movement. Likewise, Codec Avatars require extensive data collection from high-quality camera scans and phone scans to build and refine the model efficiently enough for widespread use.
Rabkin expects that these avatars will eventually be functional in virtual reality on Meta’s headsets. Currently, the Quest 3 and 3S models lack certain necessary sensors, such as eye tracking, to support photorealistic avatars. However, Rabkin is optimistic about future advancements, suggesting that these capabilities might be achievable in the next generation of VR headsets.