Meta's VR Leg Video Wasn't What It Seemed

When Meta announced that his Horizon Worlds avatars were getting legs in the near future, we got to see VR Mark Zuckerberg jump up and down to show them off. Apparently, however, what we saw was not a true demonstration of how Meta was able to generate his full-body virtual reality avatars. According to UploadVR editor, Ian Hamilton, the event used animations created using motion capture:

The process, known as mocap for short, is widely used in film and games and involves recording the movements of a real person or object so that they can be turned into computer-animated graphics.

During the event, Meta said that "legs have been one of the most requested features on [its] roadmap, and it's an important area that [the company] is building on. concentrate." Indeed, adding legs to the Horizon legless avatar would be a remarkable achievement due to the technological constraints of the VR devices we have access to today. VR headsets, as we know, weren't designed to track legs. As Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO and Reality Labs team leader, explained to CNN Business earlier this year: "Tracking your own legs accurately is very difficult and basically impossible just by a physical point of view with existing helmets." Meta's solution to this problem involves using an AI model to predict where the user's legs are supposed to be.

We'll have to wait a bit longer to see these AI-powered VR legs in action though, as full Meta avatars that don't rely on mocaps won't be released until 2023.

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