Roblox dynamic heads are live, making the metaverse even weirder

pcgamesn.com:

Roblox dynamic heads recently launched on the platform, allowing players to express themselves through various virtual facial expressions. This long-awaited update to the sandbox game‘s avatar format is yet another way Roblox seeks to evolve past its reputation as a low-fidelity kids’ game and into a platform where people of all ages can gather in fanciful virtual worlds. The heads represent a departure from Roblox’s long-standing static faces, which are iconic as memes and other internet culture references.

Roblox officially introduced players to its avatar face expression technology at the Roblox Developer Conference, which took place September 9-10 in San Francisco. A recent Roblox blog post offers additional insight into the company’s foray into dynamic heads, noting that the objective is to bring “higher-fidelity human expression to avatars.”

“Avatars enable people to express themselves and their identity creatively, and we look to continue to support that in ways beyond communication. Millions of people come to the Marketplace every day to experiment with new looks and try on different personas—sometimes even multiple times a day,” the blog post reads.

Roblox developers can quickly create unique facial expressions using the company’s recently-released Live Animation Creator, which allows Robloxians to map facial expressions to their avatars. The process enables Robloxians “to create avatars to convey a wide range of expressions that best fit your mood and better capture emotions and gestures.”

“The tools leverage our novel machine learning models and significantly cut down on the time and resources needed to create high-quality full-body and facial animations. Just by using their device’s camera, anyone can make