Finding our feet
New Zealand Listener|October 29, 2022
Will Mark Zuckerberg's huge gamble on the mass appeal of virtual-reality working and socialising have legs?
Peter Griffin
Finding our feet

There are many big obstacles standing in the way of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the future of the internet, a 3D virtual world called the Metaverse.

The virtual-reality headset technology is still clunky and uncomfortable to use for many, which is a problem as it is fundamental to delivering a truly immersive Metaverse experience. It is also still unclear to what extent people actually want to work and socialise for any length of time as animated characters in a real-life computer game.

But there's a more prosaic problem, too. Meta, the company that Facebook became last year, has to figure out how to give us legs in the Metaverse. At the moment, it does a reasonable job of mimicking our facial characteristics and expressions and the movement of our arms and torso. But avatars generally appear from the waist up. It turns out that it's a lot harder to model our legs in the virtual world.

"Tracking your own legs accurately is super hard and basically not workable just from a physics standpoint with existing headsets," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, admitted earlier this year.

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