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

When Meta announced that his Horizon Worlds avatars would have legs in the near future, we saw VR Mark Zuckerberg jumping up and down to look at them. Obviously, though, what we saw wasn't a real demonstration of how Meta could create full-body virtual VR images. According to UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton, the event used motion capture animations:

This process, abbreviated to mocap, is widely used in movies and games and involves recording the movements of a real person or object to convert them into animated computer graphics.

During the event, Meta said, "Legs is one of the most requested features on [its] roadmap, and it's an important area for [the company] to focus on." In fact, adding legs to Horizon 's legless avatar would be a major challenge given the technological limitations of the VR hardware we have access to today. VR headsets, as we know, are not designed for foot detection. "The helmets that exist," Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta and the Reality Labs team, explained to CNN Business . Meta's solution to this problem is to use an artificial intelligence model to predict where the user's feet will be.

We'll have to wait a little longer to see the pinnacle of AI-powered VR in action, as full avatars that aren't based on mocaps won't be released until 2023.

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