Last night I attended a Sansar meetup and a few things caught my attention. Obviously you can do social in Sansar, you don’t need a VR headset to get involved in a conversation, indeed with the text chat app you don’t need a headset of any sort, although the conversation was largely in voice and a voice headset definitely helps.
Some of the avatars moved, their arms would move when they spoke and I know at least one such avatar was wearing a VR headset but what took me more by surprise was the mouth movements and facial expressions of some of the avatars. At first I thought this was a feature of a VR headset but then one of the avatars mentioned that she was looking forward to getting a VR headset, but didn’t yet have one.
Now the facial expressions and mouth movement of this avatar had most caught my attention because at one time I’d convinced myself I could lip read her words.
A tweet later from Stanford VR explained to me what was likely to have been happening, Speech Graphics voice driven facial animations are apparently at work in Sansar, and if that’s true, they work bloody well.
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