Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
With all the hype over GenAI, the metaverse, the digital world where people/avatars can mingle, has been largely forgotten. After all, the notion of working in teams of cartoonish avatars seemed unlikely at best. And silly at worst, particularly for any business purposes. No one seemed interested in dealing face to face with an avatar that looked like, say, Donald Duck. So, most of us dismissed the metaverse, putting it in the same class as blockchain. Much ado about nothing. Solutions in search of problems.
But then I happened to come across some groundbreaking work that Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is doing. The program is called Codec Avatars. It focuses on making the avatars closely resemble what we really look like and less abstract. They call these things Codec avatars. The goal is to make the avatars what they call “photo realistic” as opposed to expressive. Ok, you say, big deal, they are still unrealistic avatars with no arms and legs, etc. Why not just keep using Zoom?
But then I saw a video podcast interview of Mark Zuckerberg by Lex Friedman. Friedman and Zuck were not in the same physical location, but when they were videoed in the metaverse, it was almost like they were together. The faces were realistic, down to the movement of eyes and eyebrows and facial movements. Even the lighting was realistic. The effect was striking. Friedman was frankly blown away, even stating that he quickly forgot that they were not in the same room. The effect he noted was completely different than the two dimensional effect you see on plain video and Zoom.
Of course, the two of them were wearing the cover your face headsets. But that did not interfere with what Zuck called the “sense of physical