Image: Playroom
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Rec Room social app provides full avatars.
While Meta struggles to attract users to Horizon Worlds, another early Metaverse effort is doing much better: in the spring of 2022, social app Rec Room had about ten times as many users as Horizon Worlds. Unlike Horizon Worlds, Rec Room can also be played on flat screens.
The startup of the same name opened its social virtual reality hangout in 2016 and has fulfilled many community wishes in its expansions. Among other things, users can work together to create additional levels. Another request from the community: avatars must have legs. According to the team, this wish will be granted in the future.
Does the metaverse have legs?
Originally, the studio opted for floating torsos, heads and hands. At the time, the developers saw their project as a kind of VR counterpart accessible to Wii Sports. As a result, the characters had to look simple and charming – and require little computing power. In the future, users will be able to log in with full avatars.
In a blog post, the developer announced the creation of a small team called the “Avatar Initiative” who’s been developing the new characters since late 2022: “We’re now a bigger team, VR technology has gotten better and keeps getting better, and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t with your appearance and move in VR.
New full body avatar with “arms, legs, fingers and feet” offers more expressive possibilities, writes the team. Developers should also benefit from improved motion capture capabilities. The old avatars will still be available. The team makes sure that the full avatars support all the old stuff.
A release date has not yet been set. Users can participate in development via Zendesk or Discord. Rec Room is available for free for Meta Quest, PC-VR, PSVR, Pico 4 and many monitor platforms.
In October 2022, Meta unveiled more elaborate legged avatars for Horizon Worlds, but instead of new models, only animations were shown, presumably created via motion capture.
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