Meta and Italian luxury brand Valentino have partnered to launch a new line of digital clothing on the company's Avatar Store. When the Meta Avatars Store launched in late 2022, the company offered digital outfits from a number of luxury...

This week Meta showed off a preview of its next-gen avatars during the Connect keynote. Frankly, they looked great! However, there's... less than meets the eye here. When Mark Zuckerberg appeared in Horizon during the Connect 2022 keynote sporting a next-gen...

Ready Player Me, a company focused on bringing cross-platform avatars to VR and beyond, announced it's closed a $56 million Series B round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from investors including Roblox co-founder David Baszucki, Twitch...

An innocuous screenshot of Meta's social VR platform shared by CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week saw widespread criticism in the tech sector. Prompted by the reaction, Zuckerberg shared a glimpse of purported visual upgrades headed to the platform. Last week Meta...

Epic Games, the company that makes Unreal Engine, recently released a substantial update to its MetaHuman character creation tool which for the first time allows developers to import scans of real people for use in real-time applications. The improvements...

Researchers at Meta Reality Labs have created a prototype VR headset with a custom-built accelerator chip specially designed to handle AI processing to make it possible to render the company's photorealistic Codec Avatars on a standalone headset. Long before the...

Wolf3D, the Estonian startup behind web-based avatar creator Ready Player Me, has closed a $13 million funding round. The company says it will use the funds to further build out its avatar creation tools and eventually allow developers to earn...

Facebook is rolling out its latest avatars, Oculus Avatars 2.0, which it hopes will finally unify virtual identify across Oculus applications and Facebook products. In addition to becoming the default avatars for Facebook Horizon and being optionally integrated into...

With growing usage of social virtual worlds and spaces like VRChat and Mozilla Hubs, you might be looking for a way to make your own avatar to represent yourself in VR. Here are two user-friendly avatar character creator apps for...

Ready Play Me, the free avatar maker from Wolf3D, now supports exporting avatars to VRChat, making it quick and easy to get a customizable avatar into one of the most popular social VR applications. While VRChat is host to tons of...

Many VR streamers use complicated mixed reality setups to show themselves from a third-person perspective inside the virtual world. LIV, a leading tool which makes this possible, now supports free, customizable, full-body avatars from ReadyPlayerMe, making it possible to...

Facebook Reality Labs, the company's R&D division, has been leading the charge on making virtual reality avatars realistic enough to cross the dreaded 'uncanney valley'. New research from the group aims to support novel facial expressions so that your...

Facebook Reality Labs, the company's AR/VR R&D group, published detailed research on a method for hyper-realistic real-time virtual avatars, expanding on prior work which the company calls 'Codec Avatars'. Facebook Reality Labs has created a system capable of animating virtual...

Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) chief scientist Michael Abrash believes AR and VR will be the primary way people work, play, and connect in the future. Abrash regularly speaks about when he expects these fundamental milestones in technology to occur,...

A new paper authored by researchers from Disney Research and several universities describes a new approach to procedural speech animation based on deep learning. The system samples audio recordings of human speech and uses it to automatically generate matching...