The Bright Smile of Your Digital Face
Oliver Sacks, the late luminary neurologist, suffered from a condition known as prosopagnosia (face-blindness), which is due to damage to the fusiform gyrus area of the brain and impairs one’s ability to recognize faces, including their own reflected image. It is a source of frustration as you will never have the experience of randomly bumping into a friend, unless they see you first, but more tragically much of the expressed information and emotional exchange performed by the tensing and laxing of the 43 facial muscles is lost. For Sacks and the many researchers influenced by his work, the condition spawned a great deal of study into the neurological processing of faces and awe at the brain’s need to devote so much real estate to the interpretation of a single item. As a point of comparison, there’s no known disorder that hinders our ability to recognize musical instrument or species of fruit; this tells us that there’s something unique, even critical, to facial processing and our attempts to recreate them in technologies like VR deserve considerable attention.
The rendering of faces for VR currently falls between the abstraction of emoticons and real life micro-expressions, which can be as brief as 1/25 of a second. Until hi-def 3D scans can be uploaded into social VR platforms, we’ll have to settle for the incremental doses of reality being introduced into our experiences. One such advancement is happening in the popular social VR platform Rec Room which allows users to participate in multiple tabletop games, including an old-fashioned round of poker. Speaking from experience, playing no-stakes poker in VR is boring since there’s no physical engagement with your fellow players, but Tobii eye trackers are being implemented in card games to heighten the reality and help us engage more fluidly. It may seem like a small detail, but seeing one’s opponent glance over their cards and look about the room has a profound psychological effect. For one, it proves their not dead. But secondly, if they’re genuine in their gameplay, it’s a sign that their mentally processing the activity around them and are interested in securing a particular outcome.
Another Social VR experience that, as of writing, is available in early access on Steam is called EmbodyMe. It’s an application that purports to take your (essentially biometric) photos and render them onto an avatar, so you can interact with others using a more faithful representation of yourself. Unless you’re incredibly proud of your appearance, there’s no great benefit to looking you-like when meeting with strangers — personally, I treat experiences in Social VR and Second Life-type virtual worlds as a type of cosplay — however, this can be incredibly affecting when speaking to loved ones across long distances. Within 24 of the application going online, I downloaded it and gave it a try.
I put a couple of years into my beard and I’ve grown quite attached to it.This becomes relevant in using EmbodyMe since there’s no feature for accommodating facial hair. When entering the virtual space, there is a grid of a 3D human form and a menu of options for filling in that space. I first attempted to take a snapshot using the camera on the Vive HD, but the results were lacking, so I chose a suitable photo from my hard drive. The instructions for taking a usable picture are akin to that of photos for a visa application: even lighting, face forward, no glasses… The resultant avatar had a great deal of discoloration on the lower face and I momentarily believed they’d given me a zombie avatar. But I saw the eyes and nose resembled mine and I realized that the application was not beard friendly. There are menus for dressing your avatar and giving it hair, but there’s not yet an option for accessorizing the face. Luckily, there’s a list of ready-made, celebrity avatars to choose from, including: Marilyn Monroe, Angelina Jolie, President Obama, the RealDonaldJTrump, Mark Zuckerburg, and Justin Bieber. I selected the Jackie Chan avatar, put on a long-sleeve t-shirt with red jeans, and began exploring the space.
Movement is done through teleport, which is typically a good choice, and there are mirrors placed strategically throughout the environment, so the details of your own rendering aren’t lost to your own experience. I came across spots with yellow, levitating pills; I took drew one to my face and watched as the martial arts master’s face morphed into a LOTR-style orc — I tried the other pills as well to a similar effect. The environment was a small, two-story cement structure inspired by the Brutalist school of architecture. As far as activities go, there was only a dart board and a table for stacking blocks, but I can only assume that more were on the way. Since I was an early user and it was very late evening, there was nobody there, but I was still able to look into the mirror, test different phrases and vowel sounds, and see a clumsy approximation of speech. But again, these visual approximations are far better than nothing as they become essential conversational aids. Another social VR platform, AltspaceVR, uses robot avatars who light up as they speak for the same reason.
As I said, EmbodyMe could be a great choice for meeting loved ones but, from a design perspective, there needs to be further updates before it’s suitable for meeting new people. Moreover, seeing a rough version of myself embodied digitally excites me for the advanced versions coming in the future, where face-to-face we can smile and laugh faithfully among friends and kind strangers.
P.S. This video from Mike Booth of Facebook includes many of the principles guiding face creation of avatars.
