VR Realms will read your face from a webcam, and promises the picture stays on your PC
Sketchy Realms says the next version of VR Realms will move your avatar's face with your own, and that desktop players without a headset will be able to do the same thing with a webcam. The promise that goes with it is unqualified: "Your camera picture never leaves your PC. It is turned into a pose for your avatar on your own machine. It is never saved, never shown and never sent. Only the pose travels to other players."
A VR Realms screenshot from the game's Steam page. The 0.3.0 features described here have not shipped. Image: Sketchy Realms
All of it sits in a preview post the studio published at 03:49:48 UTC on October 10, headed "Coming in 0.3.0: Your Real Face, Webcam Tracking and Avatar Outfits". Nothing in it has shipped. The studio writes that "0.3.0 is in testing now" and gives no release date, and the post carried no later edit when it was read at 21:44 UTC on October 10.
Face tracking needs a headset that tracks faces
"If your headset tracks your face, your avatar's face now follows yours," the post says, listing "Smile, jaw, brows, cheeks and tongue, with your eyelids and where you look". Other players see it: "Your face travels to everyone in the session." The switch is on by default, under Settings and then the Comfort tab, and typing /face in chat shows what a given avatar can move.
There is a hardware limit, and the studio put it in one line on October 10: "Working today on a Quest Pro. More headsets are being tested." There is an avatar limit too. A model needs face shapes to use any of this, and one built with only a talking mouth will open that mouth with your real jaw.
Gaze itself is not new: the 0.2.1 notes of October 3 sent avatar eye movement to everyone in the room, which VR Realms shipped with an opt-out rather than an opt-in. What 0.3.0 proposes is the rest of the face on the same terms.
Three webcam modes, and the one that moves your arms
On the desktop version the camera does the job the headset does: "No headset? A webcam can move your avatar." Three modes are named. "Face Only" covers "Your face, eyelids and eyes". "Face and Head Movement" adds a head that "turns, nods and tilts with yours". "Upper Body" goes furthest: "Your arms, shoulders and fingers too. An arm follows while its hand is up where the camera can see it."
Unlike the face tracking, this one starts switched off. "It is off until you pick one in Settings, on the Comfort tab," the studio writes. The privacy line belongs to the developer and cannot be checked from outside the app, so it stands as a claim about what the software will do rather than as a tested fact.
Looks, outfits and a Creator Kit
The same update is meant to bring a wardrobe. Looks are "The same avatar in other colours and textures", outfits swap pieces or a whole set, and both are reachable from the quick menu or the chat commands /look, /outfit and /wear. "Everyone in the session sees what you wear, and the game remembers it the next time you wear that avatar."
A Creator Kit ships with 0.3.0 for the people building these avatars. It sorts a modular character pack into slots for hair, torso, legs and feet, hangs a tail or a hat on a single bone, and caps every avatar texture at 2048 pixels, with a ceiling of 800MB for an avatar with parts.
VR Realms is free and has been on Steam since September 25, listed as VR Supported rather than VR only, so desktop players are part of the audience. Version 0.2.4, from October 8, is what anyone can install. None of the face tracking, the webcam modes or the wardrobe has shipped: 0.3.0 has a feature list, a line saying it is in testing, and no date.
