Roblox, the community-driven game creation and co-experience platform, has acquired avatar tech specialist Loom.ai.

The privately held company specialises in avatar creation, using real-time facial animation tech, deep learning, VFX and computer vision.

The aim of the acquisition is to speed up the development of next-generation avatars within Roblox, allowing players to create ever-more emotive digital representations of themselves.

“We believe as people share experiences virtually, their avatars should have the ability to express a full range of emotions. Loom.ai will accelerate making human co-experiences more immersive and personal, adding world-class facial animation technology as part of Roblox’s efforts to provide expressive emotive actions to avatars that will enable deeper connections for our community," said David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox.

Face time

“From our very first meeting with David Baszucki, it was clear we share a vision where art and engineering meet to create an exciting range of personalised avatars and characters," said Loom.ai co-founder Kiran Bhat.

"We will continue our work on that vision to bring real-time and real-life emotions to every Roblox avatar.”

Fellow Loom.ai co-founder Mahesh Ramasubramanian added: “We’re thrilled to join forces with Roblox to bring real-time facial expressions to the 36 million Roblox avatars playing every day in the metaverse. Roblox has created an incredible community, and we see a perfect fit for Loom.ai’s advanced 3D avatar technologies to bring shared experiences to the next level."

Details of the acquisition deal have not been published. Loom.ai will be sunsetting its current products in the first half of 2021 to focus on its new task of bringing more life-like experiences to the users of Roblox.