The push for low fidelity, as usual, and as mentioned in this very talk, is the limited power of these mobile systems pushing dual 2k displays at 90Hz.

The issue is not in polygon counts, but artistic qualities. There would be PS2 games that would look more comfortable and/or convincing than this.

But running at 120fps at basically 4k resolution while scanning 5 camera inputs on the same low power mobile CPU? I think not.

And remember these scenes can be modified by users and are loaded as needed.

This is not like a precooked scene in a computer game where designers spend weeks fine-tuning the lighting model.

I notice pretty much all quest apps use ambient lighting only which gives them this fake look. Some nice spotlights would do a world of good. But I guess anything better than this is just too expensive for the system.

Mii avatars probably have even less polygons and use simpler shading and they look a lot better to me.

You actually don’t get the “uncanny” feeling from this? Compared to non-Meta avatar systems and game graphics? Are non-gamers less susceptible to it? Is that how these avatar systems goes through the front door???

I'm very much a gamer but I don't think this is so bad, no..

It's not the number of polygons that is the problem, its how they are arranged and the colors on them.

They need to hire an better Art Director.

It's not the number of polygons that is the problem, its how they are arranged.

They need to hire an better Art Director.

They could take some polygons out of the glasses and give the characters legs at least!

Update: They are a actually doing a lot there. The lips and eyebrows are moving. It has skinned animation. When I started in the industry we were designing characters that would inanimate without skinning, everything was static like a wooden puppet.

See the keynote for the resin for the lack of legs, and the new avatars coming soon.

I'm pretty confident this has more polygons and higher resolution textures than a gameplay scene in Final Fantasy XII. Those models had 256x256 textures and 1500 polygons total per character. Just the glasses virtual-Carmack is wearing are probably pushing 200+ polygons when they could be 3 quads and a clever texture. I was going to think maybe they wanted to avoid using transparency in their textures, but he's standing in front of a large virtual glass door.

But still I agree with the other commenters, they should have gone MORE cartoony and more simple. This is just a simultaneously creepy and goofy middle-ground.