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Comment by barnabyjones | Hacker News Reader

I think the fake eyes and avatars would be a lot more palatable if they ditched the realism attempt and just used cartoon eyes and faces. You could choose different styles like Western or Anime, and people already buy things like eye masks with cartoon eyes on them. It would at least give the device and avatars some personality, not just "oh man he's using that creepy new Apple thing for the call." I guess if they're trying to sell this toy as a Serious Business Machine for Important People, that might be seen as too juvenile, but IMO silly beats creepy.

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Meta went the cartoon method, (so did apple with memoji) the problem is that it looks cheap.

So I suspect the front display was a compromise, between buildability, and not staring people out by accident.

It only looks cheap because meta made cheap, low effort avatars.

Apple could make stylized eyes look good if they wanted, I’m sure they have some Pixar connections too if they really wanted to bring on experts.

> It only looks cheap because meta made cheap, low effort avatars.

There is a wider societal statement packed in there, but that's for later. I would point out that memoji looks equally as cheap. However, there are slightly more rich people who choose/chose to use memojis

Memoji do not look as cheap. They don’t look great, but not nearly as cheap. You can see the polygons on meta’s models. They look like characters in PlayStation 2 era games.

Besides that, it’s an apples and oranges comparison. Avatars in VR are full-body (ish) and are meant as your primary method of viewing and probably interacting with others in a Vr space.

Memojis are just little faces you can put in your text message conversations.

The fact that people are making this comparison shows how little effort went into the visual design of metas avatars.

Heres a thought experiment:

You are looking at potential videos to watch on $subject. There are two videos you can see, one with a thumbnail of avatar/memoji/emoji, the other with a real person. Which one are _most_ people going to clock on (hint we can test this by analysing youtube)

The point I am making is that avatar/memojis look cheap, not because of how they are created, but because of ease of creation/lack of differentiation.

I don’t see the connection between those two statements, but I wholly disagree with your point.

3d humanoid models (avatars) can look like anything. Some look cheap, some don’t. Look at the sheer variety of avatars on vrchat.

VRchat has technical limitations that prevent avatars from looking straight out of a AAA game, but the sheer variety of the avatars and how they’re made and how they’re designed (maya, blender, with shaders, with props, etc) makes VRChat feel more alive and engaging than metas offering.

Any project that has billions of dollars of funding should be able to make good looking avatars that lend a distinct style. Hell, video games do it yearly on several million dollar budgets.

Sorry, but you’ve convinced me that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I don't want to see Toy Story representations of people.

Memoji looks cartoonish. Cartoonish is unpalatable in professional contexts. There's a reason people don't like comic sans.

What a sad state of affairs for professionals.

Not one professional is sad about this.

Then you don’t really want avatars. You want a 3d scan of someone which can be animated.

That’s fine, but to hit the massive appeal that meta wants for its metaverse, they cant do that and scale.

Also like who wants to go to the metaverse to get on a zoom call?

Zoom is enough for professionals and their meetings.

FWIW, "never say never" but I don't think I'll ever opt into being represented by a Pixar-like avatar.

If you believe I'm not alone, then by default you're alienating all of us if that is our only choice. The question then is whether my repulsion to being a memoji is greater than someone's repulsion to being an uncanny valley avatar.

I think the latter can be iteratively improved until people no longer find it uncanny—indeed I'd argue the latest research pieces from Meta AI that have been posted here on HN do seem to point that way

I don't think cartoon avatars can be improved to become palatable enough to those who dislike them

Apple had a good show on stage, but I think the fake eyes is something you just can't optimize enough to make people like it.

No matter how you trying to make it look "natural", it just can't, there are countless edge cases out there, it will never be "natural looking". For example, what if it shows others that you're staring something straight ahead but when "in fact" you're looking at a giant window playing a movie? Isn't that a bit awkward?

Not to mention, the devices makes you constantly look like that you about to nick something. It's just look so funny.

From what I understand it shows eyes only when you are interacting in real world soI guess it shows those colorfull waves and gradients when someones is looking at mentioned window

In practice, the front-facing eyes are barely visible to those looking at your face.

> For example, what if it shows others that you're staring something straight ahead but when "in fact" you're looking at a giant window playing a movie? Isn't that a bit awkward?

I dunno, sometimes people stare and think about stuff. I try not to reflexively grab a gadget in such times. But it does remind me of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bSsb9B1163k

They already solved this. The eyes are only visible when the person wearing the headset can see YOU.

Didn't you forget that Facebook did that and everybody hated it?

Also apple did that with memoji and everybody seems to be using it.

Everybody?

Yes.

I've even no idea what you're talking about?

I don’t know anyone using it. Are there any stats?

If anything, I’m associating cartoon avatars with Meta, I see more of them on fb and Instagram.

I always assumed the younger users use it. But I have no stats on it.

Here another data point from someone who should be in the everybody collection; I know 0 people who use that.

I'd say these are mainly popular among people who could be categorized as Apple enthusiasts; I've seen these on various Apple-related discord servers, news sites like macrumors or mastodon, bluesky profiles.

Nobody from my friends who happens to own an iPhone uses memoji avatars - they either prefer plain "old" pictures in their avatars or no avatars at all. Maybe not everyone wants to look like a cartoon character - I wouldn't be surprised if this could be perceived as childish behavior on levels of using anime avatars.

100%

having a memeoji avatar indicates you're a tech person like having an anime avatar indicates you like anime

(opinions from a twitter perspective, may not reflect real life)

Did it _poorly_ and everybody hated it

Meta did a bad job at it.

I keep thinking about - which one would i prefer my coworkers using when on a work call.

I think i would prefer neither, and they just 'turned the camera off'.

I think the issue with EyeSight is that Apple wanted to create the illusion that your eyes were positioned where your face is (and not where the front glass is), and to do that required a lot of compromises to image quality. Replacing EyeSight with an Animoji or whatever wouldn't fix that fundamental issue; you'd just have a dark and blurry Animoji instead.

It amazes me that “realistic avatars” is one of the key points in Snow Crash, 30 years ago, and here we are!

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