Early Preview of Facial Animation on Roblox
A live test build of facial animation in a Roblox experience was discovered Friday night.
For the past few years, Roblox has been teasing a new feature called Avatar Chat, which pairs Voice Chat with facial animation to bring more advanced expressions to Roblox avatars in experiences. In December 2020, Roblox acquired Loom.ai, a company that specializes in creating realistic facial animations and expressions for virtual avatars. In a statement, Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki stated that “Loom.ai will accelerate making human co-experiences more immersive and personal, adding world-class facial animation technology as part of Roblox’s efforts to provide expressive emotive actions to avatars that will enable deeper connections.”
Last night, a testing place was discovered that previews an array of new avatar features, one allowing you to connect your camera (phone or PC) to track your facial movements and expressions in real-life. Unfortunately, as of this article being published, the testing place has been set to Private and is no longer joinable. Here’s how it worked when it was available to the public:
- Plug in a camera to your PC or allow Roblox to access your mobile device’s camera.
- Enable the avatar preview window from the in-experience menu.
- Turn on your microphone and camera to see mouth, eyes, and head movements. (see example below)
Last year, Roblox also released a Face Animation Editor built into Roblox Studio. The Face Animation Editor provides an intuitive interface to animate Dynamic Heads using FACS within the existing Animation Clip Editor plugin.
We can expect to hear more about facial animations and “Avatar Chat” throughout this year, and more information at the 2023 Roblox Developer’s Conference in September. Stay tuned… 👀
