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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse? Why were “legs” an “incredible new feature” and not a given? Were/are there engineering or computational constraints limiting the ability to have “legs” / a high quality experience, and what were/are they?

Meta has industry leading AI tech, i mean they research for “embodied AI” and interesting ideas like that, they have expertise in many areas of AI like generative AI… But if there is a CEO king, one must do as the king commands I guess.

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Legs weren't included because there's no way to do leg tracking with a headset.

So to have them you have to build an inverse kinematics model and try to simulate them... Which also doesn't really work because you don't know the overall body position of the user.

In a practical sense, a VR avatar is a disembodied head and hands - that's all the data you actually have.

The legs thing was kind of a weak criticism. The issue isn't any one thing, it's that Facebook's overall vision is boring, and keeps putting "sell ads" first.

Thanks for clarifying. I’m not a VR user so I was not aware of that issue with regard to body representation. It seems like camera on the headset to observe the body would help (?).

> Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse?

Not much, it's just a multiplayer video game - no different technically than the mmos we've had for decades.

That's why Facebook betting the farm on it made no sense to me - this is something they should have contracted out to a good video game studio, not tried to develop in house when they don't have any experience building these kind of interactive environments. So much money down the drain for what exactly?

To control the software of course - the source of the future revenue.

Seems like it would have been cheaper and more effective to buy a video game studio already doing that sort of thing, though.

Blizzard would love to be re-bought by an even worse slavemaster.

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