Meta has walked out legs to player avatars in Quest Home — but not Horizon Worlds — in a new beta announced last week in the Meta Community forums (via UploadVR). Meta Quest avatars have famously been upper body only. Now beta testers for Meta’s Quest Home have access to the new leg feature.
Users have reported that they only see the legs when looking at someone else or when looking in the VR mirror. It also seems like the avatar’s movements don’t match its user if the user crouches.
The new Leg IK for Meta is a good start. They kept their opinion that you should only see them as a third person view
— Brad Lynch (@SadlyItsBradley) August 29, 2023
The lack of crouching is probably the most glaring issue of it so far. But progresspic.twitter.com/0s5jmIvuvW
Meta promised the addition of legs all the way back in October 2022. And yet here we are in August of 2023.
It’s been more than 10 months since Meta announced legs would be coming, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying at Meta Connect that legs are “probably the most requested feature.” Zuckerberg said then that the company would need to use an AI model for leg movement because tracking them with the headset’s cameras is tricky.
Tricky enough, apparently, that the legs shown in the Connect keynote last year may have actually been prerecorded motion capture.
It all seemed so silly that the Metaverse legs became a meme in no time flat.
It’s possible Meta will drop more leg news at this year’s Meta Connect on September 27th. A lot of the show will probably be devoted to more details about the new Quest 3 headset, although there might not be much left to the imagination at this point, considering somebody may have already filmed its unboxing.
