Upgraded legged Horizon Worlds avatars teased at Meta Connect 2022Avatars are a key part of the metaverse and Meta is one of the many tech companies which is betting big on these. But one critical element has been missing from the 3D avatars in Meta’s Horizon World: legs. Yes, while your avatar in Meta’s virtual Horizon World has a face and upper body, the bottom half is not yet available. But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to fix this problem at the company’s Connect 2022 keynote, which took place earlier this week. Zuckerberg described legs as “probably the most requested feature on our roadmap,” and announced that it was finally coming to the platform. And during the demo, Zuckerberg’s 3D avatar was shown with a full body, including legs. But it looks like those legs were a sham.
According to a tweet by UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton, Meta has clarified that “to enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.” For those who thought that the legs looked too well-animated to be a product of VR headset-tracking, your suspicions have been right all along.
There were no cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems built into a headset predicting and tracking leg movements – it was all motion capture. That’s the same technology being used widely for decades in animation and video games to record the movement of actors and replicate it in digital 3D models.
For those who’ve been wondering about the legs shown in the Connect keynote (@hrafntho). Meta: “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”
— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) October 13, 2022
So why is it so hard to add something as simple as legs to avatars? Turns out, things are just not that simple. While VR headsets like the Meta Quest 2 are able to accurately track hands, tracking legs is not that easy and remains a challenge.
But that’s not all. Zuckerberg stated in the keynote that “your brain is much more willing to accept a representation of a part of you as long as it’s accurately positioned,” but if it’s displayed wrongly, “it breaks the whole feeling of presence and immersion.” Basically, if anything’s a little off, animations can immediately look wacky or even unsettling. All these factors make mixing realism and leg animations a challenging task.
The bottom line is that we’ll have to tolerate floating torsos in the metaverse for a while now, as complete body avatars still appear to be a work in progress. The demo we saw at the keynote wasn’t an actual demo showing off what leg animations will look like, but rather a video rendering of what legs could look like.
Zuckerberg did state that Meta has been working to improve how its AI systems track and predict where legs should be moving though, so all you got to do for now is sit tight and wait if you wish to roundhouse kick someone in the metaverse.