AltspaceVR, the social VR platform, has always had a unique visual approach to presenting your digital self in a virtual space, but it may not have been to everyone’s tastes. Now, the company has introduced for familiar looking avatars to express yourself with.

AltspaceVR, who recently celebrated raising a total of over $15M to develop and grow their virtual reality social platform, has introduced humanoid avatars, in stark contrast to the robot-style models the system has used since the beginning.

You can now apparently not only choose something which looks a little more like you, you can (should such things float your boat) also choose your digital mini-me in outfits from over 90 clothing combinations.

altspacevr-avatars-1

The new avatars blink, but more importantly include corresponding animations locked to your speech within AltspaceVR. Additionally you may find a couple of other non-human options that the developers had some fun implementing.

So what are you waiting for, head over to AltspaceVR and start expressing your sense of virtual style. The platform is currently free to access and recently introduced cross platform support in the form of a Gear VR version of the application. HTC Vive support is also due to be implemented.

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • Zobeid

    They’re a long, looooong way from matching the avatars in Second Life.

    • Ruuubick

      Yep that’s the goal !

    • Simon Wood

      Was watching this conference session on social VR:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St4f6QheZA4

      Apparently Second Life avatars are more ‘realistic’ as they use textures not real time animation. The few actions done by the avatars are ‘pre-rolled’ animation.

      • Zobeid

        That is true, but I’m not sure I’m convinced that it matters as much as these guys think. They’re talking about reproducing head movements, hand gestures and facial expressions as if these were critical elements of immersion and communication, and yet we’ve all been getting by Just Fine in SL for more than a decade without that stuff.

        Even voice. . . At High Fidelity they’ve put a lot of work into getting voice communication right, but they don’t even have text chat implemented yet. Well, we’ve had voice in SL for several years, but text chat still works better most of the time — certainly at events where you have free discussion amongst several people in a room.

      • DaKangaroo

        Second Life avatars are so customisable that it goes beyond customisation. I’ve personally designed, sculpted, remeshed, modelled, UV mapped, textured, rigged, posed, animated and uploaded fully original avatars for Second Life created in 3D modelling/animation software outside of Second Life. The only constraint is that the avatars must conform to the human skeleton* for animation. I could easily create the AltspaceVR avatars shown in the article and upload them to SL to wear if I wanted, the system is that flexible.

        (*And even there with some trickery you can create avatars like, for example, dogs? dragons? etc just by deforming the skeleton and using specially designed animation sets.)

        It’s true that SL does use premade animations for things like walking, jumping, etc. But you could just as easily replace those with live mocap/hand position/head position information to drive the avatar in a similar way to how AltspaceVR does it.

        In my opinion, some combination of the two would be amazing. For example, premade animations for walking, legs on the ground, inverse kinematics for movement of leaning around, etc. But if you combined that with leap motion or HTC Vive controllers for the hands, and head tracking through the HMD, you could have the best of both worlds. You could use AltspaceVR seated, use the animations for walking, while controlling your hands and head.

        Far less changes would be required to make SL capable of this than would be required to make AltspaceVR capable of this. SL would only need the add the ability to take captured user movements in reality, say, from headset position, vive controllers or leapmotion, etc and use that positional information to drive avatar animation. That’s really not that hard when you think about it in terms of coding, that’s a month long job at most for a skilled dev team to implement and roll out.

        It’d be much less challenging than the task AltspaceVR would have.. designing an asset management system, mesh uploading system, universal system for rigged avatar meshes, storing of animations, syncing avatar animation state to different users, a local mesh/texture/animation cache.. the list of things goes on and on, it’d take at least a solid year or maybe 2 for AltspaceVR to implement all of that. It’s taken a decade for SL to get to where it is at now.

        Unfortunately, LL, the devs behind SL, are absolutely useless and seem so disinterested in improving their own service that I’m really really not holding my breath for any updates to SL any time soon to add impressive VR features to SL. Which is just so gut twistingly disappointing, considering SL would need only just a few tweaks and VR specific features to make it *** THE PLACE *** for VR social interaction, for YEARS to come. What’s wrong with them?!

  • Mat

    Is it me or does the Dude jost look like Zuckerberg? :D