Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist
There's another thing from Snowcrash I've been thinking about - realistic faces. The most exclusive club in the Metaverse was The Black Sun and what made it special was that the avatars had extremely realistic, life-like expressions, enabling them to visually express emotions and thus enabling a higher form of communication (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read it in a decade).<p>So if we buy into the notion that social presence in VR worlds will be big, somebody's going to have to build this. The technology exists, but it looks very awkward: <a href="https://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/HBT-VFXprog-021.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/HBT-VFXpr...</a><p>Not only does that have to be translated into a consumer product, but you need to capture someone's face while they're wearing the VR headset, which makes it even harder. Since VR headsets already touch your face, I would imagine the product would have to be some kind of extension of that - a larger contact area filled with sensors that reconstruct your expression perfectly.