In February 2022, Reality Labs Research launched the Controls That Matter and Considering Everyone: High-Realism VR Avatars in Virtual Work Settings request for proposals (RFP). Today, we’re announcing the winners of this award.

The exploration of realistic avatars is growing in academia and industry, and with these technical developments come ethical questions about data management, privacy, diversity and inclusion, agency and identity, and societal impact. In keeping with Meta’s Responsible Innovation principles, through this RFP we hope to support academics creating case studies related to:

• How teams build controls that preserve future users’ agency over their data
• How teams explain to future users when social signals (for example, gestures and facial expressions) conveyed by the VR system might not be accurate
• How to improve the VR community’s access to tactical guidance about how to responsibly build in these spaces using existing frameworks and theoretical research

Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a proposal, and congratulations to the winners.

Research award recipients

Principal investigators are listed first unless otherwise noted.

Accounting for differences when visualising uncertainty of avatar emotions
Karen Blackmore, Shamus Smith, Jacqueline Bailey (University of Newcastle)

Bridging worlds: Co-creating tools for the control of parametrically driven neurodiverse avatars
Georg Meyer, Antonella Macerollo, Simon Campion, Nanette Mellow (University of Liverpool)

A critical approach to psychological effects of custom avatars in social VR
Lennart Nacke (University of Waterloo)

Developing social VR interventions to disarm microaggressions and promote inclusive behaviors within diverse work teams
Geoff Kaufman (Carnegie Mellon University)

Ethical VR: People’s perceptions of facial expression misrepresentation
Sarah Bankins, Paul Formosa, Deborah Richards (Macquarie University)

Expressions/gestures inconsistencies management based on anomaly detection
Salvatore DiStefano, Giovanni Cicceri, Giuseppe La Malfa (University of Messina), Subham Chakraborty (Orebro University)

Increasing data transparency for high-realism VR avatars in virtual work
Yaxing Yao (University of Maryland), Kexin Zhang (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

What happens in the avatar stays in the avatar
Fernando Beltran, David White (University of Auckland)