Roblox, a global immersive platform where millions of people meet every day, today unveiled a number of new features for the creator community at its ninth annual Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) in San Francisco.
In the area of immersive 3D communication, Roblox announced tools for even more personalized and expressive avatars as well as Roblox Connect. The latter is a new feature that allows you to call a friend from your friends list as an avatar within a shared virtual 3D experience. With Roblox Connect, scheduled to roll out later this year, users will be able to call their friends on Roblox by their real name and transfer their real-life facial expressions and body language to their avatar - all while conversing in a shared, immersive space. What was once the preserve of Hollywood-sized motion capture studios is now being compressed into a technology that runs on a cell phone or laptop and uses only the device's camera to capture motion and translate it in real time.
Roblox: Real-time communication and AI assistants
At the RDC, Roblox also presented innovations in avatar creation. Avatars are a means of expression for users and serve as their own virtual representation. More than 10 million daily active Roblox users updated their avatars daily in 2022. Roblox is now paying respect to this deep connection to digital identity by introducing new tools for creating and publishing avatars. These are:
- Innovative mesh and texture APIs that give developers control over manipulating objects within an experience, allowing them to change shape and dimensions or customize textures. In the next few months, these APIs will be enabled to customize avatars without leaving the experience.
- The Roblox avatar creation tool now supports importing standard GLTF files in addition to OBJ and FBX files. Roblox is also releasing a preview feature that allows creators to see how their avatar will look with different facial expressions, emotes, accessories, and clothing layers. Later this year, Roblox will additionally release machine learning-based tools that automate the process of rigging, skinning, caging, and segmenting a model for the creator.
- Roblox is also working on making it easy to create an avatar from a photo and text input, within minutes instead of days or weeks.
At RDC, Roblox further announced that it will continue to expand the ability to express emotions through avatars, moving beyond facial expressions to include hand gestures and upper body movements, as well as new machine learning (ML) approaches that enable more realistic avatar movements.
“In the near future, a person's avatars will reflect their exact facial expressions, right down to the way they blink their eyes. This means people can feel just as connected in immersive experiences as they do outside of them. “We’re excited to see what our developers create with these new capabilities,” said Daniel Sturman, Chief Technology Officer at Roblox.
Coming to PS4 and PS5 next month
With the aim of enabling experiences from anywhere and on more devices, Roblox also announced that it will release its entire catalog on PlayStation 4 and 5 starting next month, bringing the full Roblox experience to millions of console owners worldwide. In addition, Roblox will update its own Xbox app and announced that Roblox will be available on Meta Quest later this month.
Roblox also introduced Assistant, a conversational AI that makes game creation on Roblox more accessible and empowers experienced developers to create richer, more engaging experiences faster. Assistant will be available in Roblox Studio and Creator Hub later this year, and will also roll out within Experiences next year to help developers learn and code. This new generation of AI-driven tools will help all creators bring their ideas to life in the future.
In addition to these new tools and features, Roblox offers the developer community additional earning opportunities to further fuel one of the largest virtual economies in the world, as outlined in the Vision for the Roblox Economy. In the 12 months ending June 30, 2023, Roblox developers have already earned $680 million.
At RDC, Roblox announced the following innovations to help developers exceed these results:
- Roblox plans to introduce subscription experiences.
- Later this month, Roblox is inviting all verified users with a Roblox Premium membership to create 3D items for the Roblox Marketplace. With the opening of its own marketplace, the platform is implementing security measures in addition to ID verification that give creators more responsibility.
- Additionally, Roblox will soon introduce features that will allow creators to detect duplicates of their items and more easily report, manage, and track IP claims.
- Next year, there will be two main types of marketplace items: those with fixed quantities - Limiteds - and those with flexible quantities, both with a per unit cost to publish.
- Next year, Roblox plans to update Creator Marketplace fees to allow creators to keep 100 percent of the net proceeds from the sale of their items, excluding taxes and payment processing fees.
All of these measures are intended to help creators of all sizes expand their earning potential and grow with Roblox.
Last but not least, Roblox announced updates to Civility and Safety: the platform introduced new tools that will contribute to an even safer environment. This includes:
- A machine learning architecture that detects rude voice communications. This model is one of the first of its kind to be deployed at scale, where AI directly assesses the content and expression of the voice, rather than first translating the voice into text and then classifying that text. The English moderation model will be available soon.
- Developers can now use the IsVerfied API to better manage access to features within their experiences based on the verification level of a person's account. This can be used to grant access to specific parts of the experience or to better manage moderation within the experience.
- Developer-configured text filters will be made available later this year, allowing developers to decide what type of text is appropriate for their community and experience.
Today's announcements are a natural evolution of the platform with the goal of connecting one billion people with optimism and civility. In the quarter ending June 2023, 65,5 million users spent an average of 2,3 hours per day on Roblox.
“All of the innovations we unveiled today at RDC will enable people to connect in unprecedented ways and across devices. For developers, these tools will enable easy, intuitive creation from anywhere and help them build a business based on the highest levels of security and mutual respect,” added Manuel Bronstein, Chief Product Officer, Roblox.
Every day, millions of people around the world connect with their friends on Roblox, communicate with each other, and explore millions of digital experiences. All of these experiences are created by the Roblox community, made up of millions of creators. Roblox builds a safe, civil, and diverse community that inspires and promotes creativity and positive relationships between people around the world.
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