Presentation given at immerse Metaverse and Avatars event on December 17th 2021

1. AI IN THE METAVERSE:
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR
METAVERSE AVATARS
By Brent Davis, PhD

2. ABOUT BRENT
• VRARA Toronto Chapter President!
• Reach out if you’re in the Toronto ecosystem and we’re not connected!
• Meet and Greet Event, Tentatively scheduled January 14th
• Co-Founder, CEO @ Nomad XR
• Computer Science PhD
Dissertation: “Exploratory Search with Archetype-based Language Models”
• Lecturer at Western University
• Professional Computing for Applied Scientists
• Unstructured Data
• Artificial Intelligence II
• Computer Graphics I
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-davis-ai/

3. AGENDA TODAY:
Why would we want personalized (autonomous) avatars?
How can AI be used to make Avatars in the Metaverse better?
How do we use AI to build these?
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4. BETTER IMMERSION FOR AVATARS IS
COMING VIA STATE-OF-THE-ART TRACKING
Face Tracking Eye Tracking Body Tracking
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5. NAVIGATING THE
UNCANNY VALLEY
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(Image credit: Osaka University | Asada Lab)

6. PRESENCE IN THE MULTIVERSE:
THESE CAPTURE YOU WHEN YOU’RE THERE, BUT -
WE CAN’T BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE…
OR CAN WE?
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• The Metaverse is composed of the experiences and worlds
inside it; these are almost always filled with a mixture of People
(PCs) and ‘AI’ or Characters (NPCs)
• None of us are always online… but the Metaverse doesn’t sleep.
When we make a world and want it to capture us, how do we
make ourselves into a character?

7. OPPORTUNITY:
CUSTOMIZED, TUNED NPCS
WHY NOT MAKE THEM NFTS?
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• Once we have NPCs that are
capturing our likeness, why not
make these into NFTs for the
multiverse?
• Opportunities for brands to
release NPCs and Avatars that are
interactive ( add in GPT-3 for
some natural language
generation! ) and have iconic
behaviours

8. BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN OUR AVATARS IN
HIGH IMMERSION GEAR TO HEADSETS THAT TRAVEL
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• Beyond making characters for our
metaverse world that bring it to
life, we can also use this to make
our regular avatars better at
‘faking it’ when we’re not in the
same high quality headset.
• Didn’t want to take the haptics rig
or the desktop it tethers to on the
road? Save your personalization
and apply it in other worlds!

9. HOW DO WE CAPTURE THIS DATA?
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING 101
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10. WE’RE COMPLEX – SO MAKE THE
MACHINE LEARNING COMPLEX TOO
(DEEP REINFORCEMENT LEARNING)
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11. PUTTING OUR DIGITAL MIMICS TOGETHER
Research
Make models that have the capacity and
intention to capture as much of what
makes us unique and human as possible
Test
Give creators as much time to tune and
refine their personalization as needed.
Craft the you that you want to be seen
More Immersive
Metaverse
• Metaverse NPC Celebrities!
• NFT Ecosystem for NPCs in
Metaverse Worlds
• Better personalization in low
resource headsets

12. SUMMARY
• The Metaverse is an unprecedented opportunity for new kinds of
creativity and immersion as we explore digital identity and digital
interaction
• Advances in AI and Machine Learning are advancing the ways we can
communicate ourselves in the Metaverse
• All of us know something about what makes us uniquely human…
Let’s build a path to being able to share that across our new worlds!

13. THANK YOU
QUESTIONS?
Brent D. Davis, PhD
@brent_dv on Twitter