Apple’s Vision Pro Brings Digital Avatars to FaceTime with Machine Learning

Apple has unveiled its first major product in eight years, the Vision Pro headset, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. The new headset will allow users to create a digital avatar using its front-facing cameras and advanced machine learning, which will enable the headset to represent a user’s movements during FaceTime chats realistically. According to Mike Rockwell, the lead on Apple’s AR/VR project team, videoconferencing was one of the most difficult challenges the team faced building Vision Pro because users were always wearing something over their eyes. The digital avatars produced by Apple appear hyper-realistic, a marked difference from some of Meta’s early attempts at virtual-reality avatars.