- Meta is recruiting adults to enhance the expression of its metaverse avatars
- The company is conducting the initiative through data firm Appen and is paying participants $50 per hour
- Meta’s metaverse ambitions have created a $60 billion hole in the company’s financial books
Social media giant Meta is recruiting adults to provide their expressions during solo activities and group chats to enhance its metaverse avatars. The company is conducting the recruitment under a campaign known as “Project Warhol” and has outsourced the recruitment to data firm Appen. The initiative comes despite Meta losing $60 billion in its metaverse exploration journey, indicating that the company still believes that virtual worlds have a promising future.
$50/Hr for Solo Acts and Group Conversations
Meta, through Appen, pays Project Warhol participants $50 an hour. Participants can choose to participate in the “Human Motion” or “Group Conversations” sections, both of which take place at the company’s research center in Pennsylvania, United States.
The Human Motion section intends to collect facial expressions of real people when performing basic actions like smiling, reading sentences, and gesturing using their hands, with the actions being recorded by a series of cameras, devices, and sensors.
Group conversations, on the other hand, aim to collect human expressions in a group of up to three people. Speaking to Business Insider, the company said the facial expressions and hand gestures are meant to “build photorealistic, real-time digital replicas of people for use in virtual and augmented reality.”
The company intends to use the photorealistic digital replicas to provide avatars that closely resemble humans when interacting in a virtual space like the metaverse.
A Year To Decide Metaverse’s Future
Project Warhol comes a few months after the company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said that 2025 is a year to decide whether the metaverse has a future.
The initiative also comes three months after the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, disclosed that the tech giant is working to make the “metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring.” Meta has also in the past reaffirmed its commitment to the metaverse despite branching into AI.
With Meta collecting human gestures to improve its metaverse avatars, it remains to be seen whether the avatars’ gestures will closely resemble those of humans during virtual interactions.
