As Meta works to make avatars a central element of its next-level experiences, it’ll also need to bring users along, by providing more ways for people to use their avatars in different applications.
Which is where this could be headed:
As you can see in this example, posted by app researcher Radu Oncescu, Meta’s working on “Avatar Quests”, which would seemingly enable users to engage in interactive games or world exploration via their digital depiction.
Which also sounds similar to its broader vision for the metaverse, its longer term, next-level social media experience that it’s still developing in the background.
Meta probably went a little too hard on its metaverse push back in 2021, when it renamed the company in line with this vision, and promised new worlds and experiences based around avatar interaction.
That may well be coming, but even then, Meta flagged that such development would be a decade out, at the least. Which meant that its metaverse shift was largely criticized and lambasted, as Meta’s current VR experiences, in particular, failed to live up to its futuristic vision.
Meta has since switched focus to the more trendy AI, and building out its own AI-based offerings, which will also, eventually, build into its broader vision. So it’s all one and the same in Meta’s view, though it’s no longer promoting the metaverse in such grandiose terms.
But a key element, again, will be avatar interaction, and enabling people to engage in its evolving spaces via their digital characters. Which is why Meta’s developing better, more customizable avatars, and adding new ways to use them in games and other experiences.
And soon, that could extend to even more offerings, like Avatar Quests, as Meta looks to set the building blocks in place to guide users towards its more immersive metaverse experiences.
The more it can align people with their digital depictions, the easier this will be, which is why you’re seeing more and more avatar options in its apps. The approach looks to build on how youngsters engage in gaming worlds, with gamers now well attuned to creating 3D characters that they use to interact in these applications.
And soon, that same process will be how you interact in the metaverse as well.
But to get people there, Meta’s going to have to seed more and more avatar experiences, so more and more people feel comfortable using their created characters.
Which, I suspect, is where options like this will come in, and you can expect to see a lot more avatar experiences being introduced on both Facebook and IG in the coming years.
We’ve asked Meta for more info on “Avatar Quests” and we’ll update this post if/when we hear back.
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