Following an initial announcement eight months ago, Meta has released its latest avatar system for all Unity VR developers, including support for App Lab titles and limited support for non-Oculus platforms like SteamVR.
Update (December 13th, 2021): Meta today announced that its latest avatar system is finally available to all Unity developers. Formerly called Oculus Avatars 2.0—and now called Meta Avatars—the system brings a huge upgrade to avatar style and expressiveness compared to the company’s prior avatar systems.
The Meta Avatars SDK offers support for Unity-based VR applications on Quest and Rift, with limited support for non-Oculus platforms, like Unity VR apps built for SteamVR. Meta says that Quest apps on App Lab can make full use of the Meta Avatar SDK, just like those on the official store.
Meta Avatars aren’t yet supported in Unreal Engine, but support is expected eventually.
The company says it has built the Meta Avatar SDK “with developer needs in mind.” Developers can override the system’s positioning of avatar bodies and facial expressions if necessary to fine-tune avatar behavior for their given application.
The company also says the Meta Avatar SDK uses an interesting distributed architecture for performance. Instead of having all headsets redundantly calculate all of the positions and expressions of all avatars in a given scene, each headset performs the calculations for its own avatar and then streams that information to other participants. Developers are also free to use the system with whichever networking stack they’d like, which increases flexibility over a proprietary solution.
Oculus-based applications using the Meta Avatar SDK will use the avatar that player’s have customized through their headset’s avatar creator. SteamVR applications can use the Meta Avatar SDK, but because those apps aren’t tied to the Oculus platform players are restricted to choosing from one of 32 pre-configured avatars. In cross-play scenarios, Meta says that although non-Oculus players can’t fully configure their own avatar, they will see the fully customized avatars of Oculus players.
As far as we know, the Meta Avatar system currently doesn’t support multiple avatar outfits or app-specific outfits, which means you can only have one ‘look’ at any given time. Similarly, it doesn’t appear to be possible for applications to offer their own unique outfits, accessories, or styles for players to use with their avatars within a specific app.
The original article, which overviews the preliminary release of Meta Avatars to select developers earlier this year, continues below.
Original Article (October 28th, 2021): Facebook began rolling out its latest avatars in the Oculus Avatars 2.0 update in April, which creates new default avatars for the company’s first-party social VR platform, Facebook Horizon.
In addition to being more lifelike and visually appealing than its prior releases, Avatars 2.0 is also positioned to unify the Oculus and Facebook ecosystems somewhat by bringing them to the full swath of Facebook properties including the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, and more.
Over the past year a number of third-party applications have worked with Facebook to adopt the system. You can already see the new avatars in Epic Roller Coasters, PokerStars VR, and Topgolf with Pro Putt, Synth Riders and ForeVR Bowling. This SDK release will allow all Quest developers to do the same thing.
In comparison to previous avatar systems created for the Oculus platform, Avatars 2.0 offers up more possibilities for customization, including customizable skin tone, hair style, face shape/markings/lines, eye shape, eyebrows, eye makeup, and more. You can also choose clothing, glasses, and body types—something Facebook says makes for one quintillion possible combinations.
The company hasn’t said exactly when to expect the Oculus Avatar 2.0 SDK, although we’ll be glued to the company’s developer blog then to give you the heads up.
The Florida Project’s director is back with an incredible feel-bad comedy
When Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) arrives in Texas in the opening moments of Red Rocket, he’s immediately ordered to leave. “You said you weren’t gonna step your foot in Texas again!” his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) yells at him across her front lawn, after making Mikey get off her property.
“And then the world fucked me!” Mikey yells back. He really believes that, too. Over the next two hours, Mikey Saber will talk incessantly and breathlessly about his vision of the world. He sees every misfortune as someone else’s fault, while every setback is just another opportunity for him to emerge victorious, even if he never does. He’s a carnival barker without a big top, and with no real need for one. He’s effortlessly charming, and sleazy to the core. In a few brief minutes, he talks his wife and her mother, Lil (Brenda Deiss) into letting him crash on their couch. And then, over the next few weeks, he makes them wish they hadn’t.
The latest film from director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project), Red Rocket is a movie about a guy you probably know. Maybe not personally, but you’ve likely crossed paths with a Mikey Saber, perhaps at work, or more likely on TV. On one hand, he’s relatable as hell: All he wanted to do was escape the oil-refinery town he grew up in. For a while, he did. Only things didn’t pan out, and now he’s forced to return home to Texas City, where no one really wants him, and the few who don’t know him are about to find out why everyone else feels that way.
Photo Credit: A24
At first, Saber comes across sympathetically. He’s a former porn star, and while he’s proud of his prior accomplishments (he repeatedly mentions that he’s a three-time award winner) they also make it difficult to land non-porn work. So he hustles, convincing Leondria (Judy Hill), a drug supplier, to let him sell weed for her like he did when he was a teenager. He bums rides off the now-grown kid next door, Lonnie (Ethan Darbone). Ultimately, he tries to work every angle he can, not just so he can leave, but so he can get back to Los Angeles, where he feels he belongs.
Soon, Mikey idealizes those dreams in Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a teenager who works at the local donut shop. Immediately smitten, he begins spending all his time with Strawberry, each deluding the other into thinking that they will be their means of escape from Texas City. Mikey’s delusion, however, takes a more sinister turn as he starts to see Strawberry as his ticket back into the adult industry, and he slowly starts grooming her into accepting his propositions.
Red Rocket’s script, by Baker and his longtime co-writer Chris Bergoch, keeps things loose and centered on Mikey’s incessant talking. Its strengths, however, lie in the things that happen around Mikey, from the people who don’t say much compared to him, who will remain in Texas City whether or not he does, to the vast expanses of Southern land, where the only landmarks are smokestacks and Trump campaign billboards. In the background of Mikey’s hucksterism, the 2016 presidential campaign plays out on television, never commented on, but ever-present. It’s another story about a man who effortlessly spun fictions about himself and got people to believe them, to the detriment of everyone in his orbit.
Photo Credit: A24
Simon Rex’s performance as Mikey sweeps up everything around it, including the movie’s audience. The actor gives the guy an indefatigable energy, and Red Rocket a bit of a real-world parallel — Rex was well-established in the early-aughts party scene, a member of a class of tabloid celebutantes mostly famous for being famous (He also starred in most of the Scary Movie films). He’s the metatextual anchor for Red Rocket’s cast of gifted unknowns and non-actors, continuing Baker’s preference for casting locals to tell local stories. Every Texas City resident is interesting enough to follow around the way Red Rocket follows Mikey. Every scene he shares with them is suffused with hilarious incredulity, as everyone grows increasingly skeptical of Mikey’s bullshit. As Strawberry, Suzanna Son takes on the film’s most difficult task, toeing the line between conveying a 17-year-old’s oblivious naïveté and her selfish ambitions, all while being portrayed through the film’s subjective lens of this older man’s ridiculous fantasy.
In spite of (or because of?) the sleaze at its center, Red Rocket is a comedy. It’s the ultimate hangout film with the ultimate dirtbag, and it constantly provides evidence of something viewers will likely suspect after only a few minutes with Mikey: The man is pathetic. He can’t help but tell you so, even as he thinks he’s talking himself up. Midway through Red Rocket, Mikey gives a profane speech where we learn what he “won” his adult video awards for: Oral-sex scenes where he was the recipient. Or, in other words, as several characters point out — arguably not much.
Mikey doesn’t think so, though. He never does. What are the odds, he says, of three different performers winning three years in a row where he is the only common denominator? Other people’s success is thanks to him. His failures are always thanks to someone else. It’s the American political discourse in miniature, a matryoshka doll of blame-games that take up all the oxygen in the room, while cycles of exploitation continue unabated. If Red Rocket’s story extended over several years instead of several weeks, its events would likely just repeat, with Strawberry yelling across her lawn at Mikey instead of Lexi. He’d have new business partners who fucked him over, more people to fault for robbing him of his chance to shine. When it comes down to it, Mikey just loves fucking people, and it has nothing to do with sex.
Oculus Link and Oculus Air Link allows you to use your Quest or Quest 2 to play PC VR games, opening up a world of high quality content that you simply won’t find on the Quest Store. Here’s a breakdown of the Oculus Link and Air Link recommended hardware specs and what you’ll need to use Quest and Quest 2 to play Rift and SteamVR games on your PC.
Updated – December 13th, 2021
Oculus Quest & Quest 2 Recommended PC Specs (Oculus Link & Air Link)
You’ll need a reasonably powerful PC to play Rift and Steam games on Quest via Oculus Link & Air Link, though many modern gaming PCs with NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards will fit the bill. Here’s the PC hardware you’ll need for Quest and Quest 2 to work on PC.
Oculus Link & Air Link Compatible Graphics Cards
GPU
Supported
Not Currently Supported
NVIDIA Titan Z
NVIDIA Titan X
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (desktop, 3GB)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (desktop, 6GB)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060M
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (all)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (all)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Super
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series (all)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series (all)
AMD 200 Series
AMD 300 Series
AMD 400 Series
AMD 500 Series
AMD 5000 Series
AMD 6000 Series
AMD Vega Series
Oculus Link & Air Link CPU, RAM, USB, and Operating System Requirements
Recommended Specs
Processor
Intel i5-4590 / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or greater
Memory
8 GB+ RAM
Operating System
Windows 10
USB Ports
1x USB port (unless using Air Link)
Oculus Link vs. Air Link
What’s the difference between Oculus Link and Oculus Air Link? Oculus Link uses a cable to connect your headset directly to your PC. This will generally result in the best visual performance, and in most cases it will let your headset’s battery last significantly longer than if you use Air Link.
Oculus Air Link is the same feature as Oculus Link, except wireless. If you have an ideal network configuration, Air Link can be a great way to easily play PC games wirelessly with Quest. Without an ideal network configuration, you might have issues with Air Link (like lag or low quality visuals).
Tethered: Oculus Link Cable
Oculus Link technically works with any USB cable, including the one that comes in the box with Quest, but without a fairly long cable you won’t have much room to move around. If you’re only planning to play seated games like racing or flying sims, you can probably get by with the included cable, otherwise you’ll want to buy a dedicated cable that’s long enough that you can really spread your virtual wings.
Alternatively, Oculus sells a lighter (but much more expensive) 16ft USB 3.0 Oculus Link cable for $80, also available on Amazon.
Whether you pick a third-party USB 3.0 cable or Oculus’ own cable, both will give you the same visual experience when used with Oculus Link. You can even get by with a USB 2.0 cable in a pinch.
Wireless: Oculus Air Link Network Recommendations
You’ll need a properly configured network for Oculus Air Link to work reliably. Here’s what to do to ensure the best performance:
PC connected to router/access-point via Ethernet cable
Router supporting Wi-Fi AC or AX (also called Wi-Fi 5 / 802.11AC or Wi-Fi 6 / 802.11AX)
Headset connected to 5GHz Wi-Fi band
Router in the same room as the headset or in line-of-sight, and at least 1m off the ground
Don’t use a mesh network configuration (extenders, etc)
Actor Jeremy Strong is having a week that his Succession character Kendall Roy could only dream about. And only part of it has to do with what happened on the season 3 finale, ‘All the Bells Say,” after much speculation about his character’s potential death.
[Ed. note: This story contains major spoilers for Succession season 3.]
Succession season 3, episode 9 arrived after another implosion for Kendall, last seen floating in a pool (and a misery of his own making,) and a similar supernova moment for its star. A new New Yorker profile of Strong, alternatively titled “On Succession, Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke” and “The Straight Man” paints the actor as one who aggressively gets into character to an extent that even his coworkers find it a little off-putting. The profile set off a moment of drama that, in several ways, accomplishes want Strong has always wanted out of acting: To “elide the line,” as he puts it in the profile, between character and real life.
Among the revelations: Strong missed part of his “wedding-week festivities” to film Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, hung out with the playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s Irish doorman to learn how to play an Irish alcoholic, often refuses to rehearse, and when shooting to quote Kieran Culkin describing the process as Strong told him “you get in the ring, you do the scene, and at the end each actor goes to their corner.” It’s not a strategy that Culkin particularly endorses. “I’m, like, This isn’t a battle. This is a dance,” he says in the New Yorker feature, reflecting on his costar.
“It’s the cost to himself that worries me,” Brian Cox says in the profile, after the piece describes a series of injuries Strong has had on the not particularly action-packed set of the show about a family of bickering moguls, of whom Cox is the cruel patriarch. “I just feel that he just has to be kinder to himself, and therefore has to be a bit kinder to everybody else.”
Strong’s approach is not so different than how Kendall started Succession season 3: constantly going viral on Twitter. The one difference is that while Kendall Roy has found himself increasingly isolated, Jeremy Strong has real friends sticking up for him. In the seventh season 3 episode, “Too Much Birthday,” partygoers are promised a trip into the world of Kendall Roy at a beyond-lavish birthday at The Shed at Hudson Yards, a venue which critics have called a meeting point of “touristic commerce and capitalist worship.”
Image: HBO
It’s a perfect venue for Kendall, who rides ravishing highs in the episode only to be met with crushing lows. By far the most powerful of these is his quixotic search for his son’s birthday present, with the only clue being bunny wrapping paper. His small army of assistants failing him, he stumbles through a mountain of presents, treating each individual gift with either indifference or outright disdain. A motorcycle? Who cares? A watch from his girlfriend? He already has one. In the end, he collapses under his own duress.
It’s a scene that plays into the classical influences often brought up around Succession, including by Strong himself. In the profile, he references both Dostoevsky and Chekhov. One example it called to mind for me was Leo Tolstoy’s 1866 short story “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” in which a peasant named Pahom who makes a deal with the devil for more and more land, before learning that all a man really needs is six feet for a grave.
Tolstoy’s parable bares striking similarities with Kendall, who, struck out against his father in the penultimate episode in hopes of proving better and smarter. And now, in the season 3 finale, he’s anything but dead, confessing for his manslaughter incident in season 1 and teaming up with his siblings (“for the first time since they were teenagers,” noted director Mark Mylod in the post-show feature) to prevent further action from Logan Roy.
In the post-show reflection on episode 9, creator Jeremy Strong said that some people might be see Kendell, Shiv, and Roman’s team up as growth. “I’m on the fence about human beings, and people certainly change what they do,” Strong went on, “but in my view, people’s essential selves do not change. In a way that’s what makes drama and choices interesting.”
How the future goes for Kendell will be left for fans to discover in Succession season 4, which was recently greenlighted by HBO. As for Strong, the immediate aftermath of the profile has prompted some major names to come to his defense. On Instagram, pal Anne Hathway also stood up for Strong’s choices as an actor, saying, “I deeply value his qualities of thoughtfulness, sincerity, authenticity, sweetness, depth, kindness, generosity, as well as his powerful intelligence and extraordinary sensitivity.” And Aaron Sorkin, via a letter posted to Twitter by Jessica Chastain, put it bluntly: “Jeremy’s not a nut.” Arguing that the profile “asks us to roll our eyes at his acting process,” Sorkin compares Strong to Dustin Hoffman, who comes up repeatedly in the profile — New Yorker writer Michael Schulman notes that Strong had a Rain Man poster on his wall as a teenager. Ultimately, Sorkin says, “there isn’t a writer, producer, or director on Earth who wouldn’t grab at the chance to cast him.”
Shortly after the Succession season 3 finale aired on HBO, Schulman took to Twitter to reveal a detail from his now-controversial profile that didn’t make the cut due to spoiler reasons. Strong told the reporter that, during the big confession scene in the parking lot, he had originally been sitting “on a stone pillar that Jeremy asked the production designer to make. They did nine takes and he just wasn’t feeling it.” The actor ultimately found himself in a “place of despair” and, according to Schulman, thought he had “come to the limits of what I can do.” So, after nine takes, Strong decided to change things up and sit on the gravel in the parking lot, and play the scene a new way. All the previous work was unusable, but the actor told Schulman that “the whole scene opened up.”
Sorkin is probably right: there may not be a writer, producer, or director on Earth who wouldn’t want to cast Strong, if for no other reason than he’s starring in one of television’s hottest shows. But if the actor’s process seems to be an inherently isolating one — one non-famous member of a production said Strong “was an annoying gnat”— than at least he has one thing that Kendall Roy has never had, even with all the money in the world: people who care about him.
Meta today announced it’s updating a bug bounty program for its hardware products, something intended to reward anyone outside of the company who reports security vulnerabilities. With some new payout guidelines in place, Meta is ostensibly aiming to highlight its commitment to security following a total rebrand that’s put significant focus on its XR hardware and its vision of the metaverse.
Meta says the program, which over the past year has netted third-party security researchers over $2 million in bounties, will include its most recent XR products, such as Quest 2, Meta Portal, and Ray-Ban Stories.
With the updated bug bounty program, the company says it’s being more transparent with bounty payout amounts, and what system vulnerabilities it classifies as top priorities.
Meta lists a few concrete examples of what to expect in its new hardware-focused payout guidelines. A bug that might surreptitiously allow mic access on Quest could net a someone $5,000. A persistent, full secure boot bypass of Quest software would pay out up to $30,000.
“If a researcher demonstrates in a bug report that their finding could potentially result in physical health, safety, or privacy risks, we’ll also take these impacts into consideration when determining the overall bounty payout,” Meta says in a blogpost. “As we’ve done since establishing the bug bounty program more than 10 years ago, the final payout amount will be based on the maximum possible security impact of a bug submission.”
This follows the company’s announcement in October that it was rebranding away from Facebook and Oculus, and making a commitment to build out its vision of an interoperable and immersive social platform—i.e. ‘the metaverse’.
To boot, Meta has just launched an open beta for Horizon Worlds, the company’s proto-metaverse platform that puts an emphasis on user-generated content—the sort of the things we’ve seen from long-standing social VR platforms such as Rec Room and VRChat.
The new bug hunter guidelines seemingly come amidst a greater shift within Meta Reality Labs in how it develops hardware. In a leaked company memo from earlier this year, Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth maintained the company would change its approach to product development and put greater focus on security and data privacy at the hardware level.
“Instead of imagining a product and trimming it down to fit modern standards of data privacy and security we are going to invert our process. We will start with the assumption that we can’t collect, use, or store any data,” Bosworth’s memo reads. “The burden is on us to demonstrate why certain data is truly required for the product to work. Even then I want us to scope it as aggressively as we can, holding a higher bar for sending data to the server than we do for processing it locally. I have no problem with us giving users options to share more if they choose (opt-in) but by default we shouldn’t expect it.”
All of this seems like Meta is turning over a new leaf, however trust is easier broken than it is granted. It’s something the company will have to actively battle if it hopes to deflect unwanted scrutiny around its future products, which will necessarily be geared towards gathering increasingly sophisticated biometric user data.
Netflix’s cancelation of it’s live-action Cowboy Bebopreflects a company following the data. While the show, which was first announced back in 2018, opened with a bang on the service’s top 10, data from What’s On Netflix shows a dramatic departure soon afterward. And both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes show a rare alignment between critics and fans, with the scores of both groups coming close to each other in their general dislike.
Without critical acclaim, a vocal fandom, or sustained interest in keeping the show a mega-hit, it’s easy to see how it was game, set, and match for John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, and Daniella Pineda. But the departure is still stunning, simply given how much Netflix poured into its promotional efforts. On Netflix’s YouTube page, one can find Cowboy Bebop remixes by Steve Aoki, behind-the-scenes clips with actors showing off the custom-made set and musicians doing their thing, and even a four-hour-and-40 minute soundtrack stream entitled “Space Jazz to Chase Bounties and Cook Beef and Broccoli to.”
Compare all that hype with Netflix’s biggest hit of the year: Red Notice. While it’s only one metric, all that appears on the company’s YouTube page is a live event of Red Notice’s stars gathering. The one promotional effort done by Ryan Reynolds doesn’t even focus on the movie, instead discussing his recent purchase of a soccer club. Of course, it helps when Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and are walking, breathing, promo machines with millions of followers on every possible platform. A tech company like Netflix knows Red Notice promotes itself. Cowboy Bebop, a weird show based on a weird show, not so much.
The quality of Bebop certainly could have played a role in Netflix’s decision. Polygon’s review offered some praise for the show, noting its “fastidious attention” to physical details from the original anime, and that when it made an alteration, it could often provide “interesting developments and dimensions.” Rather than problems relating to the acting, plotlines, or set, the problem seemed structural: the show “feels like a decision by showrunner André Nemec to interpret the idea of what a cartoon would feel like in live-action rather than create a more straightforward version of Cowboy Bebop.”
Another problem: unlike the original Bebop, the show aired all at once. The full run of the original Bebop aired from October 24, 1998 to April 24, 1999 on the satellite network Wowow. It then slowly built an audience across the world — first in Italy, then the United States through Adult Swim, then Australia, and so on. Its reputation flourished on strong reviews and word-of-mouth between international anime fans. While the anime Bebop can certainly be binged, each episode feels like an event. From Spike’s daring gambit with the Space Shuttle Columbia to Jet’s learning about feng shui on Mars, these episodes stand fully on their own. Certain plot points are pushed forward, but each session truly feels unique.
Photo: Geoffrey Short/Netflix
When all the episodes are presented together, it’s hard for that feeling to feel explosive with each go around. The Netflix Bebop tried to recreate the magic, but creating a show for binging can pressure writers to have each episode connect to the other, forcing a sense of unity that may not necessarily need to exist. What works in the bubble of writer’s room may not resonate in real life.
Of course, a show with strong ideas and flimsier execution can correct course. Lost was able to get rid of characters that weren’t connecting, The Good Wife changed character arcs based on fan response, Sleepy Hollowstarted focusing more on monster-of-the-week episodes, and despite the sell as the first Marvel Cinematic Universe TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D stopped responding to every event in the greater MCU.
The average length of a show these days is between three and four seasons, with less and less time to figure out what’s wrong. Regardless of what happened with Bebop, that’s a problem: it gives writers, actors, and creators less time to figure out what’s working and what’s not, leading to less creativity overall. A show like Hulu’s High Fidelity, which got glowing reviews, wasn’t given a chance to find its audience.
Retooling a show midway through a season, especially an expensive one, is rarely seen as a good thing. And it wouldn’t have been in the case of the 2021 Bebop. But if the data could tell Netflix to, say, lay off the Vicious stuff, or hold back with the “blackmail”/”black male” puns, then it’s possible that the show could have not just been stuck trying to recreate ’90s anime, but rather find its own footing. John Cho delivered on his promise as a leading man. The rest of the cast delivered energy with each round. The heightened tone popped in places. There was probably a good show in there, to be reconsidered in season 2. But that’s not happening.
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23085384/red_rocket_.jpg "Red Rocket is the ultimate hangout with the ultimate dirtbag 3")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23083719/succession_s3_episode_9_kendall_shiv.jpg "The Succession season 3 finale leaves Kendall Roy and actor Jeremy Strong in opposite places 26")
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