Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Legs Demo Was Staged With Motion Capture

While “rehearsed” was a common adjective thrown around about the ton of Meta Connect this year, that seems to apply to the show in more ways than one. As it turns out, Mark Zuckerberg’s demo of virtual reality legs in the metaverse was fake, pre-staged using motion captured animation.

During the most talked-about segment of the show, Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced that legs were coming the metaverse, which sounds bizarre out of context (and kind of in-context), but it’s the solution to many years of Meta VR avatars being nothing but floating torsos. He and another Meta worker showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, and Zuckerberg talked a little bit about legs and why it’s taken so long to get them.

“I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone has been waiting for this,” said Zuckerberg. “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”

“Legs are coming soon,” became a meme after the show, though “soon” does not even have a date attached to it, as Meta was typically nebulous about when these avatar updates are coming. But it turns out the legs that were shown off with all that kicking and jumping were fake. That was not actually Mark jumping, the sequence was pre-rendered for the show.

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton confirmed this via a Meta statement about the segment:

“To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”

I suppose I am less shocked about this than most, considering I’ve sat through a decade plus of E3 showcases where developers have pulled every trick in the book to paste over unfinished work to create a visual of “what’s to come.” But in this case, it was practically the centerpiece of the presentation, and fundamentally, if you cannot even get actual leg tracking to work for a ten second demo in your most important showcase of the year, it certainly does not feel as if legs will be “coming soon” to Zuckerberg’s metaverse.

Legs are hard. He’s right about that. I mean, think about how a headset is supposed to track your leg movements, and think about jumping and kicking in your living room while wearing a VR headset blocking you off from the world. When I think of VR legs, I wasn’t actually thinking of fully motion tracked legs like what they’re doing with arms, I figured it would just be some sort of animation that simulates walking or running as your character moves around, and I think that’s how other VR apps like VRchat are doing it. Nothing is tracking anyone’s actual legs in the real world. I’m not even sure Meta’s version is supposed to work like that when all is said and done.

But that system works fine! And for half a decade now it has made Meta’s avatars look extremely goofy given that in actual video games, virtual characters have had legs since the dawn of time. This is one case where in trying to get some sort of perfect leg tech, you’ve lost something in the process for years with your bizarre floating torsos that are now synonymous with your platform. And then now, you’re not even showcasing the tech you’re actually going to be using after all this.

I don’t know when legs will arrive in Meta’s metaverse, and I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg knows either. But the fact that we’re five plus years into this experiment and still debating their existence is not a great sign for the supposed future of the internet and human communication.

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