Why You Can’t Have Legs in Virtual Reality (Yet), by Rachel Metz

“Today, if you gallivant around Meta's flagship social VR app, Horizon Worlds, you do so without legs or feet. While you can customize your avatar to look somewhat like you, it will still have the ghostly appearance of a floating torso with only a head, arms, and hands.”

“The difference between the realistically responsive full-body avatar Zuckerberg imagines and the typical options currently available in VR apps is more than just aesthetic.”

“Companies can track a person's upper body reasonably well with a headset and controllers, but actual leg tracking is practically non-existent in virtual reality right now — at least when it comes to the kind of VR you're likely to use in your living room. Some apps, such as VRChat, do let people have full-body avatars, but they tend to use software to approximate lower-body motions; it can be silly-looking at best and disconcerting (or even sickening) at worst.”

“If a company wants to represent a person's legs in a realistic way in VR, it needs to find a way to keep tabs on what those legs are actually doing in real life. Adding more sensors to the headset itself — like cameras on the underside that point toward the ground — might seem like a potential solution, but, as Bar-Zeev said, it's not that easy.”

“Daniel O'Brien, general manager of HTC America, said that over time he expects the ability to track more points on the body, such as feet and hips. ‘I think full body immersion and tracking with an all-in-one headset is what everybody wants and everybody is working toward,’ O'Brien said, though like Meta's Bosworth he cautioned that it's just not possible right now.”’

“West suggests that leg movements may eventually be animated with the help of AI: Motion could be predicted based on data from the headset about how a person's head is moving. However, doing this well would require a massive amount of data about the ways people walk, for instance, and since it would not include tracking the legs specifically, it wouldn't be true to how each person moves. (Meta already uses AI along with sensors to track headsets, controllers, and hands.)”

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