In a perfect metaverse, what will it take to create a realistic human-like avatar?

A brain, a voice, and a body.

“Google is working on the brain, others are working on the voice, and I am taking on the face and body,” Mao Lin Liao, the founder and chief executive officer of Reblium, recently said to me.

For the past 20 years, the 43-years-old entrepreneur has been working in animation and marketing. He created visual effects for Jackie Chan’s Around the World in 80 Days, artwork for video game studios and collaborated with top fashion brands.

But it wasn’t enough.

“I wanted to create a positive impact in this world,” Mao said. Driven by a fateful journey in childhood where he lost his father and the recent death of a family member, Mao wanted to leave an impact beyond entertainment. His brilliantly deceptive animation had already helped put child predators behind bars. For the next step, he wants his newest creation to be the backbone of web3.

Unlike other metaverse companies starting with virtual land sales, token offerings or non-fungible token, or NFT, profile picture drops, Reblium begins with the avatar.

“This is what people are most attached to,” he said.

Based in Amsterdam, Reblium offers software that enables anyone to create and customize their metaverse avatars with uncanny fidelity, which he showcased to me over a video call (see the two videos below for examples). The intuitive interface allows numerous variations of the same avatar that are suitable for different occasions.

For a morning job meeting, a female avatar could be dressed in a smart casual outfit and a ponytail. A few clicks later she’s decked out in full makeup, a sidecut with pink highlights, and is ready to party. A few more, and her ears are prolonged, the skin color shifts, and she’s now an elf set to embark on an epic adventure.

Users can identify their avatars as male or female or move the slider in between until they find their perfect representation. They can build from scratch, customize existing templates, and change hairstyles, bone structures, skin pigmentation- everything.

The future applications of this technology are endless. “You can test out different haircuts or even see the expected results of a plastic surgery before going under the knife,” he said, “You can create predictions of what your child will look like, based on the image of the two partners.”

Mao is no stranger to how virtual reality can change the tangible world. In 2013, a project of his went viral for its photorealistic portrait of an imagined woman named Alexa.

The image was so imperfectly real -- and apparently attractive -- that Playboy magazine offered him a commission to complete Alexa’s body and give them the rights to her digital nudes. He turned it down, but Alexa was still featured in the magazine, although only in a modest headshot, leaving much for the imagination.

Catching Child Predators

In the same year, Mao had a turning point.

He took part in creating Sweetie, an interactive 3-D model that imitates a real 10-year-old Filipino girl.

Terre des Hommes, an international charity that works to eradicate child exploitation, used Sweeties to lure child predators from 71 countries via webcam chats, and then handed their identities to Interpol. Many were arrested in the aftermath, and at least one was convicted in Australia.

The sting proved how easy it is to track sex offenders and pressure governments to take action, Mao said.

“Before that, I just was a character artist, making beautiful pictures,” he said, “but Sweeties showed me that you can do impactful projects (with animation) beyond shooter games.”

In 2019, Mao established his first company, Reblika (pronounced similar to “replica”) which had a mission to create digital twins. The digital studio aims to “blur the line between the real and digital,” he told me.

It creates digital influencers that can promote brands on social media and, to some extent, replace living, breathing ones. One virtual model, Miequla, “lives” in Los Angeles, believes that “Black Lives Matter,” and has more than 3 million followers on Instagram. Another, Lu do Maglu, speaks Spanish and is a content creator with an audience of 5.9 million.

He said that his product is not necessarily in competition with humans.

“Influencers have a lifetime of 10 to 20 years,” Mao said. “If they created digital clones of themselves, they can work and earn forever.”   

Reblika’s goal of creating the perfect animated human character is far from over. Scanning and imaging technology have progressed, allowing animators to model faces and bodies to near perfection, though there are still limitations.

“Once the avatar moves, the collusion falls apart,” he said.

It can be things as simple as an unnatural reflection of light over the earlobe or teeth colors that are too consistent.

The Reblium Revolution

With the rise of interest in the metaverse, Mao raised $300,000 from friends and family to start the web3 sister company for Reblika-Reblium. 

Mao came up with the word “Reblium” as a phonetical variation of Reblika. Yet once the software announcement came out, fans pointed out that the word comes from the Latin root for “revolution.”

He refused offers for funding from venture capitalist firms, preferring to keep the company’s independence.

“I said no to a lot of people,” he said.

He dreams that Reblium will enable users to create interoperable visual identities that are consistent and usable everywhere, from social media reels to different blockchains and virtual realities. He hopes those avatars will be a leading standard in the web3 space, the same way http is the backbone of web2.

Next for the company will be NFT fashionwear for avatars in December 2022 and a mobile version a year later, he said.  

What’s Next

Looking decades ahead, Mao envisions of a future where humanity has succeeded in creating autonomous artificial intelligence capable of making their own decisions.

“Just like The Matrix,” he said, referring to the famous Wachowskis franchise.

Mao’s work also has strong roots in his family’s history, as losing both his grandmother and his father have had a lasting effect on how he sees the web3 tech, and it’s untapped potential. His grandmother suffered from dementia and had difficulty communicating with anyone. Once Covid hit, she died during lockdown, alone.

But what if software could’ve helped soothe his grandmother? Indistinguishable from humans, the avatars, he argued, can help the elderly by keeping them company and alleviating their loneliness.

In this imagined future, humans will have full digital clones, operating in a parallel economy, doing jobs, and earning money in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

As he speaks more about his vision for the future, with a realization of the political and economic implications of future technologies, Mao admits that there are a lot of ethical challenges that are not yet resolved.

Many Questions Still

How will all this affect people’s perception of self and identity? How will they deal with their self-image and aging when they can look forever young? How will governments interfere in all of this?

Mao believes that he is building a technology for the future, not the present, and that tomorrow’s generations will be better equipped to find creative answers to the metaverse’s ethical conundrums.

Behind his optimism about the future lays a desire to overcome the past.

Mao was born in China. Fleeing poverty, the family risked their lives and swam for more than 6 hours to Hong Kong.

His mother made it, but his father did not.

“Because (my father) was missing, I felt that life is too short... I can’t just live, and that’s it,” he said. “I wanted to be special.”