Meta just announced new avatar body shapes, improved hair and clothing textures, and now over one billion avatars have been created across platforms.

New body shape options, including two curvier body shapes, will be available for users to choose from starting this month. Meta is also refreshing some existing options to better distinguish them. Meta was already allowing the selection of your avatar's body type, but the company said that the older options were all a bit too similar, hence the introduction of new ones.

Also, Meta has updated how an avatar's hair, clothes, and eyes look across all stickers, profile pictures, cover photos, and more.

 "Sparing you the nitty-gritty technical breakdown, we've added additional detail and realism to both hair and clothing — meaning whether you're rocking a clean fade and suit or bedhead and sweats, your avatar should pop a little better than before," the company said in a blog post. " Solid glow-up, yes? We also fine-tuned our lighting model to give that slight reflective shine to your eyes, which will sparkle, give your personality life. Those are all the things they updated on the Avatars.

Meta has partnered with PUMA to release seven new looks in the Meta Avatars Store, announced last year. The Avatars Store lets you buy digital clothes for their avatars.

In 2020, Meta introduced avatars as a way to compete with Snap's Bitmoji and has been regularly updating since. In the most recent updates, Meta added more expressions, faces, skin tones, and accessibility devices on avatars.

The move today comes a day after Meta opened Horizon Worlds to teen users in the US and Canada, restricting the social virtual reality platform to users 18 years and above. This is in defiance of calls from lawmakers and children's rights activists not to open up the platform to young users.

The news comes a day after the CEO's remark about not being a U-turn into the AI lane, when despite very big losses in its metaverse investments, he made a point of informing investors that he is not making a U-turn into the AI lane. In fact, he believes AI to be a technology working hand-in-glove with metaverse.