(Update) Build Your Next XR App or Game in Unity With The Improved Full-body XR Avatars

Our new XR-optimized avatar body type features improved rig, bringing more natural deformations around the arms, wrists and fingers.

As new XR platforms emerge and more developers enter the space, we continue to improve our avatars and tools to support new technologies and devices. Here are some of the new XR-specific features and improvements we have added to Ready Player Me in the past months.

New Full-body XR avatar body type (beta)

To ensure that Ready Player Me avatars meet expectations and requirements of XR developers, we have created a new avatar body type – Full-body XR. From the outside, the new body type looks just like our standard Full-body avatars, including having legs. But there’s more happening under the skin mesh.

Full-body XR body type introduces a new rig specifically designed to allow for more natural hand and arm deformations in VR. The avatars now feature twist-bones in the arms, improved skinning around the arms and hands, and a new hand model. For the hand-rig specifically, we have fully implemented the Khronos' Open XR Standard, making our avatars compatible with Unity's XR Hands package and other interaction libraries.

The new Full-body XR avatars for Unity are available in public beta as we aim to offer complete feature-parity with the standard full-body avatars. Support for Unreal Engine is coming later.

Here's how to enable Full-body XR avatars in your app or game:

1. Go to My Applications page in Studio;
2. Select your app or game;
3. Change Body Type to Full-body XR in the Configuration tab.

Support for inverse kinematics

The new Full-body XR body type is compatible with Inverse Kinematics (IK) solutions, including Root Motion’s Final IK – the most popular IK solution for VR in the Unity Asset Store.

Social features and animations

Full-body XR avatars still have the same wide set of social features and animations as our other avatar body types. With support for both Oculus Lipsync and Apple ARKit blendshapes, you can animate an avatar's face as well as eyes. Our Unity SDK comes with a sample to demonstrate how you can control and animate an avatar’s eyes.

We have also partnered with Kinetix, which lets your users create emotes with AI for better non-verbal expressions.

Build a custom Avatar Creator

Crafting a user experience for XR platforms requires more flexibility and control over the interface design. Our API as well as Unity and Unreal SDKs have all the tools necessary to let you build a custom Avatar Creator experience that’s unique to your application.

Test Ready Player Me avatars on Meta Quests headsets

To give you a better idea of how Ready Player Me avatars perform on XR devices, we have created the Ready Player Me – Avatars Demo. The app lets you create your own avatar and test the XR-specific functionality, like support for IK, face and eye animations, and performance optimization options. You can install the Avatars Demo on Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and Meta Quest Pro directly from Meta Quest App Lab. Avatars Demo is an open source project, too! Feel free to use it in your own VR app or game.

Integrate Ready Player Me in your Unity XR app

Ready Player Me has all you need to integrate 3D avatars into your XR application. And it’s free to use, too! Create your developer account here today.