Social VR experiences are the best the technology is capable of, and I worked to make social VR happen at Google

Shortly after launching the first version of Daydream we started looking at what was next. The most powerful VR experiences I had ever had were all social applications and I thought this was a largely unexplored space that we should invest heavily in. I created several proposals and lobbied for support to start a large effort around social VR.

I pitched social VR and proposed a serious investment in avatars as a good starting place

Once I had buy-in that social VR was worth focusing on, I started piecing out the core elements that we needed to get right. We needed a friends list within Daydream, we needed networking technology, social apps and of course avatars. I created the first pitch for each of these areas in order to get each funded. I decided to take lead of the social apps and avatars work streams.

We started by prototyping social VR applications and avatars

Before we could get started on production avatars and apps, we needed to get a sense of what worked and what didn’t. A small group of 4 was built to rapidly create and iterate on social VR prototypes. Our main testing application was called Together, and it was the proving group for many of our core concepts. I did all the 3D assets, along with many of the UX and interactions paradigms for these prototypes. The original batch of avatars were created to match the team.

Creating our first avatar system

Building off of what we learned from our prototypes, I went into full production on a customizable avatar system. This avatar was going to be used in several of our early prototype social applications like YouTube and even with a couple partner apps. I hired a small team of external artists and together we developed this first avatar that we called “Bubblegum”. This was never intentioned to be our final product, instead it was a rapid test to get familiar with the challenges of creating a customizable avatar. We learned a great deal in this process that would help us with further iterations.

A home for our new avatars

I designed a basic VR avatar customization system and we built a small social VR app as a testing environment for the new avatars and social concepts. This app was called Indigo and it helped us build out the core technology for social apps on Daydream.

We went wide on concepts for our final production avatar

Now that our initial concept was finished it was time to start production on our polished production avatar system. I grew the team of artists and we went wide on explorations for what the new avatar system could look like. Along the way we explored hundreds of unique styles.

I developed a set of principles for VR avatars

A big part of all our prototyping was testing with as many users as we could. In addition to testing I was constantly researching avatar technology and philosophy. I eventually developed a comprehensive style guide and set of principles for Googles VR avatar systems.

We created a more hand crafted design

While exploring various art styles we found ourselves drawn to a more hand crafted, artistic and abstract style of avatars. We wanted our avatars to reflect Googles brand while also allowing people a diverse range of representation. We called this new avatar system Craft and we really loved how it turned out. Ultimately the Craft avatar system ended up being a little bit too artistically opinionated and many within the company thought that this style would not have broad appeal. Because avatars need to represent everyone, it’s important that people like how they are presented. For that reason we decided to iterate a bit more.

Our final production avatar was the result of our extensive testing and learning

This is our final production avatar which we called “Denim”. This style was a blend between our first two styles, but was much more powerful. We built thousands of customization options and developed powerful technology to give extensive customization to users. We also did impressive feats of optimization to ensure a crowd of these elaborate avatars could be rendered on a smartphone.

I prototyped and developed an avatar creator

Now that we had a production avatar we needed to develop apps and tools to build and use them. I designed web, mobile and VR avatar customization apps. These utilized some advanced Google research to allow you to automatically generate an avatar just from a photo of yourself. They also let you build extremely diverse avatars with over trillions of combinations.

Our avatars found a home in a diverse set of applications

Both our avatars and the underlying technology we developed have been used in dozens of applications across VR, AR and the rest of Google.