avatars

Scanning a photorealistic avatar for virtual reality (VR) once took more than 100 cameras to pull off, but now researchers at Meta have revealed it can be done with just an iPhone.

Canon has announced that it is developing a virtual reality (VR) software platform that it is calling Kokomo. It is designed with the intention of changing human communication by combining VR with "immersive" Canon camera-powered video calls.

When Flickr launched its site-wide redesign this past week, one of the things that saw a quiet revamp was the default user avatar. The company hired Greek designer Charis Tsevis to upgrade the original default icon -- an expressionless gray and black square face -- to something more colorful.

Photographer Ilona Szwarc's project "American Girls" is a series of portraits of girls in the United States posing with their avatars -- American Girl dolls that are customized to look exactly like their owners.

For his project Alter Ego, photographer Robbie Cooper traveled around the world to shoot portraits of online gamers. He then combined his portraits with screenshots of the gamers' avatars in the various games they play, showing an interesting side-by-side comparison of what the people look like in the real world compared to what they choose to look like in their fantasy worlds. The project got its start back in 2003 after Cooper did a shoot with a CEO who used the game Everquest to communicate with his children after getting divorced.