You Can Generate A New Meta Avatar From A Selfie

Though Meta didn’t announce it, you can generate a new Meta Avatar by taking a selfie.

New Meta Avatars Out Now In Horizon & Updated SDK

The Meta Avatars graphics overhaul is now live in Horizon Worlds, Home, Workrooms, and the SDK for third-party apps.

The new Meta Avatars with overhauled graphics and animations launched last week, after being officially confirmed at Meta Connect. But what Meta didn’t announce, neither at Connect nor when launching the new avatars, was that you can generate a new one using your smartphone’s front camera.

To do so, just open the Meta Horizon phone app, navigate to your avatar, and create a new one. You can have multiple avatars now, so generating a new one doesn’t mean overwriting your existing new-style avatar. You can tweak every aspect of it after generation, just like if you made a manual avatar.

The feature doesn’t appear to be available in regions with laws that complicate the use of facial recognition technologies, such as Illinois and the EU.

Avatar generation from a selfie has been available in the competing Ready Player Me avatar system (which supports VRChat) for over three years now, and it was actually a key element of Facebook Spaces from all the way back in 2017.

Free VR Avatar Creator Uses Selfie To Import You Into VRChat

This VR avatar creator quickly makes a virtualized version of yourself and then allows you to import it straight to VRChat. Update 02/25/21: Following Ready Player Me’s launch some users pointed out issues with the platform’s customization options and accuracy . Wolf3D addressed those concerns to us

It’s an interesting feature that should help those who aren’t interested in or good with video game character creator interfaces get set up for social VR. Eventually it’s possible the same scan could be used to generate a Codec Avatar too, offering you two virtual versions of your self, cartoonish and realistic.