Image macro, based on a screen capture from a video. The camera is following a car drifting off a multiple-lane highway on an exit ramp with the rear wheels smoking. Thus, the car is in the middle of the image, and the actual highway is off to the left. On top of the screen capture, a photo of a highway sign bridge was added. It carries a combination of signs indicating an exit. The big main sign in the middle has an exit symbol consisting of two arrows slightly left of centre. The highway side of the arrow is labelled, “Develop own modular avatar building system”. The exit side of the arrow is labelled, “Add Ready Player Me support and be done with it”. The car drifting up the exit ramp is labelled, “Metaverse developers”.
Image macro, based on a single-panel comic from the Web comic XKCD with a stack of dozens of grey, rectangular blocks of various sizes. The blocks generally become the smaller and the more numerous, the higher up on the stack they are. The many blocks at the top are labelled, “Hundreds of virtual worlds and VR, AR and XR applications launched during the Metaverse hype of the 2020s”. On the third level from the bottom and all the way to the right, there is one small vertical block which everything above rests on. It is implied that the whole stack would collapse if this block was removed. The block is labelled, “Ready Player Me”.
Image macro, based on two vertically arranged screen captures from a video. In the upper image, a school bus is standing on a level crossing with its front wheels. A train is approaching in the background. The bus is labelled, “Using Ready Player Me as the avatar-building system in your metaverse”. In the lower image, the school bus has just been hit by the train. It is careening away from the tracks, still blurry from the motion. The front of the train is labelled with the Netflix logo.
Image macro, based on a combination of two meme portrait drawings. On the left, there is a drawing of a Soyjak, a male-looking character with a bald head, a stubbly beard and a pair of glasses. He is crying with pink, blood-shot eyes, streams of tears running down his cheeks and his mouth wide open. Below, he is captioned in all caps, “We rely entirely on Ready Player Me for our avatars, and we won't have any new avatars from February, 2026 on”. On the right, there is a drawing of a Nordic Gamer, a male-looking character with a natural skin tone, well-groomed blond hair, blue eyes, a full beard, a black pullover and a calm but stern and confident expression. Below, he is captioned in all caps, “Your loss LOL”.
The images are based on the following meme templates in this order:Left Exit 12 Off Ramp (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/left-exit-12-off-ramp)Dependency, also known as Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complex-structure-supported-by-a-tiny-part)Train Hitting School Bus (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/train-hitting-school-bus)Soyboy vs Yes Chad, a combination of Soyjak (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/soy-boy-face-soyjak) and Nordic Gamer, also known as a Yes Chad (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-chad)Ready Player Me (https://readyplayer.me/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_Me) is known for various tools for creating fairly high-quality 3-D avatars for various uses. Their name is a play on Ernest Cline's 2011 novel about a 3-D virtual world and, more famously, Steven Spielberg's 2018 film adaptation.Ready Player Me uses a large number of built-in assets plus artificial intelligence to build avatars. It can be integrated into other platforms, it has a dedicated avatar creator for the popular 3-D virtual world platform VRChat, and it can be used to export avatars for various standards.Among developers of small virtual worlds and virtual world systems, it is popular because it can fairly easily be integrated into their systems, giving them quick and easy access to very versatile avatars on par with characters in modern-day video games. This saves them from developing their own avatar system, including rigging, configuration and outfitting, and from designing their own avatar components or waiting for their user community to supply these.Such virtual worlds are actually fairly numerous. The COVID-19 pandemic with its social distancing provided fertile grounds for virtual worlds which would allow for interactions without real-life social restrictions. And Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 announcement to start his own virtual world kicked off a metaverse hype. Countless virtual reality and virtual world projects were launched in its wake.Bigger players could afford to develop their own avatar engine and avatar-building system and usually also design their own avatar components. Small start-ups, on the other hand, lack the development capacities for that, as do non-profits and free and open-source projects. Some, like the decentralised virtual world systems Vircadia and Overte, require their users to generate their avatars in external tools, convert them to something that Vircadia and Overte understand and upload them on sufficiently fast servers.Others made use of the solutions offered by Ready Player Me to integrate it directly into their worlds. This immediately gave them an avatar-building system along with all assets to build avatars from as Ready Player Me generates them on the fly.There are other avatar providers like Ready Player Me, but Ready Player Me is the biggest and most well-known one by far. In fact, oftentimes, Ready Player Me must have been the only one of its kind known to virtual world developers. Even if not, they deemed integrating at least one more such provider an unnecessary effort. After all, Ready Player Me did what it was supposed to do.One year ago, in December, 2024, Ready Player Me launched PlayerZero which can be integrated into virtual worlds and the like, too. The killer feature of PlayerZero is that users can create an avatar and use the self-same avatar in all virtual worlds that have PlayerZero implemented without ever having to remake it. In fact, generating the same avatar twice over is next to impossible, seeing as Ready Player Me has always been AI-powered.With the takeover of Ready Player Me by Netflix, the latter will fully incorporate not only its staff, but also its technology and assets and make them available exclusively to Netflix products.On January 31st, PlayerZero will be shut down which will immediately rob hundreds of virtual worlds of their entire avatar engine. Not only will users no longer be able to create new avatars, but even existing avatars will vanish along with the entire avatar engine, essentially breaking these virtual worlds altogether.These worlds will have to choose: Either they find and integrate another avatar engine. This would take quite some time during which the whole world will remain essentially defunct, and then everyone will have to build new avatars. Or they develop their own avatar engine and either design their own avatar assets or also provide a way for their user community to make, upload and share avatar assets. This would take much more time, and it would require people talented enough to make avatar assets. Well, or they give up and shut down, and be it because they cannot survive for a prolonged period of time during which nobody can access them because nobody has an avatar anymore.As hinted at in the fourth image, Second Life and worlds based on OpenSimulator, both from the 2000s, have a much more resilient avatar system. It doesn't even use assets built into the world engine. Instead, avatars are built in-world from content that first has to be acquired into the inventory. With only very few exceptions, this content is made and offered by users.
