As a Roblox developer, it is currently difficult to allow users to facially express their emotions using different faces. Players can emote in-game using one dynamic head or one face, and multiple emotes: However unlike emotes, it’s cumbersome or impossible to select faces in-experience. Much like the emote menu, history shows the platform cannot rely on individual developers to facilitate what I believe should be a metaverse-wide confident and effortless use of UGC.
In short: Stevie Standard cannot cry, drool, get heart eyes, or grow vampire teeth. With or without camera access. Such effects can greatly enhance lifelike expression, and alternatives like emoji break full voice chat immersion.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because my users would be able to better facially express their emotions and avatar identity in immersive 3D space, which would foster a more deeply engaging social metaverse experience and earn me more robux and tickets.
Here’s one mockup of what this feature could look like in-experience:
As you can see, the rich catalogue of classic faces could synergize with the upcoming facial animations to provide an even wider range of expressive emotions than just facial animations alone. It’s like emoji for the metaverse.
Here’s another mockup of what this feature could look like in-metaverse, this time when the user changes faces, the hypothetical experience provides custom scripted behavior to make the newly selected face appear via Chat Bubbles in addition to the customer’s Robloxian. Such custom behavior could be useful when the avatar is distant, turned away, the experience has a top-down camera, or for avatars that wear helmets or face masks, are piloting a mech, driving a car, or don’t have any humanoid faces at all. etc.
I think this feature would unlock the full potential of the new dynamic heads as well as the classic and iconic faces on Roblox across the entire platform. Thank you for reading my request.
Finally, a shout-out to the face changers of old.
