Image: Meta
Meta is adding some better customization features to its avatar creator as part of the latest update for its Quest headsets. With the v57 update, you’ll be able to “fine tune things like your hair and eyebrow color, more accurately adjust your skin tone, add makeup and face paint, and otherwise make your VR persona better reflect how you see yourself IRL,” according to a Monday blog post from Meta.
I don’t have the update yet, but based on a screenshot from Meta (which I’ve included at the top of this post), it seems like the update will add a lot of much-needed improvements. For example, in the screenshot, you can see that there are sliders to specify a shade for the person’s base hair color and their highlights; on v56, which is what I have, I can only pick from Meta’s preselected colors for my hair. Meta’s v57 screenshot also shows a bunch of new makeup options like blush and face paint.
It seems like there are a lot of nice additions here, and taken with the fact that the long-promised avatar legs for avatars will be rolling out to everyone soon, Meta’s avatars seem like they’re about to get a lot better.
v57 includes a few other updates as well. Users in Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the US will be able to unsend image messages you send while in VR and in the Quest mobile app. The Explore feed, which suggests apps you might like, is being rebranded as the Horizon feed (likely to better match the company’s Horizon Worlds branding it uses for its Roblox-like social app). But according to the full v57 release notes, the update also removes the ability to simultaneously cast what you see on your Quest headset to the Quest mobile app on your iPhone.
Meta could be on the cusp of announcing some bigger Quest software updates at its Connect event on September 27th and 28th. We already know we’ll hear more about the seemingly imminent Quest 3 at that show. I have a hunch we might get some info on the forthcoming Horizon Worlds mobile app, too, especially after Meta itself teased some Horizon Worlds news on the… horizon… in a blog post last week.
