Yaser Sheikh, head of Meta’s Codec Avatar research, gave a presentation at the Nvidia GTC conference last week, and MIXED was there.

Last September, Meta demonstrated its Codec Avatars tech in a Lex Fridman podcast. Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg spoke for an hour over a long distance with photorealistic Codec Avatars. Both had been meticulously scanned beforehand. During the interview, they wore a wired Meta Quest Pro that uses five sensors for eye and face tracking. Until now, it was unknown what other technology was needed.

In the presentation, Sheikh said that a workstation with 4 GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards was used to render the avatars on both sides. This means the technology is still a long way from running at this quality level on standalone headsets like Meta Quest 3, which only have a fraction of the processing power.