Full Body Avatar | What's Next?
Full body avatars is still in beta, so what are we working on to get it out of beta?
We are continuously iterating on the full body avatar, and now that every player can use them, we are interested in hearing and working on feedback from everyone.We are continuing to work on how the full body avatar moves in VR and screens (especially with dancing and idle animations), fixing holotars to work with full body, making it so a creator can determine which avatar types are used in their costumes, fixing the ability to adjust how hats sit on your head, fixing more screen-based animations (have you noticed how full body avatars drink water bottles through their eye? :P), finishing up all of the grip poses for the 500+ items, and exposing the underlying sliders that shape your body and head so you can have more control in customizing your form.
We are also continuing to polish some of our legacy avatar items that don’t look great yet on the full body avatars (we know some gloves aren’t where we’d like them yet). Finally, we haven’t forgotten about full body tracking and finger tracking for our VR players.Only when this list of things are done (and we address additional feedback we receive) will we consider dropping the beta status.
Our commitment to the floating bean avatars
We know a lot of you are concerned that we may deprecate the floating bean avatar when we determine full body avatars are ready to be out of beta. Don’t worry! We are committed to supporting and upgrading floating beans that have been here since the beginning of Rec Room.One of our big tasks right now is to take the optimizations that you read about above— such as skin culling masks and just-in-time level of detail— and bring them to the bean so we can reduce their cost by 60%. This will be a big help in our fight to improve performance on all platforms.Additionally, we plan to bring over some new features to the bean like being able to see your customized hands when grabbing objects, being able to see your torso when you look down, and the option to have a nose, the option to have eyebrows, and the option for eye gleam. Whether you want to preserve your classic bean as is, selectively add some of the improvements (such as eye gleam, or eyebrows), or move all the way to a full body avatar - we will fully support you.Look out for an upcoming dev blog where we will dive deeper into our plans for preserving and enhancing the floating bean avatars.
With the upgraded bean (coming soon™) , your glove customization can stay visible when holding items like the laser pistol. We’ll also have an option to hide your hand if that’s the interaction you prefer.