This new mobile app from High Fidelity (official website) lets you take a quick selfie with your smartphone’s camera and turn it into a full body VR avatar within minutes.
Despite the fact that you can be pretty much whoever and whatever you want to be in social VR apps such as VRChat and High Fidelity, sometimes you just want to be a digital representation of yourself. Especially if you’re using the app professionally or to meet with someone you know in real life, it might be more prudent to present as yourself rather than an outlandish avatar.
That’s where this new mobile app comes into play. The app is called Virtual You: 3D Avatar Creator and it’s available now from the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store. All you do is take off your eyewear, brush back your hair, and position your face inside the oval to snap a selfie. After a few questions the app will spit out a 3D avatar that, honestly, looks pretty solid for a first attempt. I only made very minor tweaks to mine, such as general face shape and eyebrows, but it was basically good to go.
One tricky thing about this process is that once you link your High Fidelity account and “send” the avatar to your in-game self, it’s not where you’d think. I spend about 20 minutes searching for the avatar inside the app assuming it would show up somewhere in the “Avatar” menu but for some reason it actually goes to your “Inventory” first. After you click “Wear” it will show up under “Avatar.” Hopefully I save you a few minutes of aimless confusion.
I would prefer more hair options and a few more casual clothing styles, but overall I’m pretty impressed with the results. I snapped the waving pic at the top of this article from the non-VR version of High Fidelity to make things easier. This is what I look like in meat space for comparison to my High Fidelity self:
I don’t know if this is enough to, personally, pull me to High Fidelity over the likes of VRChat, but it’s still a really nice feature that I’d love to see implemented in similar fashions across VR. The Oculus Avatar system is great and expressive at what it does, but it’s tough to beat a traditional-style full body avatar like this. It just feels comfortable to wear an alternate version of your own skin.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
