When Meta announced that its Horizon Worlds avatars would soon have legs, we saw VR Mark Zuckerberg jump up and down to show them off.
However, it appears that what we saw was not a true demonstration of how Meta was able to generate their full-body virtual reality avatars. According to UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton, the event featured motion capture animations:
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
The process, known as mocap for short, is widely used in film and video games, and it involves recording the movements of a real person or object so that they can be converted 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 been a significant area of [the company’s] focus.”
Because of the technological constraints of today’s VR devices, adding legs to Horizon’s legless avatar would be a significant achievement.
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As far as we know, VR headsets were not designed to track legs. Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO and Reality Labs team leader, told CNN Business earlier this year:
“Tracking your own legs accurately is super hard and basically not workable just from a physics standpoint with existing headsets.” Meta’s solution to that problem involves the use of an artificial intelligence model to predict where the user’s legs are supposed to be.
We’ll have to wait a little longer to see these AI-powered VR legs in action, as Meta’s full-body avatars that don’t rely on mocaps won’t be available until 2023.
