根据公共测试渠道上v57版本的更新,Meta Avatars的Quest Home终于拥有了双腿。
The company's avatars have been widely mocked on social media and the broader tech press for their upper-body appearance.
Meta first said they started working on legs last September, announcing the feature was "coming soon" last October.
Many third-party VR apps and games already offer virtual legs. But no VR system currently available for purchase has built-in leg tracking, so when you look down, the virtual legs won't match the actual movement of your real legs.
Also, there's not an elegant way to handle the transition between sitting and standing, or a way to make the legs look natural as they move when using the analog sticks. Some people don't care about these fake virtual legs, but for others, it's really disturbing.
Meta circumvents these problems by showing only the legs in third-person view and not in first-person view. However, third-person view technically involves looking through a virtual mirror, so many users of the v57 PTC version of Quest saw their legs in Horizon Home's mirror.
The avatar's third-person view doesn't support crouching, so it remains standing when crouching or sitting. This can lead to false eye contact in social VR, which can feel particularly unsettling in a virtual mirror.
So far in VR, Quest's Horizon Home seems to be the only place where legs appear. Even in version v57, legs are not shown in Horizon Worlds in the virtual mirror, although they are visible to mobile and web users. Additionally, the Meta Avatars SDK has not been publicly updated, so third-party developers using the SDK cannot add legs yet.
Meta may be waiting to release an SDK update at its annual Connect conference, where it announces and releases a number of Quest VR features. This year’s conference is scheduled to be held on September 27, less than a month away.
Last year, Meta also announced that it would be making graphical improvements to the avatar this year, giving it a more realistic visual style. But there's been no news since then, and the company said the demo shown was created using motion capture technology, not VR.