New Direct Message Settings

Control who messages you

Our mission at Rec Room is to create a fun and welcoming place for people from all walks of life. That’s an easy thing to say and a much harder thing to do, but it’s one of the most important things we work on because the magic of Rec Room is hanging out with friends - old and new.

And y’know, we think our community is pretty darn special. We’re very proud to have you and all of the fun and kind and kooky Rec Roomers in our community. But just because we think you’re all great doesn’t mean you have to agree with us. YOU should have control over who you engage with and how you engage with them, just like you choose which rooms you want to hang out in and who to hang out with. What makes a great social experience is that it works for you.

So, today we’re launching new player chat settings that give you more control over who can directly message you. If you like to see a full DM inbox, you can keep your preference to ‘all friends’. If you’re an empty inbox type of person, you can choose to completely turn off DMs. Or, pick the middle ground and choose to receive DMs from favorites only!

If you try to DM a player who has DMs disabled, you’ll see this message:

If you have DMs disabled, you’ll see this message when viewing your DM threads:

And if you want to change your settings at any time, you can find them on the Experience settings page of your Watch.

These settings apply to player-to-player DMs and group DMs - we’d heard from our popular creators and video partners that group chats had gotten a bit wild, so these settings also apply to who can add you to new group chats (friends, favorites, or no-one)! Room chat and party chat will stay the same as social features in the room or party you’re hanging in.

And of course, your existing player settings will continue to be respected - so blocked and banned players still won’t be able to message you.

We are always looking for ways we can improve your experience in Rec Room. We hope this is a useful change that puts you in control. Hit us up with ideas if you’ve got a burning request to make Rec Room even more fun and welcoming, and keep giving it your Rec Room Best!

A Look Under the Hoodie - A Technical Deep Dive on Full Body Avatars

A Look Under the Hoodie - A Technical Deep Dive on Full Body Avatars

The full body avatar beta is now available for everyone! To celebrate, we wanted to share some of the nerdy details on how we made the full body avatar work and a refresher on why we did it. Jump to the end if you’re curious about what’s next…

Why we decided to make full body avatars

1. More self-expression - One of the main reasons for introducing full body avatars in Rec Room is to create additional opportunities for players to express themselves. The classic bean avatars, while iconic, can sometimes be limited in conveying the widest possible range of emotions and actions. 

2. Easier to understand what’s going on in the game - Our beloved beans are amazing, but sometimes it's a little hard to visually understand what they're doing outside the context of Rec Room. Full human silhouettes with connected limbs make it easier to understand visually what’s going on.

3. Easier for creation - Soon, creators will be able to make their own avatar items to wear and share in Rec Room. Doing the work for the full body avatars allowed us to update the skeleton shared between beans and full body avatars to better match the industry standard so it's easier for our creators to make custom shirts, pants, hats, gloves, shoes, etc.

4. Third-Person is better with full bodies - While controlling and watching your avatar in this improved third-person mode, gameplay and social interactions are just more fun with the full body.

5. Adding new features we’ve wanted in our avatars - Adding new features like noses, adjustable glasses, adjustable body shapes, and eye gleams help breathe new expression into our avatars. These small details contribute to the overall relatability and expressiveness of the avatars, giving our players more options for how they want to look.

6. Adds more ways for all of us to make money - By adding noses, eyebrows, fingers, arms, legs, and feet, we are expanding the kinds of things we and eventually our creators can make and sell to our community.

This was the initial concept art we created as a target for what full body avatars could look like. We’ve made a lot of tweaks and improvements since then, but we feel like the original charm remains.

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Fitting more limbs into the same amount of memory

While we were developing the full body avatar, we recognized that our crash rate due to memory for all of Rec Room, especially on mobile devices, had gotten really bad. Every developer at the company was tasked with making memory optimization their top priority. One of the challenges that made it difficult to ship full body avatars within our original timeline is that we decided we needed to get to a place where the full body avatar, with all of their extra limbs, animation systems, etc., had to use the same (or less) memory as the floating bean. We called this “getting to memory neutral.” 

Here’s where we were when we started the optimization work.

Our benchmark floating bean avatar had 6,095 vertices (which define the geometry), and cost about 4 MB per avatar (which includes all 3 levels of detail meshes). The floating bean also had a total of 18 bones and 4 weights per vertex.

This is the benchmark avatar we used for comparison of our bean geometry cost vs our full body cost

The equivalent full body avatar (which added default pants and shoes) had 11,384 vertices, and cost about 8 MB per avatar before optimization. The full body skeleton currently contains 102 active bones with 4 bone weights per vertex.

We needed to find a way to cut our full body avatar cost in half in order to hit our goal of being “memory neutral.”

We got there with 3 key innovations.

Memory Optimization Innovation #1: Skin Culling Masks

For our first innovation, we built skin culling masks. This technique allows us to throw away some of those expensive vertices in memory by not building parts of the avatar’s skin that are not visible based on what they’re wearing. This means that for every clothing item our artists and creators will author, they can select from a set of existing “skin culling masks” to inform the avatar system which skin faces are hidden when an item is worn. 

Whenever you change what you’re wearing, we look through the set of items you’ve equipped and determine which geometry faces can be completely discarded. This comes with the added benefit of avoiding clipping bugs by just removing the problematic underlying skin! 

You’ve probably noticed during our beta that when authoring our huge catalog of avatar items, some culling masks weren’t set correctly, or needed to be adjusted.  While we fixed many neck and wrist gaps, missing fingers and hands there’s still work to do. We are continuing to clean this up during our polish work.

You can see here in the right image that there are fewer skin polygons under the clothes compared to the left image that doesn’t have skin culling turned on. The Skin Culling technique allowed us to throw away between 1k to 2k vertices on average.

Memory Optimization Innovation #2: MeshData, and Vertex Data Compression

For our second innovation, we re-wrote how the avatar mesh was built using a new primitive called the MeshData feature. This dramatically sped up how our avatars are built, and removed an annoying frame hitch that sometimes happened. 

Before, you’d probably notice when a player joins a room there can be a few frames of lag, especially on lower-powered devices like the Quest 2. That’s no longer the case with full body avatars. 

Another nice thing about the MeshData feature is that it allowed us to compress the data per vertex so we could manipulate how much memory that bone weights and UVs took up. With this optimization, we saved about 30% of our total memory.

This is a snapshot from deep within our code of how we changed the layout of our vertex data to trade precision for memory efficiency (using half and byte data types instead of floats and integers saved us 60% of our unvarying data)

Memory Optimization Innovation #3: Just-in-Time Level of Detail

For our third and final innovation, we developed a technique we call just-in-time level of detail. The classic floating bean system builds all three level of detail meshes whenever a new avatar appears and holds on to them in memory. We then only show one of these meshes at a time based on how far that player is from your camera.

Showing the different level of details that an avatar may have

Because of the work we did to use the MeshData type above, we could explore building a dynamic avatar that builds the avatar when the level of detail should change without experiencing those frame lags. So now we only pay the memory for what we display. This saved us another 40% of memory on average. 

This trades off some compute time for memory savings, but we found across all of our platforms that thanks to Unity’s MeshData and multithreaded Jobs, it does not impact FPS!

So in total, we were able to reduce the cost of the full body avatar by around 60~70%, more than the 50% we needed. This is why we say that the full body avatar is more optimized than the floating bean.

Memory problem solved! What about the frame rate?

Thanks to Unity’s animation system, we found that all of our platforms could pretty smoothly handle the complexity of the extra limbs. Where we did add some considerable computational expense is in the full body inverse kinematic (IK) solver we use. 

Full body IK helps with the believable movements of the body, arms, and legs on screens and in VR while only tracking or animating your head and hands. With enough players in a room, lower-end platforms started to show bad FPS. So instead of updating the full body IK solver for every player on every frame, we built a system to dynamically update player animations up to a certain amount per frame, prioritizing those avatars closest to the player or those that haven't been updated in a few frames. 

This priority-sorted technique ensures that you always get a good FPS, but at the cost of some players’ movement stuttering a bit, especially when they are far away from your camera. This felt like the right trade-off for us.

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Interaction Improvements: Showing your hands while grabbing stuff

One of the big challenges for full body avatars was coming up with a way to show you grabbing objects. With the floating bean, we got away with this by hiding your hand whenever you were holding something. But since one of our major goals was to make it easier for others to understand what you were doing, we knew we needed to find a good solution for making sure holding items looked good.

We tried a bunch of different approaches, including snapping your virtual hand to a spot on the grabbed item. But that felt like the game was physically pulling you around and rotating your hand. We decided that we should always honor where your hand is in real space and have the grabbed objects come to them, so your virtual hand feels as close as possible to your real one. You can especially feel how this improves the stabilizing handles for laser weapons while in VR. 

We did find one exception to the rule that felt nice. Instead of allowing your avatar arms to stretch as long as they need to match the location of your real hand, there’s a point where if you move a held item too far, your hand will look like it let go and the tool hovers where you’re holding it in real space…kind of like you’re still controlling it with magical powers. We call it the “Telekinesis effect.” 

The telekinesis effect

Then there’s the visual gripping effect for (many) objects. We wanted the visual to look cohesive for Rec Room objects. In order to give our artists control over how hands are posed when grabbing the object, we created an internal tool called the Hand Grip Placer. Our Artists can then determine how objects should sit in the hand and what hand pose they should take. During the beta period of full body avatars, we are continuing to work through all of the 500+ items you can grab in Rec Room to make sure that you have great-looking grips.

This is an internal tool we wrote to give our Grip Artists a way to place and pose how the hand should grab each one of our 500+ items in the game.

Improved movement & animation

Thanks to the work of @joedanimation , we have enhanced and added more life to our avatar animations. This includes improvements in walking, running, jumping, climbing, clambering, wall running, and sliding. Our goal is that Rec Room feels immersive and expressive, and these improved animations do a lot to ground the avatars in the reality of the game space. 

We are still working on polishing all of the animations in the game as part of our beta work.

Bean slide compared to full body slide

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Full body avatars is still in beta, so what are we working on to get it out of beta?

We are continuously iterating on the full body avatar, and now that every player can use them, we are interested in hearing and working on feedback from everyone. 

We are continuing to work on how the full body avatar moves in VR and screens (especially with dancing and idle animations), fixing holotars to work with full body, making it so a creator can determine which avatar types are used in their costumes, fixing the ability to adjust how hats sit on your head, fixing more screen-based animations (have you noticed how full body avatars drink water bottles through their eye? :P), finishing up all of the grip poses for the 500+ items, and exposing the underlying sliders that shape your body and head so you can have more control in customizing your form.

We are also continuing to polish some of our legacy avatar items that don’t look great yet on the full body avatars (we know some gloves aren’t where we’d like them yet). Finally, we haven’t forgotten about full body tracking and finger tracking for our VR players.

Only when this list of things are done (and we address additional feedback we receive) will we consider dropping the beta status. 

Our commitment to the floating bean avatars

We know a lot of you are concerned that we may deprecate the floating bean avatar when we determine full body avatars are ready to be out of beta. Don’t worry! We are committed to supporting and upgrading floating beans that have been here since the beginning of Rec Room. 

One of our big tasks right now is to take the optimizations that you read about above— such as skin culling masks and just-in-time level of detail— and bring them to the bean so we can reduce their cost by 60%. This will be a big help in our fight to improve performance on all platforms. 

Additionally, we plan to bring over some new features to the bean like being able to see your customized hands when grabbing objects, being able to see your torso when you look down, and the option to have a nose, the option to have eyebrows, and the option for eye gleam. Whether you want to preserve your classic bean as is, selectively add some of the improvements (such as eye gleam, or eyebrows), or move all the way to a full body avatar - we will fully support you.

Look out for an upcoming dev blog where we will dive deeper into our plans for preserving and enhancing the floating bean avatars.

With the upgraded bean (coming soon™) , your glove customization can stay visible when holding items like the laser pistol. We’ll also have an option to hide your hand if that’s the interaction you prefer.

State of Voice Moderation

The State of Voice Moderation

We've received a lot of questions about voice moderation, so we got the 411 from our trust and safety team on how voice moderation actually works in Rec Room.

We use voice moderation systems in all public rooms in real time. These are cutting-edge machine learning systems that detect hate, harassment, and other types of nasty speech based on Rec Room’s community standards.

What’s The Deal?

We’ve spent the last year running analyses and reworking our systems. Here’s the most important takeaway: the data confirms what we knew all along - the vast majority of players are fantastic community members. Most have never broken the Code of Conduct. Never. Not once. Angels.

Of those that have broken the rules, most players only slip up once. Say it gets a bit tense, maybe you miss *that* paintball shot at the last second and a few “$%@!s” slip out - our voice moderation system is designed for exactly this. It will catch the one-off and give you a friendly warning - because we get it - we all get caught up in the moment from time to time.

What If It’s Not Just A Moment Then?

Players only lose mic privileges if that moment escalates. Temporarily revoking mic privileges is a very direct form of feedback - hey, that wasn't cool! - but it’s also a chance to reflect; "how can I be excellent with other Rec Roomers when I get my mic back?"

If a player keeps using speech to be hateful or harass, that mic restriction will increase, and may eventually turn into a ban to give them a chance to cool off. We don’t like banning players. We do it when we have no other way to protect the experience for the rest of our community.

As we said, our players are top notch. So, bans for voice chat toxicity are actually really rare- like 1 in 135,000 people rare. You’re literally more likely to roll all sixes on six dice! And those very rare bans are now also short - we don’t need to (and we aren’t) pressing the 40-year ban button or even the one week ban button for voice toxicity. Long or permanent bans are used only for serious code of conduct violations.

But What If I Didn’t Actually Mess Up?!

Hang on though… you’ve all seen the social posts that say “I didn’t say anything and then I got banned” or one of our favorites “It was just a mic echo”. But it’s not true! If players are getting banned or muted, we are pretty dang sure they said a few things they shouldn’t have. Is it 100% perfect? No. But it almost is…

This is where our internal data wizards - come in: every detection system has a False Discovery Rate (FDR) i.e. a chance of being wrong. The FDR limits the confidence we’re making the right decision on any issue. If the FDR is ever above 5%, you can never reach 99% confidence. Unless… you wait. If you see not 1, but 2 or 3, or even 25 potential-rule-breaks in any given period - then you can have quite a bit more confidence that someone did cross the line.

So even if the system has a 5% FDR, if we see a player caught 10x, then we’re not 95% confident - we’re more like 99.999999999% confident. So yeah…almost 100% perfect! We don’t want to interrupt games unnecessarily, so to reduce false positives, we don’t ban or mute based on one thing a player says in one fragment of speech - instead we wait until we hit that 99.999999999% confidence rating based on multiple hits, which can be over a few sessions or in the moment.

This really is the best of both worlds - we catch the worst toxicity, we forgive the one-offs, and we stop those gnarly false positives. And you know what? It works! This chart shows what’s been going on over the last year - instances of toxic voice chat have fallen by around 70%!

What’s Next??

So, job done then? Not quite…we’re getting to a good place on improving the systems’ accuracy, but accuracy is only half the story. The other half is about what we catch - and more importantly, what we don’t. Right now, if the system is catching you, you slipped up more than a few times. But we know - and you know - that there are times we probably should have caught something and we didn’t. Players being unfairly banned is lose-lose, so we worked on accuracy - but now we’re turning our attention to broader coverage. More on that in future updates, but for now, thank you to all of you who continue to make Rec Room the great community we want it to be. And keep doing your Rec Room Best!

Avatar Movement & Gameplay

In past blogs in this series, we’ve talked a lot about how the new full-body option will look. In this one, we’ll show off how it moves and interacts with the game world.

Just chillin’

There are so many ways we express ourselves through our avatar’s movements. We point, give a thumbs up, jump, slide, and dance. We shoot lasers, dodge paintballs, throw dodgeballs, and raise our hands in celebration! The full-body option needs to look great doing all those things and more. As you can see from that list, how we move our hands is a big part of how we interact with the world, so let’s start there.

Helping Hands

One of the most important ways we use our hands in Rec Room is to connect with other players. When we wave hello, fist bump to join a party, or give a high-five, we’re expressing ourselves to others, and we want those expressions to look great. To accomplish that, we need to think from the hand through the wrist, arm, elbow, shoulder, and even down through the torso, hip, and legs. 

Pretend someone you know is across a crowded room from you, and wave at them. Do it now. We’ll wait. Notice how your whole body moves and shifts a bit as you raise your arm. Those are the subtle movements we’re trying to capture in the avatar animations to make them feel alive.

Hello there!

Another area we think a lot about with hands is how they hold objects. Currently, your hand disappears when holding any object. While this was useful in the early days of VR, as we develop full-body avatars, we want hands to be more expressive as you grab objects. It would look a bit weird to cut off your hand while holding something, so instead, your hand and fingers take a position that is natural for each object. You'll pick up a coffee mug like you normally would and throw a frisbee while grabbing an edge. Picking up objects will feel more realistic, and your hands will seamlessly pose to a natural fit for everything in Rec Room. You'll be able to do all the same things you normally can, except now the objects will be connected to your avatar via your hand. 

And it’s not just hands and fingers around objects that we’re thinking about. With finger tracking, we need to think about the full range of finger movement. You’ll no longer be restricted to a small set of hand motions. Want to wiggle your fingers - go for it! Want to bust out the horns - rock out! Want to put up a peace sign - groovy! (Note: finger tracking will ship after the full-body avatar option, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t stoked about it.)

Here’s an example of how hands might move with finger tracking

Get a Move On

Let’s zoom out and look at how the rest of the body moves. There are several ways we move around in Rec Room: walk, run, jump, climb, crawl, slide, and wall run. Each of those needs to look good individually, and the transitions between them need to be seamless. Also, even more so than hand movements, these actions require the whole avatar to be moving in sync to look natural. Take a look at the run animation below. Notice how it’s important to get the arms, shoulders, and head moving in sync with the legs.

Walking, Jogging, and running are looking pretty good. Climbing… still needs some work

Game Balance

One of the questions we’ve gotten about the full-body option is, “How will it affect game balance in PVP rooms?” Specifically, since the full-body option has more surface to get hit, will people who choose that option be at a disadvantage in rooms like ^Paintball? 

We see Rec Room as a fundamentally casual game, one that isn’t optimized for rigorous competition, but we still took that question seriously. We ran playtests with some of the most skilled paintballers at Rec Room, where we pitted a team of floating beans against a team of full bodies. The same players took turns using each avatar option, and any part of the avatar hit with a paintball counted as a KO. We found floating beans don’t have a significant advantage (and we found the full bodies are delightful to compete against).

With all that in mind, here’s the plan. You will be able to play with either avatar option in any room. Any part of the avatar you can see (arms, legs, etc.) will be a part you can hit. For competitive formats, like Leagues, where even the tiniest advantage seems meaningful, organizers are welcome to restrict participants to one avatar type or another.  

Full-body or floating bean, you’re gonna get KO’d if you stand on a container and let everyone shoot you🙂

What’s Next?

Looking back on the whole blog series, we’ve given you the gist of how the full-body avatar option will look, move, and represent you in the Roomiverse. But there’s one more big piece we haven’t gone deep on yet. The full body is the foundation that you’ll build on when you make your own clothing and, eventually, your own avatars. We’ll dig into that in the next avatars blog.  

But before we get to that, we’d like to leave you with the latest iteration of the full-body option!

What do you think?

Avatar Faces

In this fourth installment of the Avatar Dev Blog series, we’ll talk about the face of the full-body avatar option. The new face will look a lot like the floating bean’s face with a few noteworthy additions. Let’s take it from top to bottom.

The grid shows how the face is divided up under the hood.

Eyebrows

Eyebrows are a new optional addition to the full-body avatar. We added them to give your facial expressions more depth. They’ll be in the same drawn-on style we love with that charming wiggle like the eyes and the mouth. This brings them to life and lets us incorporate them into the facial animations when you emote.

A fun animation test (not actual gameplay) of an avatar emoting with its eyebrows.

At launch, you’ll get to pick from three different eyebrow shapes with the ability to adjust their size and position. We also want to give the customization option to go without eyebrows, since even though we feel like it expands the range of expression, we heard the feedback that some of you would prefer to express yourselves without them.

Thin, medium, and thick in three different styles.

Eyes

The full-body option will have many of the eye shapes you’re familiar with, along with a bunch of new options so you can really dial in your look. They work with all the emotes like the old ones do, so you’ll still be able to express your love 😍 or joy 😂 through your eyes. 

We’ve also added an eye shine to all the eyes to bring a bit more life and gravity to the avatar’s face through added contrast between the eye and highlight. Without the eye highlights, the eyes felt duller in comparison to the newly upgraded body. You might notice below that we’ve turned down the shine a bit from what you saw in the last concepts. We too thought they were a bit too distracting at their original brightness level.

We love how each eye gives the face a different character.

Noses

Another new addition to the full-body avatar’s face is the nose. We found that one of the more effective ways to express yourself through your avatar is to have an identifiable silhouette. So we explored noses as a way to define your silhouette from the side. Even though it’s a relatively small part of the avatar, we found it to be surprisingly effective at giving each avatar a unique look. 

This also explains why the nose isn’t in that drawn-on style like the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth. They are there to give you facial expressions, while the nose is there to define the form of your face.

In our iteration and experimentation, it became clear that overall the full-body design was more appealing with a nose than without, but we heard that some of you felt strongly that you wanted “no nose” as an option to express yourselves. With that in mind, at launch, you’ll get to pick from about eight nose styles and tweak their size and position, or choose to have no nose if you prefer to rock that Voldemort style.

You can see here how the nose dramatically changes the vibe of the silhouette.

And the Rest

The mouths are the same for the full body as they are for the floating bean, and they will work the same way.  Your options for face/head shape will be similar as well. The color of the skin on the face will be a tiny bit different though. We’re adding more depth to the skin color. This lets us give faces a bit of a flush to make them feel more alive. It also lets us have lighter palms on the hands of darker skin tones for better representation. 

Note the lighter palms.

What’s Next?

As you can see, we’ve already made several iterations to the face based on your feedback, so keep it coming. While we think it’s getting close, we plan on having a few more rounds of interaction before we add the full-body option to the game. Speaking of games, in the next blog, we’ll look closer at how the full body will affect gameplay, and see it in motion!

Quest 1 Support

Hey there, Rec Room fans!

We’ve received some support questions and feedback and wanted to confirm that we are no longer supporting Quest 1.

We understand that this news may come as a disappointment to players still using this platform. As a team, we're constantly striving to provide the best experience possible, and unfortunately, the age and technical limitations of Quest 1 have made it challenging for us to continue supporting it.

We want to thank all our Quest 1 players for being part of the Rec Room community, and we hope you'll continue to enjoy the game on our other supported platforms. We're committed to continuing to bring exciting updates and new features to Rec Room, and we can't wait to share what we have in store with all of you (especially something big later this year…)

Thank you for your understanding and continued support! Game on! 🎮😊

Avatar Embodiment

Welcome to the third dev blog about the next evolution of Rec Room avatars. In the last blogs we talked about the optional full-body avatar and how clothes will work with it. Here we’ll look at another benefit you’ll get with the full-body option - enhanced embodiment leading to greater self expression. The new avatar system sets us up for full-body and finger tracking, but even if you don’t have tracking capabilities, seeing an avatar that looks and moves more like you is a real boost to immersion. 

A concept image showing a peek inside the full-body option while it’s being controlled by a player with full-body tracking. 

What makes the avatar move?

First, let’s take a high-level look at the bits inside the avatar that enable you to bring it to life.

The avatar has a skeleton that defines its base form, how all the pieces are linked together, and ultimately how it can move. Then there’s the model which goes over the skeleton and defines the shape of the avatar that we see. The skeleton and model come together to define how you look when you move.

Lastly, we add animations to make the avatar seem alive when you’re idle, and keep the movements smooth and understandable while you’re active. There’s lots of tweaking and tuning done at each layer to make sure the avatar’s body doesn’t fold or bend in weird ways as you move around.

From left to right, the underlying skeleton, the skin and clothing we layer on top, and the animations that make it move.

Yeah, but how do I make the avatar move?

With a basic VR setup the inverse-kinematics system (IK) will place your elbows and shoulders in specific locations based on the position of your headset and controllers. This is the same tech we use when you wear a full-body costume currently. Guessing where your arms are by the location of your head and hands is a hard problem. We’ll iterate on how to make the upper body animation look good, but if you want the most accurate representation of how you’re moving - that’s where full-body tracking comes in. With SteamVR’s full-body tracking tech you’ll be able to tap into more of this IK system to position your full-body avatar’s elbows, chest, hips, knees, and feet! 

For finger tracking, we’ll be adding support for the newest Meta Quest headsets. Point 👉, give a peace sign ✌, throw the horns 🤘…and your avatar will do the same. Maybe at some point you’ll be able to ditch the controllers altogether.

We’re hoping to have support for full-body tracking when we launch the full-body option later this year, but bear with us if it comes out a bit after the initial launch. Finger tracking will take us a little longer, but we’ll get there.

Work-in-progress hand model

How do you blend animations and my movement?

Without tracking, your movements will be responsible for the full-body avatar’s upper body (head, shoulders, arms) while avatar animations are responsible for the pose of their lower body (hips, legs, feet). This is because in VR we don't actually know where your legs and feet are located so we have to rely on an artist's interpretation - since we do know where your head and hands are, we try to pose your avatar to respect your real VR pose.

However, if you're using full-body tracking then we’ll know where your legs and feet are - so we can dynamically switch between using avatar animations and VR tracking information to pose your lower body depending on the situation.

While you're running around we'll continue to play animations on your legs - despite the fact your real legs aren't actually moving - so that you appear to be running to other players in Rec Room. Once you stop walking in-game we'll blend back to showing your real leg positions so that you can dance and pose however you like.

Okay, it’ll move like me but will it look like me?

Just like with the current floating bean avatar, the full-body option will let you adjust the shape of your body. But instead of just a few options, you’ll be able to set the individual sizes and shapes of lots of different body parts - enabling near-infinite possibilities. With these new settings you’ll be able to create a more accurate (or idealized) depiction of yourself to embody. The settings we’re currently discussing include the ability to adjust: your height, the length of your torso, the width of your shoulders, belly, and hips, and the thickness of your arms and legs. We’ll have several options to adjust your face as well, but we’ll go into them further in a future blog. 

A mockup of what the body adjustment settings might look like.

What’s next?

Speaking of that future blog, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from you on the eyebrows and noses of the full-body option, so we’re dedicating the next blog in the series to the face. We’ll talk about the evolution of facial features, show off some of the options you’ll get to pick from to customize your face, and talk about the changes we’ve made based on your feedback.

Dressing the Full-Body Avatar

One of the main reasons we're developing the full-body avatar option is to give you even more ways to express yourself in Rec Room! We believe one big part of how you express yourself comes from the clothing that you wear. As we said in our last dev blog, the full-body option will support all existing avatar items at release. Today we’ll talk about how that will work, and about the new items the full-body will unlock.

Converting Torso Items

Sleeves were one of the first parts of dressing the full-body we thought about. None of the existing items have meaningful sleeves since the floating beans don’t have arms, so we had two options - have all tops on the full-body be sleeveless or figure out a smart way to add sleeves to the old items when they are on the full-body. We decided on the latter. 

To do that we needed to create a universal sleeve design that could apply to the many different styles of torso items Rec Room has to offer. We've created these concept designs, where one of our skilled 3d artists will then take a sleeve style that best matches the base item and cut holes, stitch, and apply color and materials to each item. The end result will be sleeves that look like they were there all along! 

All items at release will have a version for floating beans and one for full-bodies. This image shows how we plan to create the latter from the former.

Once we figured out the plan for sleeves, we had to address the fact that many torso items already included a bit of a “leg item” in them. For example, the tan pants on the hoodies above or the skirt on the jacket dress below. We can’t just extend them all the way down, since we want you to be able to mix and match tops and bottoms so you have greater ability to get your avatar to look like you want it to. So again we’ll turn to our awesome 3d artists.

Each torso item will get individual treatment so it looks great on the full body option.

For some items, like the hoodie, where a leg item is implied, they’ll trim off the bottom bit letting you replace it with whatever it you want. For other items, like the jacket dress, where it’s more all one piece, they’ll leave the bottom bit in place, and you’ll get to choose what you want to wear under it (e.g. a pair of tights).

Converting Hand Items

Another bit of anatomy you’ll get with the full-body option is fingers. That means we need to figure out how to make a bunch of items that were made for a wristless mitten-hand work on a hand with five digits that’s attached to an arm. 

This one is more of a work in progress, but we hope the same principle we used for sleeves will work here. In a sense, we’ll have five little sleeves, one for each finger, that those awesome artists will match to our existing items to turn mittens into gloves.

Ironing Out the Wrinkles

While we’ll do our best, converting old items to work with the full-body option won’t be 100% perfect. There will likely be bits that look off or broken at first. But we’ll keep iterating on them until we get all the wrinkles out.

And don’t worry, none of these changes will affect the items when floating beans wear them. If you choose to stick with the floating bean avatar your items will look like they always have!

New Leg and Foot Items!

Now for the shiny, sparkly new stuff we're really excited to introduce - leg and foot items! We think this new clothing goes a long way to helping you be yourself, or whoever you want to be, in Rec Room.

For foot items, we’ll have about four starter options at launch. We’re currently thinking: sneakers, boots, flats, and sandals. Sneakers will likely be the default because it's unsanitary to be walking around the Rec Center in bare feet. We’ll add more foot items as time goes on.

These shoes are for mock-up purposes only, but we’re excited for all the potential foot items. Flippers? Bunny slippers? So many possibilities!

Similar to the foot items, we’ll have about four starter leg items and more soon after. We’re thinking about starting with jeans (default), tights, shorts, and a skirt.

What else should we add?

What’s Next?

We’ll be making lots more of all kinds of items, and might eventually take advantage of other new item slots that the full-body option gives us. No promises, but here are some things we’ve discussed: nail polish, socks, and nose and eyebrow piercings.

Let us know what you’d like to see!

Also, the work we’re doing under the hood for the full-body option will allow you to make avatar items for each other, but that’s a topic for another dev blog.

The Future of Avatars in Rec Room

When Rec Room first launched in 2016, we thought of it as kind of like  the “Wii Sports of VR.” At the time, our avatar designs followed the best practices for VR while keeping them charming and approachable. We avoided showing untracked legs and arms because it could break the feeling of presence; we kept facial features cute and minimal to avoid the uncanny valley effect; and we chose simplicity over visual detail so the game ran smoothly. Also, we were a small team with limited time and resources so we chose to keep our avatars simple.

We love the resulting “floating bean” avatars, and know you love them too. But a lot has changed in Rec Room over the last six years. We’re now a bigger team, VR technology has gotten and continues to get better, and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t with how you look and move in VR.  Our “Wii Sports of VR” has evolved into a radically cross-platform, social UGC platform. It's time to evolve how we can express ourselves in Rec Room.

Thus the full-body avatar. The arms, legs, fingers, and feet of this new full-body option provide more opportunities for you to be who you want to be in Rec Room. They also let us track movements better in VR, and help make the game more understandable when we share it with friends. 

A concept showing what the full-body option might look like

At the end of last year, we assembled a small team called the "Avatar Initiative" to take the next step towards full-body avatars. Instead of working behind the scenes and revealing a new avatar option as part of an update, we decided to share our progress as we build. Your feedback will help us shape our work so we do our best to make Rec Room better without losing the things that make it special.

Our Design Values for Full-Body Avatars

We take it seriously that any change to avatars is a big deal and might disappoint those who have fallen in love with the floating bean style. So we have decided that it's a top priority to get these two things right:

1. When we release the full-body avatar, you will not be required to adopt it. The option to choose the new avatar or remain a floating bean will be yours. We will work hard to not change the look of your avatar for you.

2. The full-body avatar option will fully support all existing items at release. You’ve spent time and money building your identity and outfits, and we don’t want to mess with them!

😳 That's a lot of stuff we've made over the last 6 years

What’s Next?

You let us know your thoughts about our new initiative in Zendesk or on our Discord, and stay tuned for more dev blogs about full-body avatars  as the details firm up. There’s lots to consider: how will leg and foot items work, what impact will the full-body option have on gameplay, in what new ways can you customize your avatar… We'll continue updating you on where we're heading, why we've chosen to go there, and what comes next.

Rec Room on Xbox!

We’ve teased it, we’ve talked about it in AMAs… 

Today Rec Room is launching on Xbox! Please join us in welcoming a whole new group of players, family, and friends to the Rec Room universe 🌌 We’ve got a few events and surprises that should make the launch even more exciting: 

When you invite an Xbox player to try out Rec Room using your Friend Code you’ll both earn a free bottle of bubbly at the end of the event! 

We also built an awesome ^WelcomeXbox room where everyone (all platforms) can visit to meet all of the new players and earn a new limited time gift drop - the Space Soldier Helmet! Xbox players can also earn the gift drop by visiting the Rec Center. Be sure to visit the room before December 17th to grab the limited time gift drop! 

Bringing Rec Room to Xbox has been a ton of hard work and we couldn’t be prouder of the folks that made this happen. For us, Rec Room has always been about creating a fun and welcoming community for as many people as possible. That means making Rec Room the best place for you and your friends to hang out, regardless of location or device. 

Please help us welcome all of the new Xbox players in whatever way best suits your personality. If you’re a quest fanatic, party up with some Xbox players and show them the ropes on your favorite quest. If you’re a paintball fan show them your favorite map. If you’ve got a favorite batch of custom rooms, give them a tour! 

If you see players hitting any issues or having questions about Rec Room remember to let them know about our HappyFox support site. From there they can browse the knowledgebase or get in touch with the support team via a new ticket. We also have a very helpful and active player community on our discord for any quick questions.

New players can also find a lot of How To videos on our YouTube Channel or answered questions on our subreddit. You can find links to both of those and all of our other social channels and tutorials here. 

And a reminder for all players that your Rec Room account allows you to log into Rec Room across ALL supported devices! Your login works across everything: iPhone, iPad, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Steam, and Oculus. Every time we launch on a new platform we see a big wave of excitement hit the community as more people are able to have their first Rec Room experience. The community has been awesome at welcoming new players in each time this happens and we just want to say a huge thank you to everyone for that in the past and for all of that help going forward. Cheers! 

PS. If you capture a great Rec Room photo or video moment be sure to share it with us by tagging us in your post or using the #RecRoom tag. You can find us at:

@RecRoom on TikTok

@RecRoom on Instagram

@RecRoom on Twitter

Rec Room on YouTube