Our last iteration of the face tracker, about 3 weeks ago... We had engineered joints and pivots for fitting Valve Index and Quest 2/3 HMDs
Hi Everyone,
This is Jason writing, and it has been a while since we last updated about our partnership with Akro on the Face Tracker that we have been working on. Mostly, it has been a lot of work on iterating and trying to get the general design correct, and there has been a lot of testing and trying to get the quality of tracking to be up to the quality that an EOZ product deserves.
Akro, and especially Akari has been hard at work and we had a chance to get to an alpha prototype unit, and Brad had the chance to test it at CES 2025 in their private suite! It was very exciting for us to put on the Akro x EOZ face Tracker and to give it a spin in VRChat.
Unfortunately, it has been a let-down. We did not observe any problems with the hardware and cameras, but however, Brad's face wasn't detected properly in an almost perfect environment for face tracking and we were quite concerned with the various issues that we had observed with the software that we've been using. In short, without a dramatic and almost complete overhaul of the software that we had intended to ship with, it is impossible for us to launch this product as intended. (Yes, we had intended to use Project Babble as the software in this face tracker)
I know that this has been a product that's been anticipated by a lot of EOZ and Akro's customers, but with a social responsibility to the VRChat community, EOZ cannot and will not launch this when we know that there is a long way to go. Our next steps are to figure out and bring in a new partner who has mouth, tongue and cheeks detection algorithms. We hope that with a new partner, a great product can be built for the VRChat community. This has set us back a lot, but EOZ thinks that it is a responsible thing to do. We thank everyone that has been looking forward to this and we hope to provide a new update soon.