Soon after COVID hit and made our team go fully remote, we quickly got tired of seeing each other's faces on video and decided to give Mozilla Hubs a try – so we could meet up in the same room, virtually.
More than 30,000 people decided to make an avatar within the first month
Hubs is pretty awesome, but there was one thing about the platform that just didn't do for a team creating personal avatars: the generic robot-style avatars you have zero similarities or connection with.
Having the right tools at hand, we decided to fix the problem and integrate Ready Player Me avatars with the platform, so we could use our own avatars created on readyplayer.me in Hubs.
We tweeted some people in the Mozilla Hubs community about it and ran a successful Product Hunt campaign.
What happened next was unexpected. More than 30,000 avatars were created for Mozilla Hubs within a month of the launch, peaking at 2,500 avatars in one day. We saw a lot of excitement on social media as people were eager to show off their freshly created avatars or cheer to the progress of the 3D avatar industry.
Personal avatars are an essential part of the future of virtual communication. In contexts imitating reality, such as work meetings or conferences, people can connect with each other better when using avatars that look like themselves. We're glad the Hubs community agrees.
Mozilla Hubs has already hosted many previously-offline meetups and conferences that moved online due to the pandemic. Ready Player Me avatars have made virtual conferences like WeAreSummit and SIGGRAPH feel more like face-to-face.
Personal avatars also make a perfect profile picture if you want your identity to be recognizable yet anonymous. Just check out Three.js founder @mr.doob's Twitter pic (definitely one of our proudest moments). 💁♀️
What's next for Ready Player Me?
We're currently in the process of integrating Ready Player Me with many other VR apps, virtual events platforms and games. Our eventual goal is to create a universal identity platform that allows you to create your avatar once and use it across the virtual world.
Previously published at https://readyplayer.me/blog/we-added-personal-avatars-to-mozilla-hubs-and-this-is-what-happened