Codec Avatars
Telepresence that looks exactly like you
Latest: Large-scale Codec Avatars, CVPR 2026 (pretrained on 1M in-the-wild videos); Gaussian/relightable codec avatar papers through Dec 2025
Meta's decade-long program to make VR telepresence indistinguishable from reality: neural-network 'codec' avatars captured in a multi-hundred-camera dome and driven live by headset sensors. Publicly revealed March 2019 from the Pittsburgh lab (founded 2015, led by Yaser Sheikh), it remains Reality Labs Research's flagship moonshot, now testing internally at Meta.
Why it matters
Reality Labs' flagship moonshot: neural avatars captured in a multi-camera dome and driven live by headset sensors, aiming at telepresence indistinguishable from reality. The 2026 Large-scale Codec Avatars work pretrains on 1 million in-the-wild videos, showing the approach generalizes beyond lab captures, and it anchors Meta's long-term bet on presence.
Facts
- Original 2019 capture rig used 171 cameras.
- Codec Avatars 2.0 (shown at MIT, 2022) rendered 5 avatars at 50fps on a Quest 2 and was claimed to cross the uncanny valley; Sheikh said the project went from 'ten miracles away' to 'five'.
- The Sept 28, 2023 Lex Fridman–Zuckerberg podcast — the first photoreal-avatar interview — needed a workstation with 4x RTX 4090s per side.
- The CVPR 2026 paper scales pretraining to 1M videos with zero-shot robustness even to stylized imagery.
- Program is closed, but Meta open-sourced companion datasets (Ava-256, Goliath) and code (audio2photoreal).
Try it yourself
Official Codec Avatars page ↗ Read the CVPR 2026 paper ↗
Lineage
Sources
arXiv ↗meta.com ↗tech.fb.com ↗uploadvr.com ↗