Meta is on the hunt for adult volunteers to help shape the future of its Codec Avatars — paying $50 an hour to record facial expressions, gestures, and conversations.

Meta is currently recruiting paid volunteers at $50 per hour to capture a range of facial expressions, physical movements, and conversational exchanges. This data will feed directly into the next phase of Meta’s Codec Avatars project, a technology aimed at powering more lifelike avatars for VR and AR — first demoed back in 2019. According to a report from Business Insider, the initiative, codenamed “Project Warhol,” is being run through the data company Appen, which is officially listed as a Meta partner in the project’s consent forms.

The research itself is split into two separate studies: “Human Motion” and “Group Conversations.” In the Human Motion study, participants are asked to mimic specific facial expressions, read sample sentences, and make hand gestures, all while being recorded. The setup involves cameras, headsets, and various sensors tracking participants’ movements from all possible angles. The Group Conversations portion brings together small groups of two or three people, who engage in unscripted conversations and light improv activities. Both studies are scheduled to kick off this September at Meta’s research lab in Pittsburgh.

Meta has been steadily inching closer to mainstreaming its Codec Avatar technology. Last summer, the company posted a string of job listings tied directly to the Codec Avatars project, including roles for a design prototyper and an iOS developer. The goal: to build out an “internal XR phone service” described as defining “the future of human-to-human interaction through immersive telepresence with Codec Avatars.”

Meta’s ambitions aren’t just talk—last September, the tech made a splash in a high-profile podcast, where Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg held a long-distance conversation using photorealistic Codec Avatars. What didn’t get mentioned at the time: pulling off that level of realism required workstations loaded with four GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs per avatar.

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More recently, in March 2024, Meta’s Head of Research Yaser Sheikh revealed that an earlier, less detailed version of the Codec Avatars already runs on standalone VR headsets — and that it’s now possible to generate an avatar with just a one-minute face scan from a smartphone. Meta calls these quick-scan versions “Instant Codec Avatars.”

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