{"id":379837,"date":"2025-10-28T05:28:50","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T05:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.roblox.com\/?p=39195"},"modified":"2025-10-28T05:28:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T05:28:50","slug":"avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Avatars and Identity in the Metaverse, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In Sanskrit, avatar (<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u0905\u0935\u0924\u093e\u0930)<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> refers to \u201can incarnation in human form.\u201d In Roblox, few things reflect a user\u2019s identity more directly than their avatar. As we\u2019ll discover, there is no \u201cstandard\u201d Roblox user, and the fantastical aesthetic variety in our users\u2019 avatars directly reflects the diversity of the user base itself.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>Characterizing Avatars (Methodology)<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">If we\u2019re interested in aesthetic diversity, we need to start by characterizing avatar aesthetics. The most natural place to look is the 2D avatar thumbnail that often represents users to one another<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">For aesthetic analysis, we need to turn this thumbnail into a semantically meaningful numerical representation. There are many ways to reduce the dimensionality, but here\u2019s a few that we can try.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The simplest approach: directly apply <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Principal_component_analysis\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">PCA<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to the flattened thumbnail images. To evaluate the \u201cquality\u201d of the reduction, we visualize thumbnails on the extremes of the principal components (PCs). We can see that while the first PC distinguishes between interpretable types of avatars, the twelfth is too broad to be meaningful.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">PC 1 (14.3% of variance explained):<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39477 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1276\" height=\"360\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">PC 12 (1.5% of variance explained):<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39487 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1198\" height=\"329\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">2. Almost as simple: we can apply the last hidden layer of an off-the-shelf pretrained image\u00a0 \u00a0classification network (Resnet 18), and evaluate embedding quality by clustering them. Observe how Resnet captures color information very effectively (see all the blue shoes in the second cluster) but sometimes fails to encode shape information (see the first cluster).<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Samples of thumbnails from 2 clusters are shown below:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39497 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1193\" height=\"175\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39507 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-3.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1193\" height=\"181\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\">3. To get a visual read on cohesiveness, we can apply UMAP to reduce the image classification embeddings all the way down to 2 dimensions. While there dose seem to be discernible clusters, the large blob of points in the bottom right looks suspicious. Rightly so: samples from that megacluster are visually incohesive.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">2D embedding plot:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 120px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39517 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"692\" height=\"471\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Samples from the megacluster in the 2D embedded space:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39537 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-5.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1194\" height=\"161\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">4. Training a small custom variational autoencoder (VAE) on the thumbnail data directly. Ideally, this better captures the unique aesthetic variation in Roblox avatars, as compared to a general-purpose image classifier. (cute aside: K-means is particularly appropriate for clustering these embeddings, as its normal prior matches up with the VAE\u2019s latent variable posterior)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">While there are metrics that can attempt to quantify the benefits of different approaches, practical use cases for unsupervised learning often come down to subjective judgment. Anecdotally, we find the most success with #4.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Avatar Manifold<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Using the VAE, we can transform the thumbnails into succinct 64-dimensional vectors for clustering. Here are some examples of the VAE + K-means clusters from a 20-way clustering:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some very customized avatars in one cluster:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39547 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-6.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1191\" height=\"205\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tall and thin avatars, which we call \u201cRthro\u201d in another cluster:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39571 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-7.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2650\" height=\"472\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Big and blocky avatars which we call \u201cBlocky\u201d in this cluster:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39557 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-8.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1193\" height=\"222\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Default avatars here:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39581 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-9.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1193\" height=\"204\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lightly customized in-between Rthro and Blocky body type in this one:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39591 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-10.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1193\" height=\"221\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dark Angels of Roblox<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39601 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-11.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1195\" height=\"200\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\u201cLook Over There!\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39611 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-12.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1196\" height=\"222\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Black Cube<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39621 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-13.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1192\" height=\"206\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I Believe I Can Fly<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39631 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-14.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1197\" height=\"218\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The consistency of the clusters across multiple runs, random initializations, and choices of k suggests that Avatars naturally fall into distinct (albeit fuzzy) categories. On the extremes of contour, we have the old-fashioned, square-bodied \u201cBlocky\u201d characters opposite the tall, thin, more lifelike \u201cRthro\u201d avatars. We also find a number of default avatars, which users have not edited since joining Roblox (cluster 4 above). In between, there\u2019s everything from \u201cgoth ninjas\u201d to \u201cgoing clubbing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Identity through Avatar<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">How do these aesthetic clusters relate to our users themselves?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The easiest place to start is user behavior on the platform. When plotting avatar edits in the last month, account age in weeks, total seconds of playtime, and one-month retention by cluster &#8212; engagement indicators &#8212; we are presented with four graphs that demonstrate <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">dramatic<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> variation across clusters. Users with heavily customized avatars tend to be most engaged and most frequently retained, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">while the avatars that haven&#8217;t been as heavily customized tend to be less engaged.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-39641 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1-15.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1397\" height=\"877\" \/><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are two opposite causal interpretations of this. One is that users who edit their avatar become more engaged with Roblox as a result. The other could be that users who are already invested into Roblox tend to pour more effort into their avatars as time goes on. There\u2019s been great work by others at Roblox <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/robloxtechblog.com\/causal-inference-using-instrumental-variables-580272d9ddbd\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">determining which interpretation to believe<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Regardless of causality, we see that two aspects of on-platform identity\u2014aesthetic representation and level of engagement\u2014are closely intertwined. What about off-platform identity, though? How do our users\u2019 real-life identifiers &#8212; age, geography, gender, etc. &#8212; intersect with their Roblox identities? Check out Part 2 of this blog post to find out!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Nameer Hirschkind is a Data Science Intern at Roblox. He works on Roblox&#8217;s Avatars to help every player create an Avatar they love. Neither Roblox Corporation nor this blog endorses or supports any company or service. Also, no guarantees or promises are made regarding the accuracy, reliability or completeness of the information contained in this blog.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a92021 Roblox Corporation. Roblox, the Roblox logo and Powering Imagination are among our registered and unregistered trademarks in the U.S. and other countries.<\/p>\n<p>The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.roblox.com\/2021\/10\/avatars-identity-metaverse-part-1\/\">Avatars and Identity in the Metaverse, Part 1<\/a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.roblox.com\">Roblox Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.roblox.com\/2021\/10\/avatars-identity-metaverse-part-1\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Sanskrit, avatar (\u0905\u0935\u0924\u093e\u0930) refers to \u201can incarnation in human form.\u201d In Roblox, few things reflect a user\u2019s identity more directly than their avatar. As we\u2019ll discover, there is no \u201cstandard\u201d Roblox user, and the fantastical aesthetic variety in our users\u2019 avatars directly reflects the diversity of the user base itself. Characterizing Avatars (Methodology) If we\u2019re interested in aesthetic diversity, we need to start by characterizing avatar aesthetics. The most natural place to look is the 2D avatar thumbnail that often represents users to one another. For aesthetic analysis, we need to turn this thumbnail into a semantically meaningful numerical representation. There are many ways to reduce the dimensionality, but here\u2019s a few that we can try.\u00a0 The simplest approach: directly apply PCA to the&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"excerpt-more\"><a class=\"blog-excerpt button\" href=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/avatars-and-identity-in-the-metaverse-part-1\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":379838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[298],"tags":[5955,299],"class_list":["post-379837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-roblox","tag-data-science","tag-product-tech"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Avatars and Identity in the Metaverse, Part 1 | Arcader News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Sanskrit, avatar (\u0905\u0935\u0924\u093e\u0930) refers to \u201can incarnation in human form.\u201d In Roblox, few things reflect a user\u2019s identity more directly than their avatar. 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