Facebook, Now Meta, Demonstrated Photorealistic Avatars

Yesterday, during the annual Connect conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook's new name – Meta. This news alone stormed the internet and made many people miss an interesting tech demo where Yaser Sheikh, Director of Facebook Reality Labs in Pittsburgh, demonstrated Meta's new codec avatars. According to the demo, these new avatars are full-height and have the photorealistic looks of a person they represent.

The team showed that the work they put into this project gives users better control over their eyes, facial expressions, hairstyles, and appearance. The company also showed off the ability to simulate how the avatar’s hair and skin could react to different lighting conditions and environments and even how it was working on interactive clothing.

The project, however, is still WiP due to the enormous amount of hardware and powerful computers to make one of the avatars, but in the future, the company promises to make this available for everyone.