Oculus Avatar SDK

Avatars deliver true social presence with persistent identities you can take with you across the Oculus ecosystem. Bring other user Avatars into your app, game, or experience so players can feel like themselves and recognize their friends.

Avatars also provide hand presence for Touch controllers, letting you integrate Oculus Touch interaction into Rift apps. Integrating Touch enables users to interact with their environment and enhance their perception of themselves within your virtual world.

In May 2018, with the launch of Oculus Go, Oculus released a new visual style for Avatars. This update provides a new look and feel that provides users more ways to express themselves and an updated visual fit for the aesthetic of the many VR worlds.

Integrations for the initial version of the new Avatars are currently available for Unity and Unreal. Sample code for native C++ will be coming soon.

What’s New in Avatars?

Dynamic lighting on Rift - The updated look and feel uses a reference physically-based renderer on Rift, allowing us to deliver an Avatar that fits much better into the game world and lighting. Previous Avatars had a significant amount of pre-computed lighting that made them stand out in well-lit environments.

Lightweight shader on Mobile - The new version of Avatars also adds a lightweight mobile shader, which achieves much of the full PBR with drastically reduced compute. The shader combines avatar meshes within the SDK and uses Unity's texture array functionality, with the resulting mobile Avatar requiring a single draw call per eye and lower GPU/CPU overhead overall from the shader.

Mouth movement on Mobile - The mobile shader now adds subtle mouth movement to the user’s Avatar when speaking through VoIP.

More consistent testing - The Unity integration has been updated to make testing and development between PC and mobile more consistent. Your Android build configuration will use mobile meshes and force ASTC textures while in the Unity editor to help match the assets that will be seen by the user.

In this Guide

This guide will review how to integrate the new Avatars into your app. Legacy integrations will continue to serve the old style of Avatars if you choose not to upgrade your app. Please see the Legacy Avatar 1.0 SDK Development Guide for information about the previous iteration of the Avatar SDK.

Updating your Integration

If you’ve previously integrated the Avatar SDK, please see the Avatars Upgrade Guide for information about how to quickly update your integration.