🔒 Pick a face, choose a voice
Imagine a Monday morning a few years from now. I get up, I don’t shave (as usual), but before I head out, I open an app and set my public profile to the “neat professor” variant.
Anyone who looks at me through augmented reality glasses will see me clean-shaven, in a pressed shirt, maybe even a little younger. For my wife, I keep the default profile, because she already knows what I look like. For the students, the bearded version, since it supposedly adds authority.
It sounds absurd. And yet the way the technology is evolving isn’t that far from this vision. Since 2015, Meta Reality Labs has been developing a line of research on so‑called Codec Avatars—photorealistic face-and-head avatars whose appearance and expressions can be reproduced digitally in real time. In the Pixel Codec Avatars paper, they demonstrated a system capable of highly faithful facial reproduction, and subsequent work advanced both the image realism and practical methods for acquiring the data needed to build an avatar.
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