Whether it’s a flat profile picture or a three-dimensional avatar that you can pilot through spatial websites, there are more opportunities than ever to represent yourself on the internet.
Playing with the different games and platforms can be fun, but have you ever wanted to make one avatar for everything? Ready Player Me is working on it for the metaverse.
What Is Ready Player Me?
Ready Player Me is a project of Wolf3D, who specialize in 3D avatar generation for companies like HTC, Huawei, Tencent, and Vodafone.
While all of those companies might use Wolf3D for projects that only work on specific devices, applications, or experiences, Ready Player Me is available for users and works across a number of different websites and applications.
Using Ready Play Me, you can create an avatar to use across the metaverse and other VR platforms. It's just like having a profile picture, only in 3D!
How to Get Started With Ready Player Me
Ready Player Me is free to use, but does require you to create an account by entering an email address. A confirmation code then gets sent to that email address to get you started.
The first step in creating your avatar is uploading a photograph of your face. Wolf3D’s deep-learning algorithms, fed by a database of over 20,000 proprietary scans of real people, then generates a 3D avatar.
Once your avatar has been made, you can fine-tune its makeup and hair, facial features, skin and eye color, and of course clothing and accessories.
Ready Player Me lets you have multiple avatars at once, and only the first one has to start with a photo. Your other avatars can look like you if you want, but they can also be completely different.
If you have any digital wearables, you can even equip these to your avatar by selecting Wardrobe from the menu on the left side of the page.
Then, you can either enter a redemption code that came with the asset or link a MetaMask wallet address. The latter is easiest if you have the MetaMask browser plug-in.
How to Connect Apps With Your Ready Player Me Account
So, what is all of this work for? Where can you take your Ready Player Me avatar? There are currently over a thousand different websites, applications, and platforms that are compatible with Ready Player Me.
Most of those are smaller projects or niche communities. However, some are relatively big players including Mozilla Hubs, MeetinVR, and VRChat. That’s handy because VRChat and Mozilla Hubs in particular have impossibly clunky avatar customization tools.
To see a full list of websites, apps, and platforms compatible with Ready Player Me, click Discover Apps in the menu on the side of the pane.
The default setting, Discover, shows you all participating platforms grouped into categories like “Most Popular” and “Business and Productivity.”
If you are looking for a particular app, change the slider at the top of the page to All Apps A-Z and scroll to find what you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, there’s no search bar. If the app that you’re looking for isn’t listed, keep coming back. New projects collaborate with Ready Player Me all the time.
Once you’ve found an app that you want to connect, click the View App button on the thumbnail. Then, change the slider from App Overview to How to Connect to get a set of instructions.
Unfortunately, there’s no one workflow. Connecting in-browser experiences like Mozilla Hubs is as easy as copy-and-pasting a link.
Connecting independent apps like VRChat is a little trickier–and the connection may not be supported on all hardware versions of that app. For example, VRChat is compatible, but not if you use VRChat through Steam or Oculus.
Come as You Are With a Ready Player Me Avatar
Many of us are spending more and more time in virtual worlds. And the power over how we present ourselves in those virtual worlds is important.
While many of us don’t have the tools to represent ourselves how we might like in many of those virtual worlds, Ready Player Me is giving us that control.