Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced recently that all the avatars in Meta will become more customizable. Why/ because they will have legs that will help you move around and give a sense of reality. Earlier they were just floating avatars but now legs will be a part of all avatars. Seems like a nonsensical addition, right? Well, it isn’t all true. The demonstration was designed using motion capture and is not how game avatars will walk and jump around.
Ian Hamilton of UploadVR noticed this deception and was the first to talk about it. After that, Meta said, “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”
Why aren’t Meta’s VR legs Real?
It is common knowledge that companies tend to showcase extra enthusiasm for even the smallest, useless features of their product. The actual release starkly differs from what the ad and promotions highlighted. Meta VR legs are exactly that. Rather than spending time perfecting the legs and showcasing them in the preview, they decided to use motion capture to make it look more realistic. Why create hype and interest around a prospective feature that was fabricated, to begin with?
Zuckerberg could have clearly described that it was done using motion capture and the video isn’t indicative of how the avatars will move. The primary focus seems to be building hype for Metaverse, a name so confusing because multiple Metaverses already exist. Zuckerberg changed the name to Meta to make it more confusing and synonymous with the brand identity. He said that implementing ‘legs’ was hard which is why no VR platform has them. But Twitter users immediately proved that claim wrong.
Despite the huge promotion in the digital community about Metaverse and how it will change the world, the actual reality is very different. Decentraland, a popular metaverse platform hasn’t even amassed ten thousand active users. For a technology that is so hyped, the interest isn’t sure it’s there. Why roam in a bleak digital world when you already have RTX-supported games that look lifelike on the screen? But Zuckerberg believes that millions will come to Horizon Worlds to spend time as they do on Instagram and Facebook.
