Oculus Avatars: Now Cross-Platform!

The Oculus Avatars SDK is one of our tools provided to help developers create more meaningful, authentic interactions in their apps. Based on developer feedback, we've continued to invest in fidelity, visual style, performance, and utility. Today, we're moving forward to address one of your biggest requests: Oculus Avatars are going cross-platform.

We rely on our developer community for feedback on how to improve the avatar system. The most common ask to date has been to enable the Avatar SDK for other platforms. Most developers already build for multiple platforms, and we're excited to help them bring people together across communities, regardless of device or storefront. With SDK release 1.28 we're rolling out support for cross platform Avatars on PC, with an included Unity sample and an updated SDK license. You'll be able to implement a unified avatar system and compelling multiplayer experiences while minimizing cost and development time.

Oculus Avatars will work right out of the box. We've updated the SDK to support querying the users' avatar from any platform.

For this initial release, it will be possible to query the Avatar for an Oculus user from any app that uses the SDK. We're in the early stages of building out richer avatar support for non-Oculus users, but to provide some choices for non-Oculus users we've created 12 default avatars (included in the Unity sample) that can be provided as options to anyone without an existing avatar.

This is really just our first step in supporting developers across platforms, and we're excited to see how Avatars are used and get your feedback. You can download our first cross platform sample for Unity to get started, and find additional info in the updated docs for Unity, Unreal, and native development.

We're continually investing in more options for appearance, expression, and customization — including developer-created avatar content - and will have more to share soon.