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There's been lots of interesting conversation over my post last week criticizing Meta's ultra-real human IRL avatars, and why they're not actually wanted in metaverse platform — with many VR enthusiasts telling me I'm wrong because of, well, reasons. I even got into a back and forth with someone from Meta on social media, who kept insisting people want avatars which look like themselves IRL… but eventually admitted this was an assumption without a proof point.
By contrast, I know one notable counter-example all too well:
Thanks to the arrival of mesh in 2010 and some amazing community creators, Second Life now has what are arguably the most ultra-realistic human avatars for an open virtual world/virtual world platform. You can see that incredible evolution on this very blog, when you compare the best human Second Life avatars of 2006 such as these with the best featured in Cajsa's regular column.
Yet despite — or because — of that improvement in human avatar quality, Second Life's active user base has not appreciably grown. It was about 600K monthly active users in 2006, and it's still about that number. At the same time, metaverse platforms with highly abstract or cartoonish human avatars have exploded* in growth.
To be clear, this is not to criticize the Second Life creative community at all; I am always excited to see the latest amazing avatar portraits curated by Cajsa. The market for ultra-realistic human avatars may be a niche, but it's an amazing niche all the same.
The mystery is why Meta thinks this is what a mass market generally wants, let alone ultra-real avatars which look like their IRL owner.
As I said, it's possible we might want IRL avatars in a non-virtual world/metaverse platform, such as a Zoom call, especially for business contexts where we want to present as professional an appearance as possible. But even that narrow use case is questionable. (And far as affordable, high quality volumetric capture from a smart phone, a decade or two away in any case.)
In other contexts outside business calls — especially with video calls between friends and family — it's hard see any strong desire to change what we already do on our smartphones. When it comes to consumer adoption of technology, easy and good enough always beats out difficult but amazing.
***By the way, longtime virtual world pundit Gwyneth Llewelyn notes a possible exception in IMVU:
While non-human, cartoonish avatars abound on all sorts of virtual worlds out there, I find it extremely interesting that IMVU, which is as (almost) old as SL, and started with cartoonish avatars — because "everybody knows that people prefer them" — once they opened up avatar creation to developers, they immediately started to develop avatars with the correct proportions and as realistic as IMVU allows them to be, given its own mesh/UV limitations.
"Limitations" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, in my opinion. Also, because most IMVU users access the world via the mobile app, the graphics quality and avatar appearance is still pretty abstract, low detailed, and frankly crude compared to SL. Also, IMVU has 7 million MAU, which is a big step up in usage from Second Life — but still quite small compared to the cartoon behemoths of Roblox, Fortnite, etc.
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