Telepresence has the potential to bring billions of people into AR and VR. It is the next step in the evolution from telegraphy to telephony to videoconferencing. Just like telephony and video-conferencing, the key attribute of success will be “authenticity”: users' trust that received signals (e.g., audio for the telephone and video/audio for VC) are truly those transmitted by their friends, colleagues, or family. The challenge arises from this seeming contradiction: how do we enable authentic interactions in artificial environments? In this talk, Yaser Sheik from Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) Pittsburgh will discuss their early steps towards achieving metric telepresence: realtime social interactions in AR/VR with avatars that look like you, move like you, and sound like you. FRL's approach of using codec avatars - the use of neural networks to address computer vision and computer graphics problems in signal transmission and reception - for unprecedented 3D sensing resolution and the capture systems necessary to achieve their goals will also be discussed. Originally presented at SIGGRAPH 2019. PRESENTER Yaser Sheikh, Facebook Reality Labs LEARN MORE AUTHOR'S WEBSITE: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~yaser/ ACM SIGGRAPH: https://www.siggraph.org/