While “rehearsal” was a common adjective in the tone of this year’s Meta Connect, it seemed to apply to the show in several ways. Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality demo at this week’s Meta Connect event was not just rehearsed, but choreographed using motion capture animation.
In the show’s most talked-about segment, Zuckerberg proudly announces that feet are moving closer to the metaverse, which sounds weird (and a little bit in context), but solves a problem that Meta VR avatars haven’t been able to solve for years. swim around the body. He and another member of the Meta team showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, while Zuckerberg talked about the legs and why they took so long to create.
“I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone was waiting for this,” Zuckerberg said. “But seriously, the legs are stiff, which is why other VR systems don’t have legs either.”
“The Legs Are Coming” became a post-show meme, though “soon” wasn’t even tied to a date, as the Meta is usually unclear as to when these avatar updates will arrive. But it turns out that all the kicks and jumps shown are fake. This is not actually a cue jump, the sequence is pre-rendered for the show.
“To give you a preview of what’s coming next, this section features animations created with motion capture.”
Considering I’ve been in the E3 showcases for over a decade, with the developers using every trick from the book to insert work in progress to create “something in the future” visuals, I’m not sure about that. But in this case, that’s really the heart of the demo, and it’s fundamentally not going to be like a ten second demo if you can’t even get actual leg tracking at the most important show of the year. Legs will be “soon”. into Zuckerberg’s virtual world.
Legs are solid. He is right. I mean, think about how the headset should track your foot movements, think about jumping and kicking in your living room while wearing a VR headset keeps you out of this world. When I think of VR legs, I don’t really think of legs with full motion tracking like they do with arms, I think it’s just some kind of animation that mimics walking or running when your character moves. I guess this is what other VR apps like VRchat do. There is nothing in the real world that can track someone’s real legs. I’m not even sure the Meta version is supposed to work like this.
But the system works great! For five years, given that real video game avatars have legs from the start, the Meta’s avatar looked pretty silly. In this case, in trying to get some perfect leg technique, you’ve lost something over the years because your oddly floating torso has now become synonymous with your platform. And now you don’t even show the technology you’re actually going to use.
I don’t know when the legs will get to the Meta’s virtual world, and I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg does. But the fact that we have been experimenting for more than five years and are still discussing their existence does not bode well for the so-called future of the Internet and human communication.
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Post time: Oct-26-2022