Creating a perfect avatar boils down to achieving what the team calls 'social presence', and vaulting the uncanny valley to deliver acceptably realistic avatars is something they've been working on for years. The team calls the process "passing the ego test and the mother test."
"You have to love your avatar and your mother has to love your avatar before the two of you feel comfortable interacting like you would in real life. That's a really high bar," Sheikh maintains.
A demonstration showing two VR users talking with lifelike avatars gives an interesting look at what the future of VR avatars could be.
The company says at this point these sorts of real-time, photorealistic avatars require quite the gear to achieve. The lab's two capture studios—one for the face, and one for the body—are admittedly both "large and impractical" at this point.