Android XR — Digital Humans

Android XR is a next-generation platform for spatial computing devices. As part of an embedded collaboration between Magic Leap and a leading technology partner, I lead AI and XR initiatives focused on digital humans — avatars, embodied agents, and full-body tracking — across the Android XR ecosystem.

One of the first concrete deliverables was an official public sample for Android XR developers: a Unity-based avatar demo that showcases how perception APIs, body tracking, and real-time rendering come together on XR hardware. The sample is open source and lives in the Android XR Unity samples repository on GitHub, serving as a reference implementation for developers building presence and avatar features on the platform.

A second project pushed further into AI: an embodied Gemini agent demo that combines large language model interaction with full-body avatar animation and spatial awareness — showing what it looks like when an AI assistant has a body and occupies the same physical space as the user.

Running in parallel is applied research on full-body pose estimation: recovering whole-body motion from partial sensor coverage (head and hands) combined with inertial measurement units. The goal is plausible, low-latency body reconstruction without the suit — a core enabling technology for believable avatar presence in consumer XR.