Create a Teams Avatar from a Photo: Easy, Results: Not So Good

The holiday period is a good opportunity to look over developments that have occurred inside Microsoft 365 and see if we missed anything important for inclusion in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. The writing team regularly review the items logged in our Planner plan that’s synchronized with the Microsoft 365 admin message center, but it’s easy to overlook a feature, especially when Microsoft delays its delivery (which happens more often than you’d like) or it’s of marginal interest.

Message center notification MC937922 (19 November 2024), which describes how to create a Teams avatar from a photo, is in the latter category. I wrote about Teams avatars (aka Mesh avatars) when they first appeared in 2023 but have not used them much since. The thought of being able to use a more realistic avatar created from an image spurred on this test.

Service Plans for Mesh Avatars

At one point, Mesh Avatars were a Teams Premium option, but since June 2023 the feature is available in a bunch of product SKUs. MC678301 (last updated 4 October 2023) announced the introduction of the MESH_AVATARS_FOR_TEAMS service plan (id dcf9d2f4-772e-4434-b757-77a453cfbc02) to control access to avatars. Checking the Entra ID product names and service plan identifiers page, you’ll find that the service plan is included in plans like:

• Microsoft 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Microsoft 365 E3
• Microsoft 365 E3 (No Teams)
• Microsoft 365 E3 EEA
• Teams (EEA)
• Microsoft 365 E5
• Office 365 E1
• Office 365 E3

Oddly, the avatars service plan is not listed for Office 365 E5. This might be because of the change in licensing from the decision to unbundle Teams from Microsoft 365 following action by the European Union. Given that Office 365 E3 and E1 still include the Mesh Avatars service plan, the situation is inconsistent at present. To check if a license includes the Mesh Avatars service plan, you can check the service plans available to a user account that’s assigned the license. For example:

$MeshId = 'dcf9d2f4-772e-4434-b757-77a453cfbc02'
$User = Get-MgUser -UserId Jim.Jones@Office365itpros.com # User with assigned license
$SkuId = "6fd2c87f-b296-42f0-b197-1e91e994b900"  # SKU to check. In this casem, it's Office 365 E3
[array]$ServicePlans = Get-MgUserLicenseDetail -UserId $User.Id | Where-Object {$_.SkuId -eq $SkuId} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty ServicePlans | Sort-Object ServicePlanName 
If ($MeshId -in $ServicePlans.ServicePlanId) { Write-Host ('Teams Mesh Avatars service plan found in {0}'-f $SKUId) }

Teams Mesh Avatars service plan found in 6fd2c87f-b296-42f0-b197-1e91e994b900

Creating an Avatar from a Photo

A user account can have up to three avatars which are maintained through the Teams Avatars app (obviously, users must be allowed to access the app to maintain their avatars). I already had three avatars, so I had to remove an existing avatar before I could create an avatar from a photo. After that, it’s a matter of selecting the option to use a photo rather than designing a new avatar from scratch. You can use the workstation camera to take a photo or upload an existing JPEG, BMP, or PNG file of up to 10 MB.

The guidelines in the app say that an uploaded image should be taken in a well-lit environment. I used a professional headshot taken at the Ignite 2016 conference (Figure 1). Sure, the photo is nine years old now, but it’s good enough for a test.

Clicking the button to proceed is the signal for Teams to use the biometric data extracted from the image to build three different versions of an avatar to choose from. I wasn’t impressed with the results (Figure 2) because I don’t think any of the avatars came anywhere close to the source image.

After choosing the avatar that seems closest to reality, you can edit its details to improve it. For instance, the hair color in all the generated avatars was way off, so I elected to use “arctic white” instead. You can also play around with skin tone, body form, clothing, and so on to create the perfect avatar, or at least as close as the technology can get you to perfection in its current state. Figure 3 shows my final result.

I also tried by taking a photo using the PC camera, but the results were no better.

Avatar Generated from Photo is Better But Not Great

The avatar generated from the uploaded photo is closer to my actual form than the avatars I was able to create from scratch (known as base avatars), but only slightly. I was disappointed at the outcome because I reckoned that the input photo was of sufficiently high quality for Teams to generate a nice result. Alas, I fear that I might need to wait for a further iteration before the software can create a truly representative avatar from an image.

Your mileage might vary etc. It could be that my face isn’t conducive to biometric modelling!

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