Shake your fist and your VR avatar’s face will turn “angry.” Put your hands on your face Home Alone-style to express “shock.” Triumphantly thrust your hands in the air and your virtual self’s face will show “joy.”
These are what Facebook calls “VR emoji,” and they’re the company’s vision for how we’ll convey emotion in virtual reality. We’re not talking about yellow illustrated emoticons popping up over your head. Instead, your avatar’s eyes, eye brows, mouth and other facial features will change to mimic how we exhibit body language in the real world.
Face-to-virtual-face
Michael Booth, Facebook’s head of social VR, describes that “when you send a message and you want to make an emotional point, you stick an emoji on there.” We lose tone and physical cues when we text, so emojis emerged to clarify what you really mean. Otherwise, the recipient won’t know whether you’re excited or worried when you say “oh my.”
Booth wanted to alleviate similar sentiment ambiguity that exists in social VR as you don’t usually see someone’s real face. The solution goes far, far beyond the “Reactions” you can leave on 360 News Feed content to express more nuanced feedback than just a “Like.”
“We’re coming up with a language that triggers your avatar to make certain emotions,” aka “VR emoji” Booth tells me. “We can’t just be a blank presence. [In VR] we have eyes, we have mouths. We need some kind of emotions or it seems like totally flat affect.” If you say something shocking to a friend in VR, but their face stays completely static, it breaks your sense of presence. We’re accustomed to facial cues.
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For example, in the real world if you’re in the middle of a long explanation and someone doesn’t understand you, you can recognize the confused expression on their face. That tells you to dumb it down a bit, provide more background context or say it again in a different way.
Without VR emoji, your conversation partner would either have to interrupt you, flail their arms in a non-obvious way or wait until you’re finished. With Facebook’s VR emoji, you can shrug with your palms up, and your face will show an easily recognized expression of confusion — eyes scrunched and mouth crooked. Though Booth warns the gestures behind its VR emoji vocabulary are sure to change over time.
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Mark Zuckerberg dives into how our brain processes social VR
None of this depends on eye or facial tracking, which would require additional hardware to be built into VR headsets. Startups like FOVE are building these headsets, and apps like VR chat room Altspace make your eye movements visible on your avatar. But eye tracking isn’t built into the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, Google Daydream and Cardboard, HTC Vive or PlayStation VR headsets. The hand-tracking that VR emojis require is proliferating much faster toward the scale Facebook craves for its product.
Booth details four of the main goals Facebook has for using avatars to create the sense of believable human presence in social VR:
“You’re comfortable with the way you look”
“Friends can recognize you at a glance”
“It’s not creepy and disturbing”
“Facebook can create avatars that represent each of its 1.7 billion users”
Facebook is still experimenting with different ways to personalize avatars so they look like you. One option is an internal drawing tool where you illustrate a version of your face to plaster onto your avatar. Another is to use an Occipital Structure sensor or other image-capture device to model your head. Facebook could potentially even try to recreate your VR face from the photos tagged of you on its social network.
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Whatever it offers will have to work reliably, otherwise you could end up with a grotesquely disfigured avatar version of yourself that would break rules No. 1 and No. 4 above.
Live VRing
Luckily, Booth knows plenty about avatars. He spent 10 years making video games at Valve and another two at Blizzard. He was planning to start his own VR game studio, but then Facebook showed him the “Toybox” social VR demo, which he says “really blew my mind.” He joined Facebook, and since December has been working on the successor to Toybox, Facebook’s unnamed social VR prototype demoed today.
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Source: TechCrunch