Meta's new holographic avatars are here and they're surprisingly real

They're a notable improvement over the company's earlier attempts at digital likeness.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that the first time I saw one of Meta's new holographic avatars today, during a WhatsApp call with a Meta rep I had just met a few minutes before, I didn't immediately clock that I was speaking to an avatar. That's how far the company's avatar technology has come in the last couple years.

Meta announced at Connect that it's bringing its holographic avatars to its new VR glasses and to the Meta Ray-Ban Display frames. I got the chance to experience both ahead of the keynote and was surprised at how far the tech has come since the first time I experienced it on Meta's Orion prototype .

Setting up an avatar is a bit different depending on which device you're using. With the display-enabled glasses, you create an avatar in the Meta AI app through a process similar to creating a Vision Pro "persona." Using your phone's camera, you're prompted to turn your head to show different angles of your face. It then asks you a series of questions that are meant to capture how your voice sounds in different interactions.

In my demo, it asked me things like "what does your perfect day look like from start to finish" and "what's one of your hobbies, and why do you like it." This part of the demo actually glitched. The Meta AI app kept skipping through the questions as if it couldn't detect my voice, but the hiccup didn't seem to affect the process. I was then prompted to "smile and show your teeth" and repeat a phrase as if I was surprised.

In all, creating a holographic avatar for the display glasses should only take about 5 minutes from start to finish. Once set up, you can use it on a video call while wearing your display-enabled glasses, whether you're chatting via WhatsApp or Zoom.

The avatars are powered by Meta's new Muse Realtime Avatar model, and it uses that brief training period to approximate your actual facial expressions while you speak. Watching my avatar speak was a strange experience. While I was wearing the glasses and speaking as my avatar, I could see a small preview of myself in the bottom corner of the display. It looked exactly like me, but my brain was also able to immediately recognize that it wasn't me.

But when I tried the experience from the other side, holding the phone and chatting with an avatar, I was fooled at first. It might be because I had only just met the person I was speaking to. So I wasn't familiar with his mannerisms or expressions, but it looked very similar to how I would have expected him to appear on a typical video call. It was only when looking more closely at his background that I could detect the video wasn't quite normal. Meta is also adding a transparent watermark to all video calls with an avatar. In my first viewing, I mistook this for a logo on his shirt, but if you know what to look for, it is a clear identifier.