Dec 19, 2023

v24 of the Meta Avatars SDK is now publicly available

Meta Avatars SDK v24 introduces a new technical foundation and delivers visual enhancements, greater customization, performance improvements, and Unity Asset Store support.

Note: This version of the Meta Avatars SDK does not introduce support for tracked or animated legs.

Building a new technical foundation for Meta Avatars

With v24, Meta has revisited many of the core systems underpinning Avatar SDK, which will enable Meta to deliver future improvements without introducing significant breakage risk to your application.

Since the Meta Avatars SDK was introduced in 2021, it has been challenging to make visual improvements at the rate we would like due to the need to preserve compatibility with existing apps. In v24, we’ve rebuilt our core systems to work through a rig abstraction - rather than targeting the rig itself - which will allow us to more rapidly improve Avatar visuals in the future without breaking applications. As a consequence of these updates, existing animations and record and playback animations will need to be reworked.

With the introduction of this new technology, Meta will eventually deprecate support for its legacy character rig. We will share more information on this deprecation timeline next year. As of v24, Meta will no longer officially support Meta Avatars on Quest 1 devices. If your application needs to support Quest 1 and you decide to upgrade to v24, then please follow these instructions to ensure v24 compatibility.

What’s new in v24

In addition to introducing a new character rig, v24 also delivers a bundle of improvements:

Visual enhancements: Specific updates include more detailed hair and clothing enabled by implementation of normal texture mapping and the introduction of eye glints.

Greater customization: New, hand editable shaders, Meta Avatars Shader, provide more flexibility around how avatars appear in your application. Additionally, we’ve introduced a new LightingExample scene, which makes it easier to understand how an avatar will look with developer-created lighting setups.

Performance improvements: A new skinning technology, Compute Skinner, that lowers Meta Avatars’ memory footprint and improves the loading time of avatars. This update does not require additional development work as you will get this on by default when you upgrade to v24.

Unity Asset Store: SDK v24 will be the first version of the Meta Avatars SDK that you can download via the Unity Asset Store. Unity Asset Store will ease the paths for existing developers to update to future versions of the SDK and for new developers to integrate the Meta Avatars SDK into their applications for the first time. We will release future versions through the Unity Asset Store.

v24 of the Meta Avatars SDK is now publicly available

Building a new technical foundation for Meta Avatars

What’s new in v24

Get the latest updates from Meta Horizon.