For the duration of Meta’s Connect meeting on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg created a substantial announcement: the avatars in the company’s Horizon VR application will be having legs shortly. To demonstrate this groundbreaking specialized accomplishment, Zuckerberg’s electronic avatar lifted each leg in the air, then did a jump, though Aigerim Shorman’s avatar kicked into the air.
It may perhaps have all been for display. In accordance to UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton, an unnamed Meta spokesperson stated that the “the segment showcased animations created from movement capture,” meant to “enable this preview of what’s to arrive.” To me that reads like what we observed was not really a demo of what Horizon’s legs will look like, but fairly an artist’s interpretation of what Horizon’s legs might close up on the lookout like.
All right, possibly that is a little bit dramatic. For the reason that, seriously, this was simple to see coming. My co-employee Jay Peters even warned that the pre-recorded online video was not necessarily an precise representation in his coverage of the announcement. Still, if Meta actually is attempting to say that its presentation didn’t feature any footage of what legs will truly glimpse like as interpreted by your Quest headset, that’s a little bit worrying. This function is supposed to be coming soon, but we simply cannot see it however? How am I intended to know if I should shell out $1,500 on a Quest Pro if I just can’t be confident that it’ll permit me have my virtual avatar leap up onto the boardroom desk and do a dance throughout a virtual meeting?
I guess we’ll just have to wait right until the legs basically launch to see how Meta’s AI-predicted legs stack up towards the true deal. For now, I guess we’ll just get a kick out of Zuckerberg’s awkward “demonstration” — even if all it genuinely proved was that computers are, in fact, able of rendering legs in some capacity.