Today, on a bitterly cold, -20°C winter day up here in the frosty Canadian prairie hinterlands (which felt more like -30°C when you factored in the wind chill from a strong wind), I was able to spend a convivial hour sitting around a campfire on a warm, tropical desert island, chatting with Caitlyn Meeks of Tivoli Cloud VR and a few other avatars (including a personable, OpenAI-controlled toaster named Toastgenie Craftsby, who every so often would spit out some toast, or even a delicious rain of hot waffles, during our delightful, wide-ranging conversation!).

Tivoli Cloud VR’s Desert Island (picture by Caitlyn Meeks)

Tivoli Cloud VR, a successor platform to the now-shuttered original High Fidelity social VR platform created by Philip Rosedale’s company of the same name (and based on HiFi’s open-source software code), has had a few new developments since the last time I visited, back in September! Among them is the full integration of Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me avatar creation system, as demonstrated in this two-minute YouTube video by Tivoli Cloud ambassador and well-known social VR personality XaosPrincess:

This is the same Wolf3D system which I first reported on back in September 2019, when High Fidelity issued an app called Virtual You, where you could take a selfie on your mobile device and then use that picture to create a HiFi avatar. As a matter of fact, I still have the avatar I created using Virtual You saved to my hard drive, and I hope to upload and resurrect him as one of my avatars on Tivoli Cloud VR! In the case of Tivoli Cloud, the app is fully integrated into the client software; there’s no need for a separate app!

Note that Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me avatar creation system is also used by Mozilla Hubs, although the Mozilla Hubs avatars are only head-and-torso, as opposed to the full-body, rigged avatars used in Tivoli Cloud. In fact, one of the people sitting around that campfire today was animating his avatar’s hands and fingers using a Leap Motion Controller! It was amazing to sit across the campfire from Max and watch him wiggle his avatar’s fingers in real time.

Max Huet, Caitlyn Meeks, and Roxie sitting around the campfire (all three avatars were created using Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me software)Here’s a closer look at some Ready Player Me-created avatars, provided by Caitlyn Meeks of Tivoli Cloud VR

Using Ready Player Me, it is possible to create endlessly customizable human avatars—and Caitlyn tells me that you don’t even need to start from a selfie! You can just jump right into the program (as shown in the video above) and start creating your perfect virtual representation!

Here’s a thirty-minute interview with Timmu Tõke, the co-founder and CEO of Wolf3D (the creators of Ready Player Me), where he talks with Cristian-Emanuel Anton, the co-founder and CEO of MeetinVR, about VR avatars, meetings in virtual reality, and the metaverse. (MeetinVR is yet another social VR platform using Wolf3D’s avatar system to create their own head-and-torso-with-hands avatars!)

I suspect that we will see other platforms join Mozilla Hubs, MeetinVR, and Tivoli Cloud VR in using Ready Player Me avatars! Such corporate partnerships bode well for the future of the metaverse we will all live, work, and play in.

If you are interested in Tivoli Cloud VR, you can visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on Twitter to learn more. As I expect I will be writing more often about Tivoli Cloud VR, I have created a new blog category called (surprise!) Tivoli Cloud VR on the RyanSchultz.com blog (and I will go back and add all my previous blogposts about the platform to that new category).

UPDATE Feb. 10th, 2021: Daniel Marcinkowski of Ready Player Me has just published an interview with Caitlyn Meeks, the CEO of Tivoli Cloud VR, about the recent integration of Ready Player Me avatars, which you can read here.

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Thank you to Caitlyn Meeks and XaosPrincess of Tivoli Cloud VR, and thanks to Rainwolf for the heads up on the interesting Timmu Tõke interview!