Digital avatars are moving beyond prerecorded videos. Synthesia has created an interactive avatar of Dominic-Madori Davis that answers questions about her story on venture-backed startups and fraud, while Meta is preparing holographic avatars for VR glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display frames.
These projects take different paths to the same destination: a digital version of a person that can respond, speak, and appear in a more lifelike form. Synthesia’s avatar works through a combination of voice, language, text, and video systems. Meta’s version is designed for display glasses and uses facial expressions to create a full-body holographic avatar.
Synthesia Builds an Avatar That Answers Questions
Synthesia built Dominic-Madori Davis’s interactive avatar from photos and a two-minute voice recording. The avatar was trained to answer questions about her story on venture-backed startups and fraud, giving people a way to interact with a digital version of her account rather than only reading it.
The technology combines voice-to-text, language, text-to-voice, and video models. In simple terms, the system can take spoken input, process language, create a response, turn that response into speech, and present it through video. That combination gives the avatar its interactive quality.
The Synthesia team took a couple of days to make Dominic-Madori Davis’s avatars. That timeline stands out because the result involves more than a still image or a recorded clip. The finished avatars bring together a visual identity, a voice, and a system trained to respond to questions about a specific story.
Alexandru Voica, head of corporate affairs at Synthesia, is part of a company that has expanded beyond one avatar project. Synthesia, a video-generation startup, offers a video-creation platform, an agentic platform called Sessions, and an API platform.
The company hit a $4 billion valuation earlier this year after crossing $100 million in ARR last year. Its work also sits in a crowded digital avatar market that includes D-ID, HeyGen, and Colossyan, all of which are described as digital avatar startups.
Meta Brings Holographic Avatars to Glasses
Meta announced its new holographic avatars on September 23, 2026. The company is bringing them to its new VR glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display frames, with holograms set to become available on Meta Ray-Ban Display in early access this fall.
Meta’s holographic avatars run on the Muse Realtime Avatar model. Creating a holographic avatar for display glasses takes about 5 minutes, a short setup time that makes the technology easier to connect with a person’s appearance.
The full-body avatars rely on inward-facing cameras and sensors to understand facial expressions. Those cameras and sensors give the system information about how a person’s face moves, which helps the holographic avatar reflect expressions during use.
The technology remains in an “early preview” stage with limited availability. That means Meta has announced the direction of the product, but access is not yet open to everyone. Early access for Meta Ray-Ban Display will begin this fall.
Two Versions of the Same Digital Shift
Synthesia’s project focuses on conversation and personal storytelling. A person asks questions about Dominic-Madori Davis’s story, and the avatar responds using the voice and visual identity created from her photos and recording. Meta’s project focuses on presence, placing a full-body holographic avatar inside a glasses-based experience.
The tools behind both projects connect several parts of digital avatar technology. Synthesia uses voice-to-text, language, text-to-voice, and video models, while Meta uses the Muse Realtime Avatar model with inward-facing cameras and sensors. Both systems link an avatar to real-time interaction rather than treating it as a fixed video.
Karissa Bell, author of the Meta avatar article, described the challenge of recognizing a digital version of a person. “It was only when looking more closely at his background that I could detect the video wasn’t quite normal,” Bell wrote.
She also captured the strange familiarity of seeing a convincing digital likeness: “It looked exactly like me, but my brain was also able to immediately recognize that it wasn’t me.” That tension sits at the center of both developments. The avatars are built to resemble people, but they remain digital creations.
On September 26, 2026, Dominic-Madori Davis’s article was published about her digital avatar. Together with Meta’s September 23 announcement, it shows how quickly avatar technology is moving from video creation toward interactive systems and wearable displays.
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