Meta's latest avatar system is available to all Unity developers

Following the first announcement eight months ago, Meta released the latest avatar system for all Unity VR developers, including support for App Lab games and limited support for non-Oculus platforms such as SteamVR.

Meta announced that its latest avatar system is finally available to all Unity developers. Formerly known as Oculus Avatars 2.0 — now known as Meta Avatars — the system offers a huge upgrade to avatar style and expressiveness compared to the company's previous avatar system.

The Meta Avatars SDK supports Unity-based VR applications on Quest and Rift, but has limited support for non-Oculus platforms, such as Unity VR applications built for SteamVR. Meta says quest apps on App Lab can take full advantage of the Meta Avatar SDK like the official store.

The company says it has built the Meta Avatar SDK with the needs of developers in mind. If necessary, developers can override the system's localization of avatar body and facial expressions to fine-tune avatar behavior for a given application.

The company also said that the Meta Avatar SDK uses an interesting distributed architecture to improve performance. Instead of having all headsets redundantly calculate all the positions and expressions of all avatars in a given scene, each headset performs calculations for its own avatar and then streams that information to other participants. Developers are also free to use the system with any networking stack they prefer, which adds flexibility to proprietary solutions.

Oculus-based applications using the Meta Avatar SDK will use avatars customized by the creator of the avatar that the player uses. SteamVR applications can use the Meta Avatar SDK, but since these applications are not tied to the Oculus platform, players can only choose one of the 32 preconfigured avatars. In the cross-platform game scenario, Meta says that while non-Oculus players can't fully configure their avatars, they'll see fully customized avatars from Oculus players.