Cover Corp announced last night the new hololive Live2D 3.0, the latest step in their software, further enhancing the tools for livestreaming with a virtual avatar.

While no exact rollout date has been given, the official Hololive Twitter put out a short video briefly going over some of the new features coming to hololive Live2D 3.0.

The most noticeable of these are the animated hands- any Vtuber fan knows that before this, Live2D models had typically been holding static A poses, with many Vtubers cropping themselves to look like they were being viewed from the waist up and have their hands off-camera.

With the new update, however, it looks like they’ll be able to have canned animations to look as if they’re actually gaming, with animated models for holding a controller or mouse and keyboard.

Interestingly enough this does build up on something that Vtubers had been doing in recent months- commissioning a set of static or animated arms and overlaying them over their models, to look as though they could achieve this same effect.

Other features include improved facial expressions- they didn’t go into specifics about how this would work, but from our own observations it looks like the switch between facial expressions can have actual gradations- allowing for characters to more naturally transition into expressions like blushing.