The billionaire CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is without a doubt the most enthusiastic about the potential of Meta’s metaverse. On Tuesday, at the Meta’s Connect conference, Mark Zuckerberg made a major announcement: the virtual reality avatars in the company’s Horizon VR software will soon have legs.
The CEO commented that there is one more feature on our road map that will likely receive the most interest and attention.
“Legs!” he said. “I think everyone has been waiting for this!” said a cartoonish digital version of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
To show this ground-breaking technological feat, Zuckerberg’s digital avatar lifted each leg in the air before performing a jump, while Aigerim Shorman’s avatar kicked into the air.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta will utilise an AI model to forecast and represent the positions of a user’s entire body. “But as delightful as the livestreamed reveal may have been, it appears the Horizon Worlds legs “demo” was more a “screen images simulated” moment”.
The statement states that Avatar legs would first appear in Horizon Worlds and then be added to additional experiences “over time as [Meta’s] technology improves.”
The apparent fabrication of a feature that has attracted a lot of industry critique, snark, and competitive-trolling doesn’t help the bumpy rollout of what is supposed to be Meta’s signature product. While anything in a product demo deserves suspicion it is especially unfortunate given that it is supposed to be Meta’s flagship product.
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As the company explained, “legs are hard!” The rendering of real-world legs that are hidden from the headset’s field of view will be inaccurate.
Legs might be on the verge, but it doesn’t appear that we have a clear idea what they will appear like. Guess we’ll just have to wait for the legs to launch to see how Meta’s AI-predicted legs compare to the real stuff.
