Metaverse Avatars: Ready Player Me reaches milestone
Ready Player Me lets you create Metaverse avatars in minutes. The platform is actively used by the VRChat community.
Next to Rec Room, VRChat is the most popular metaverse platform for virtual reality. On New Year's Day, VRChat broke the mark of nearly 90,000 concurrent active users on Steam alone. A remarkable number that catapulted VRChat into the league of the ten most-used Steam titles.
The Metaverse platform is available for both virtual reality and PC. Around 30 to 50 percent of users are likely to be using VR headsets. Rising user numbers and the pandemic helped VRChat close an $80 million funding round in June 2021.
Avatar creation made easy
The problem with VRChat: It's quite cumbersome to create a personalized avatar for the Metaverse platform. Knowledge of the game engine Unity is required for this.
The avatar platform Ready Player Me solves this problem. A digital alter ego can be created on the computer or smartphone within minutes and imported into VRChat. Those who want maximum similarity between their physical and digital selves can upload a selfie. Ready Player Me then tries to create the most accurate avatar possible.
Once an avatar has been created, it can be imported into VRChat with a single click. | Image: Ready Player Me
Because I don't like the default avatars from VRChat, I recently tried Ready Player Me together with a colleague. I was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of the process and the end result.
Half a million VRChat avatars
Ready Player Me aims to become the Metaverse's leading avatar system, whether for traditional screens or VR and AR glasses. As long as the Metaverse breaks down into individual and mutually incompatible platforms, and thus is not really a Metaverse at all, Ready Player Me is likely to attract growing interest as a cross-platform avatar facilitator.
At least, if enough partners can be found. More than 1,000 apps already support the avatar system, but most of them are likely to be relatively small.
VRChat is the largest and most important partner so far. In its blog, the company writes that VRChat users have created more than 500,000 personal avatars with Ready Player Me so far. The avatar system has been supporting VRChat for exactly one year.
Read more about the Metaverse:
- Virtual travel: The Expedia CEO and the Fear of the Metaverse
- Othersight Test: Photorealistic VR Travel for Quest 2
- Meta rolls out improved Metaverse avatars
Note: Links to online stores in articles can be so-called affiliate links. If you buy through this link, MIXED receives a commission from the provider. For you the price does not change.
