Van Vugt et al demonstrated that a recognizable (and not hyper-realistic) avatar does not necessarily fall into the uncanny valley. Eduard Zell et al show that the uncanny valley effect may be triggered not by making an avatar more realistic, but by introducing inconsistencies in the stylization/level of detail. There is an ongoing discussion that the uncanny valley is less applicable to many use cases of realistic avatars. This is why The Polar Express was so controversial when it was released. Humans can have a strong, visceral aversion to such characters. Movie and game industries exploited uncanny valley for ages to create scary characters. Anyone interested in the details can start from the wiki article. Uncanny valley is a well known effect that an imperfect 3D model of a person creates an eerie feeling for people. But mostly a lot of creators are cautious about enabling realistic avatars because of the uncanny valley effect, which refers to the mental uneasiness that occurs when an artificial figure tries but fails at mimicking a human. It is not easy to animate such a model so that it resembles the person. It is hard to create a likeness of a person from one or few photos collected with a mobile phone (Hollywood uses expensive - a few hundred thousand dollars worth - rigs). So why instead of realistic avatars, do we see so many cartoonish ones? There are a few challenges in creating realistic avatars. This establishes credibility in this new and uncertain reality. So, what we need are realistic enough avatars that our friends or acquaintances can recognize us. 10 years from now hardware may be powerful enough to render hyper-realistic avatars in real time, but today it is not available to consumers. This means the closer to reality my avatar is, the better. However, if I am in a business meeting with customers, I need to show my face in order to be more trustworthy. Perhaps I am a lawyer, and I want to be a cat in VRChat, I can be. If I am in the VRchat or a similar experience, I may choose to be anonymous on that platform, so VRChat avatars offer the flexibility to choose what kind of character I want to be. Playing a game of Fortnight, I may not feel like being recognized. You can’t get away with a flat video (a few companies tried having 3D models with superimposed video streams for personalization), so a lot of companies are looking for a solution that involves personal avatars. Meeting people in a 3D experience (or the “metaverse” that is becoming a very trendy term these days) requires a digital representation of a person. This will allow users to see each other as in real life, use whiteboards, share video screens and documents. Once there are better VR headsets that are lighter and have higher resolution screens, increasingly more meetings will be in VR. People are used to exist in a three-dimensional space, so we are getting tired of staring at 2D cameras when meeting with people over Zoom. Increasingly more of these digital interactions are in 3D. The pandemic served as an acceleration to the trend that was already obvious. Kids are on social networks like Roblox, and multiplayer games. Everyday people talk to each other via emails, chats and video instead of meetings and phone calls. Our CEO, Victor Erukhimov, has written a post on using realistic and cartoonish avatars in Metaverse, and we are republishing it here.Ī digital world connects us all.
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