Apple’s Vision Pro headset will turn you into a digital avatar when FaceTiming

Apple’s Vision Pro headset will let you replace your face with a hyperrealistic avatar when you’re using FaceTime. As shown during WWDC 2023, you can scan your face using the headset to create a digital “persona” of yourself that will appear during video calls.

Unlike the cartoony avatars you can make with apps like Microsoft Teams and Meta’s Horizon Worlds, it looks like Apple is aiming to create a virtual version of your face that’s accurate to how you really look. In the video Apple showed at WWDC, a user holds the headset in front of their face, allowing the device to scan it with “an advanced encoder-decoder neural network” that Apple says has been trained on a “diverse group of thousands of individuals.”

From there, Apple’s Vision Pro headset creates your digital persona, which can track your face and hand movements while you’re using FaceTime with the headset. It’s hard to tell how well this feature actually works from the video alone, but the persona looks fairly realistic, aside from an apparent lack of hair texture.

Either way, it seems like a viable solution to using FaceTime when you don’t have a camera pointed directly at your face (like you would when using the app with an iPhone or Mac). But I’m still looking forward to seeing how it performs when not in a controlled setting, and I have lots of questions about what you can and can’t do when scanning your face (like wearing a scary mask).