Why You Can't Have Legs in Virtual Reality (Yet)

Mark Zuckerberg showed off a cartoon version of himself in a virtual world at an event in October as he outlined the company's new focus for the next decade. Zuckerberg demonstrated a bunch of things his virtual avatar could do. But one thing that is still far beyond the capabilities of Meta's current virtual reality is rendering and handling legs or feet. CNN: Meta has been considering for years how to make avatars more realistic. In an Instagram AMA (Ask Me Anything) session earlier last week, Andrew Bosworth, Meta's VP of Reality Labs and incoming CTO, acknowledged the difficulty of the task while saying the company is considering how to solve it. "Tracking your own legs accurately is super hard and basically not workable just from a physics standpoint with existing headsets," Bosworth said. 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. Despite all the progress made in perfecting the technology behind VR headsets in recent years, it's still tricky to perfectly track your legs in real life and recreate the same movements in VR without setting up an array of sensors on or around your body. Still, several VR experts told CNN Business they think it's important to bring legs into virtual spaces.

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