In the videos depicting these dreamlike spaces — where you could work with your colleagues or hang out and play games — I had a burning question about the avatars representing users: WHERE ARE THEIR LEGS? Hit the play button in Satya Nadella’s tweet below to watch a clip of Microsoft’s metaverse demo:
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 2, 2021 The avatars in both these virtual worlds from a couple of tech giants are just floating torsos, and that’s a rather odd bug/feature for them to have in common. So I decided to ask experts if there was any technical reason behind it. After all, the characters in most games with a third-person view have legs. Is it especially hard to do that with virtual versions of ourselves? A lot of that has to do with sensors. Currently, metaverse experiences are largely restricted to VR headsets; some are compatible with handheld controllers, like the Oculus touch controllers. However, there are hardly any commercially available sensors and controllers for our legs. That means your leg movement can’t be accurately detected and depicted in virtual environments. But can’t we just use cameras to capture what our legs are doing? Gijs den Butter, co-founder of Netherlands-based XR controller company SenseGlove, said cameras on your headset are not enough to track leg movements: One of the things these metaverses are trying to do is to place your real-life self in a virtual setting. Dr.Rolf Illenberger, managing director of VRdirect, an enterprise-focused VR platform company, said that misrepresenting users’ height in VR could annoy them: We could use potentially use sensors mounted on your feet; however, that is yet another kind of peripheral to add to the mix. He also pointed out that in real life when you look down, you’re used to seeing your legs are at a specific distance away from your face, which you’re used to. But in the virtual world, if that situation is not replicated, it could cause you to feel nauseous. So until there are better sensors to avoid this on headsets, companies might avoid creating legs. With the limited experiences available in current metaverses, movement is largely dependent on teleporting from one place to another. Butter said that in the coming years, we might have in-home devices that’ll help us capture movements of legs. “If in the future, locomotion becomes our standard way of moving in the metaverse, we will get legs for our avatars. When everyone would have an omnidirectional treadmill at home, making an inverse kinematics model (a digital model for human movement) of your legs would not be too difficult,” he said. We reached out to Meta and Microsoft to ask about their leg-less avatars. While Meta didn’t comment on the story, Microsoft agrees with some of these points. The company said the legs are coming in future versions: Till then, think of this as a feature, not a bug — and float freely in the metaverse. Over time, we plan to continue to evolve our avatar stack and leverage new capabilities in order to be able to accurately represent the full human form.
