Meta Avatars SDK Now Available

The Meta Avatars SDK is now available to all Unity developers on Quest, Rift, and Windows-based VR platforms. Any App Lab or Store developer can start integrating Meta Avatars here.

In April we announced our new avatar style and showcased what the next generation of avatars could bring to gaming with Epic Roller Coasters, PokerStars VR, GOLF+, Synth Riders, and ForeVR Bowl. The Meta Avatars SDK adds social presence to your experience with highly expressive and customizable avatars and more than a quintillion (no, we’re not making that up!) possible combinations of outfits and physical features. Since we launched, we've made a number of updates to outfits and physical features, both in terms of pushing on the quality of the assets, but also adding more options for people. We'll continue to improve the fidelity and customization options so that people feel represented in the metaverse.

People can configure their Meta Avatars via an editor included in the platform so that all apps integrating the Meta Avatars SDK can represent them in a consistent and authentic way. Developers can focus on making great products rather than their own avatar systems, and people can seamlessly transition between experiences without the need to configure app-specific avatars.

But the SDK is much more than the style; it’s substance. Meta Avatars are built with developer needs in mind to power all kinds of experiences in VR. Meta Avatars interpret hand tracking, controller tracking, and audio input to drive highly expressive Avatar models. Custom IK algorithms help make sure that the avatar's body positions and facial expressions are as realistic as possible, and these algorithms will improve over time. You can override any of the body positioning and facial expression data provided in order to fine-tune the appearance of Avatars in your applications.

The intention of Meta Avatars is to enrich social interaction. Optimizing for multi-user experiences has been a fundamental goal. The system locally estimates the avatar’s pose and allows it to be streamed to other participants using your choice of networking stack. This approach reduces the amount of computation effort required, and accommodates the need to override the system’s default avatar facial expression and body position in a manner that is authoritative in the experience. This empowers developers to create multi-user experiences that look natural while maintaining the performance of your app as Meta Avatars join or leave your experience.

Here is what some of our current third-party developers who already have the SDK integrated into their apps have to say:

“Avatars are critical to our mission of creating games with next level social. We have players in our games who are on dates, meeting up to hang out or listening to music with friends. We’ve even seen ForeVR Bowl players change their outfits and bundle up to suit the snowy landscape of our Holiday Hall. For our upcoming ForeVR Darts experience, we wanted to create the ambiance of shooting darts with your friends or with your league at the local hangout. The customized avatars make that experience more interesting, engaging and immersive. But luckily not too immersive that the darts hurt if they hit you!”
- ForeVR Bowl

“You really get a lot straight out of the box! You get things like kinematics, which is not trivial. If you can get it to work you can get the customizations for free. You can edit off the Oculus menu so you don’t need to edit your own menu. That’s a fair amount of work there. You can get hand tracking if you want. You get the whole thing and it works really well with the whole Ecosystem.”
- Cook-Out

“It will allow people to be themselves and not just a common face in the crowd like our current very limited avatar selection provides. We think that if people can be themselves, it will make their own experience less monotonous, and it will greatly improve the quality of shared media - because it won't all look almost identical.”
- Eleven Table Tennis

The Meta Avatars Unity plugin includes prefabs, scripts, and assets that allows convenient access to all available functionality, along with several samples including:

The SDK contains 32 sample avatars that are available for use during development and are freely available for use in shipping products. These sample avatars are representative of the quality of the custom avatars users can create, and can also be used as presets for NPCs, users who don’t want to customize their own, or to represent users on platforms without a Meta login like SteamVR.

For more information, along with code snippets and best practices to help you get started, please see our documentation.

Download the Meta Avatars Unity SDK, along with documentation, here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know on the developer forum.