According to Road to VR, HTC Vive America’s Vice President of Product and Operations, Vinay Narayan, revealed that the company plans to release a lip-tracking module for the Vive Pro headset to gather data about how the user’s mouth is moving. While little about the module was revealed (aside from its existence), HTC has said it wants to make the module available as a development kit for research and experimentation. The lip-tracking module will tie into a Vive facial tracking SDK that the company will make available.
This data could be used for a variety of purposes, such as animating an avatar’s facial expressions in real-time, motion capture recording, or research on speech and body language. As the upcoming Vive Pro Eye will include built-in eye-tracking, this lip-tracking module will likely work in tandem with the aim to produce realistic avatars for users – similarly to Facebook’s recent efforts. However, Facebook’s realistic virtual reality (VR) avatars are years away, while HTC’s implementation could be coming soon. The race to get realistic avatars into consumers hands is on.
