Meta Horizon Worlds: their feet are already talking about them

Meta is finally showing the legs of the Horizon Worlds avatars, but those legs were generated using motion capture.

When Meta announced that Horizon Worlds avatars would soon get legs, we could see Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar jumping around as a demo. However, apparently, what we saw was not a real demonstration of Meta’s capabilities in terms of creating avatars. According to UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton, the animation was created in motion capture for the occasion.

Meta Finally Reveals Horizon Worlds Avatar Legs

This process, often referred to by the acronym “mocap”, is widely used in films and video games. The idea is to record the movements of a real person in order to integrate them into an animated virtual environment, thus reproducing said movements very accurately.

Legacy Coming Soon! Are you excited? ? pic.twitter.com/SB6qSepKm4

— Meta Horizon (@MetaHorizon) October 11, 2022

But these legs were generated using motion capture.

During the event, Meta said that “legs were one of the most requested features on the roadmap, and that was a big part of [the company’s] focus.”Indeed, adding feet to avatars that lacked them represented a great success if we are aware of the technological limitations of the virtual reality devices we have access to today. Virtual headsets as we know them are not designed to control our feet. As Reality Labs CTO and Team Lead Andrew Bosworth explained to CNN Business a few months ago: there is.

For those who were curious about the legacy featured in the main Connect speech (@hrafntho). Meta: “In order to give a preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created with motion capture.”

— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) October 13, 2022

However, we’ll have to wait to see these AI-powered virtual legs in action, because full meta avatars that don’t use motion capture won’t show up until 2023.