Mobile Avatars SDK Beta - 2/15/17

[Ross_Beef]

Hi everyone and a huge thank you for participating in the Mobile Avatars SDK beta.

Please note that this is not yet ready for redistribution and is covered under our existing NDA’s

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I've attached our SDK and Avatar assets packages to this post, which should enable you to begin implementing Avatars on your Android devices.

A few things to call out:

• *IMPORTANT* - the .SO file we've included is for development only, and will be removed from future releases, and should not be distributed with your applications. In the shipping version of the avatar SDK, this will be distributed with the oculus platform so that we can patch in enhancements and new content without requiring you to patch your applications. For now, we’re distributing these directly to you so that you can be working with the latest code. 
• The implementation process is exactly the same as for PC, so the existing SDK documentation  should hold true (with the exception that anything to do with Touch is probably less relevant on Mobile!). We've packaged up the Android-friendly equivalent of all of the Unity samples for you to rapidly get up to speed with Mobile Avatars.
• This build of the Mobile SDK makes use of the Rift PC Avatar meshes and materials. We're currently in the process of finalizing a set of lower tri-count assets (2k per Avatar vs. 10k on PC) and mobile-optimized materials which will significantly decrease load and drawcalls, but in the interest of allowing you to validate Avatars in your mobile experience we wanted to get the SDK to you as soon as possible. Because all of these optimizations happen at the SDK or Unity integration level, our intention is that we can make these updates with little or no code changes required from the developer side (save for dropping the new bundles over existing ones).
• At present we're including all of our assets to you in a zipped bundle. As we rollout the SDK these assets will be accessible from the Oculus app. In the meantime you'll need to locate the OvrAvatarAssets.zip in a specific path on your phone:

/sdcard/Oculus/OvrAvatarAssets.zip

• You can run this command to do this:

adb push <path-to-your-local-file> /sdcard/Oculus/OvrAvatarAssets.zip

Please contribute feedback and any questions on this private forum.

Right now we're focusing on optimizing Avatars for mobile as much as possible, but where we can make your lives easier within our timelines we will do.

We look forward to hearing how you're getting on with Oculus Avatars for Mobile and will keep you updated here with updates to our releases.

Best

Mike Howard
Product Manager, Oculus Avatars