# FlowAvatar: Real-Time Full-Body Avatars from Sparse Egocentric Inputs on Consumer XR Devices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16277/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03277/) (2020)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [Video Based Reconstruction of 3D People Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04758/) (2018)
- [GaussianAvatar: Towards Realistic Human Avatar Modeling from a Single Video via Animatable 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02134/) (2023)
- [ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09545/) (2020)
- [FastViT: A Fast Hybrid Vision Transformer using Structural Reparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14189/) (2023)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Pixel Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04638/) (2021)
- [Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03704/) (2023)
- [AvatarPoser: Articulated Full-Body Pose Tracking from Sparse Motion Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13784/) (2022)
- [Avatars Grow Legs: Generating Smooth Human Motion from Sparse Tracking Inputs with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08577/) (2023)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [QuestSim: Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Sensors with Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09391/) (2022)
- [IMUPoser: Full-Body Pose Estimation using IMUs in Phones, Watches, and Earbuds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12518/) (2023)
- [STAR Loss: Reducing Semantic Ambiguity in Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02763/) (2023)
- [Realistic Full-Body Tracking from Sparse Observations via Joint-Level Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08855/) (2023)
- [EgoPoser: Robust Real-Time Egocentric Pose Estimation from Sparse and Intermittent Observations Everywhere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06493/) (2023)
- [DiffusionPoser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction From Arbitrary Sparse Sensors Using Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16682/) (2023)
- [HAHA: Highly Articulated Gaussian Human Avatars with Textured Mesh Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01053/) (2024)
- [TexMesh: Reconstructing Detailed Human Texture and Geometry from RGB-D Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00158/) (2020)
- [HMD-Poser: On-Device Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Scalable Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03561/) (2024)
- [MobilePoser: Real-Time Full-Body Pose Estimation and 3D Human Translation from IMUs in Mobile Consumer Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12492/) (2025)
- [HMD-NeMo: Online 3D Avatar Motion Generation From Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11261/) (2023)
- [Robust Human Matting via Semantic Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05210/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prior avatar embodiment research has studied tracking completeness (how faithfully the body, hands, and face are sensed and reproduced) and personalized appearance in isolation, each requiring specialized lab equipment. How these factors interact on consumer hardware remains an open question, because no existing system unifies body pose, face, hands, and personalized appearance on a standalone headset. We present FlowAvatar, a system enabling real-time personalized look-alike avatars with full-body pose, hand articulation, facial expression, and eye gaze tracking from sparse egocentric inputs on consumer XR devices (Meta Quest Pro). Our pose model achieves competitive spatial accuracy and state-of-the-art temporal consistency on the AMASS benchmark against prior works with comprehensive spatial and temporal losses validated through architecture and loss ablations, while running in real-time. Two user studies (N=12, N=10) provide converging evidence that tracking completeness and personalized appearance serve complementary roles: tracking completeness broadly improves perceived motion quality, while only their combination achieves positive total embodiment.