The Metaverse is a trendy concept and its relationship to virtual reality is clear. This is why Meta, former Facebook and owner of Oculus, is very interested in this area. Especially in the representation of avatars in virtual environments. Well they just introduced a chip to generate avatars and which we have been able to see integrated into future Oculus Quest.
And avatar in a virtual world is nothing more than our visual representation in the same. In video games it’s usually the character we control, but in a metaverse it has to have a 1:1 correlation to our movements. For example, it is important that he animates over time according to our words and that his facial expressions correspond to ours. Whether using a virtual reality headset or a simple webcam to access said virtual environment.
Although it seems very banal, its realization is essential to give a feeling of naturalness to the user who interacts with said environment. Of course, that requires specialized chips like the one Meta is developing for its future Oculus Quest. This is part of the trend of recent years to develop processors, but optimized for certain specific areas.
This is the chip to create Meta avatars
Meta has released a document explaining that they have created a chip that allows to automatically generate user avatars. Concretely, it will go in future Oculus systems and its operation is very simple. What it does is use the internal camera for eye tracking, which also records the upper part of our face and automatically generates an avatar based on the information obtained. It is a chip specialized in the generation of a red neural depth or DNN
The information obtained is then fully encrypted and sent through the network to the rest of the participants in the virtual world. Who decode the information to generate the avatars from their point of view on the virtual world. In this way, the main processor of each of the headsets is freed from said task and a representation more in line with the reality of the users is created.
This technology has several applications, for example, it can prevent a malicious person from impersonating someone with a completely different identity. By this we mean preventing you from lying about your gender, age or ethnicity. Although, on the other hand, others may see it as a way to violate their privacy and a step closer to Big Brother. In any case, Meta or Facebook is known to tamper with the information of its users. We reserve our opinion on the development of this chip, in any case the development of this chip is only one more curiosity. Moreover, we believe that chips of this type will be more and more common in our mobile phones and computers, if it is not already the case.