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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

Why… why is he bottomless? (He’s represented by a Wii-like avatar. When camera angles change from close up to medium shot he’s just a floating torso in a living room set)

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Maybe they couldn't figure out how to stop the legs from flailing around and obscuring his face.

This isn't too far from the truth. Carmack is known for giving presentations lying on his back with his legs up in the air. this simply wouldnt work on an avatar with legs. Kudos to Meta for recognizing this before giving an embarrassing presentation.

My guess is because of height variance, crouching, misaligned floors, difficulty doing IK in a lifelike way given all those.

They could maybe hire some engineers and, I don’t know, have them work on that? Every other game in the world seems to have figured out a solution.

They did. They announced and demoed the new avatars in the Keynote, and explained why the current avatars are legless. But as with all things new, everyone is just too busy shitting on their own misunderstandings, rather than actually paying attention. :P

If they have to explain it maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place? I hate these "didn't read the article and felt the need to comment anyway" just as much as the next person. But this is a presentation and they have to assume people may skip to the middle, or have sound muted, or whatever. I honestly don't care, but I'm 100% team "I will ask why there are no legs and it's not on me to do my research on this".

Your point is very well taken and I am mildly ashamed. In my own defense I mentioned that it was the one talk by him I have been unable to concentrate on due to this very problem. but thank you for doing my homework for me.

Fair enough.

"Every other game in the world"? Few other games are VR with human avatars and involving so much variation in real time.

VR Chat seemed to do a far better job 8 years ago

They did? They have both better avatars [1] and life like ones too [2].

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvfV-iGwYX8&feature=share&si=EMS...

[2]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvfV-iGwYX8&feature=share&si=EMS...

At least give the man a ghost bottom, would make the floating less awk :/

Because if he had legs, he might also have genitals, and you’re not allowed to do that on Facebook’s Metaverse.

Fools! Don't they know pornography drives all new technology? This is dead in the water.

That reasoning aside, there are an infinite number of ways to solve this that would be less "weird" to look at than simply nothing. Even a simple colored half sphere would be better than just nothing.

this comment is gonna age poorly

One of the big announcements in the Keynote was "legs" so apparently all avatars have been legless.

Legs are hard.

The headset he’s wearing can’t see his legs reliably. It’s just the physics of what can be seen from there.

Add to that, inverse kinematics to lock the legs to the floor is expensive to compute (when you’re dealing with such a small frame budget)

They did announce legs support in the keynote though.

Its not exactly IK compute. It has more to do with it looking decent than the pure compute. There's no shoulder hip or leg tracking so its really not easy to figure out what the legs should be doing.

I never thought inverse kinematics would be the explanation, and it’s totally obvious in retrospect. Thank you so much. TIL

There were some "harassment" issues with legs.

Really? Can’t tell if satire...

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