Finding our feet

Will Mark Zuckerberg's huge gamble on the mass appeal of virtual-reality working and socialising have legs?

- Peter Griffin

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.