Meta Avatars Highlights from Connect 2022

Today, we kicked off Meta Connect 2022, our annual developer conference exploring innovations in augmented and virtual reality—and the future of the metaverse. In our keynote and developer sessions, we shared our vision for Meta Avatars and how we’ll empower developers to bring avatars into their own experiences.

In this post, we’ll recap highlights, including:

In case you missed it, you can watch the keynote and developer sessions on-demand after the event on the Reality Labs Facebook Page—and be sure to check out our new Meta Avatars developer webpage to learn more about our Meta Avatars SDK and documentation.

The metaverse won’t be built by one company—it will be built through partnership and co-creation with our developer community. Developers are critical as we work to build bridges to the metaverse. So we’re working to bring Meta Avatars to certain first- and third-party VR and mobile experiences.

We want to meet developers where they are—and you’ve told us that you want support across more platforms and engines. We’re excited to announce that the Meta Avatars SDK will soon support Unreal Engine for VR developers. This has been one of the most requested integrations from developers, and we’re thrilled to bring it to market. We’re testing this with a small set of partners first and will make it more broadly available in the upcoming year.

We want to empower developers to integrate Meta Avatars across multiple experiences. We’re excited to share that the Meta Avatars SDK will soon support iOS and Android on Unity. We’re testing this with a small set of partners first and will make it more broadly available in the upcoming year.

We want you to be able to give your communities avatars with full-body experiences. Legs have been one of the most requested features on our roadmap, and it’s been a significant area of our focus. We’ll start by enabling legs in Meta Horizon Worlds, and then we’ll make these full-body avatars available to developers next year.

The Meta Avatars SDK will support our soon-to-be released headset, Meta Quest Pro, where our new APIs will allow you to explore Natural Facial Expressions to enhance immersion for your users.

We’re excited to share that we’re expanding availability of the Meta Avatars Store to VR later this year—extending the places where you and your communities can engage with avatars commerce. Any developer who has integrated the Meta Avatars SDK and has an entry point to the Avatars Editor will get this new experience—including the Meta Avatars Store. With this expansion, we’re starting to build a future where storefronts are immersive and social.

In addition to the innovations we’re delivering to developers, we’re also enhancing the experience for people across our own products. We want people to feel represented by their Meta Avatars. Here are some of the latest advancements we’ve made:

We want people to have a seamless experience creating their Meta Avatars, so we’re introducing the ability for people to generate an avatar simply by taking a video selfie with their phone camera. Instead of starting the process from scratch, people can devote more time to refining an avatar that already captures their likeness.

We’re excited to share that Meta Avatars will soon be available on WhatsApp. People will be able to create and share their avatar, all without leaving the WhatsApp experience.

We’re introducing new, embodied experiences across our social platforms. Coming next year, Meta Avatars will be available for video calls on Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Avatars will mirror their speakers’ expressions and movements during the conversation—creating a middle ground between on-camera and off-camera experiences.

As we navigate towards the next generation of social experiences, we believe that avatars will be key to bridging us from today’s online experiences to those enabled by a more embodied internet—the metaverse. And we want to build that bridge to the metaverse for people together with you, our developer community.

To catch up on all the updates and news from Meta Connect 2022, check out our recap or visit the Reality Labs Facebook page to watch the keynote, Developer State of the Union, Carmack Unscripted, and individual developer sessions.