You'll soon be able to use 3D avatars on Google Meet thanks to ChatDirector. Better than Teams?

Microsoft Teams made 3D avatars a real thing a little while ago. The premise is simple: instead of your actual face, a cartoonized avatar represents you during the meeting. But now, Google, Microsoft’s number-one competitor, seems to be working on something similar, yet a little more advanced.

The tech itself is called ChatDirector, which Google researchers demonstrated during the CHI 2024 conference in Honolulu, Hawai’i, not too long ago. Basically, the tool uses 3D avatars in video-conferencing, shared 3D environments, and automatic layout transitions, but it has a spatial awareness that makes it different from the rest.

Check out the prototype’s demonstration below:

Say, you’re having a Google Meet discussion. With this tech, it scans the faces of all the meeting participants and puts the cutouts altogether in a new background (sort of like the Together Mode on Teams). But, instead of being a floating set of pixels, these “cutouts” are your actual faces instead of a cartoon version of you like on Teams.

This means, that if you move the background camera to any side, you can see these 3D avatars moving as if you’re there in all angles. These avatars can also mimic real-life visual cues like eye contact, and the layouts can adjust automatically based on who is speaking.

Unlike Teams, Google Meet does not currently have a 3D avatar feature. So far, what folks are using are third-party offerings, so this proposed native support is more than welcomed.

“Transforming users’ video in this way can raise questions about their control over their likeness, requiring further research and careful consideration,” Google warns, however.

It’s still a prototype that’s being researched at Google’s labs for the time being, so it may take some time for this feature to actually make it to Google Meet.

You can read the paper here, titled “ChatDirector: Enhancing Video Conferencing with Space-Aware Scene Rendering and Speech-Driven Layout Transition,” for a more technical explanation.