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Facebook's Legs Video Was A Lie (kotaku.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The company formerly known as Facebook earlier this week announced -- and demonstrated -- that avatars on its metaverse will soon have legs. Here's an update on that: While the updates bringing full-body avatars aren't expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?

Anyone who has ever been around any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help. As UploadVR's Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says, "To enable this preview of what's to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture."
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Facebook's Legs Video Was A Lie More

Facebook's Legs Video Was A Lie

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  • Zuckerberg was dishonest . . . shocker (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @09:42AM (#62965917)
    Say it isn't so. Zuckerberg has never been dishonest about anything in the past. . .

  • can call itself anything it wants, whatever name it assumes will always be lipstick on the Facebook pig.

  • https://youtu.be/3R-ez_Mim-k [youtu.be]

    I'll just leave this here and wonder off....

  • Are we supposed to be excited? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @10:02AM (#62965957)

    not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something.

    I can't believe having VR legs is a selling point, nor that anybody would bother creating a fake animation of Fuckerberg with VR legs, not that anybody would bother writing a story about it, nor that somebody would submit a story about the story to Slashdot, nor that a Slashdot editor actually picked it up, and certainly not that I'm actually commenting about it.

    I guess it's a very, very slow news day around the world... Because the long and the short of it is:

    1/ How shit must the Metaverse be that people get excited about VR legs
    2/ How sad must Metaverse dwellers be that they get excited about getting VR legs.

    • Any coder can render legs, that's well understood. Some 3D geometry and inverse kinematics, we all have stacks of 30 year old books on the subject. Even having the legs appear in fairly plausible positions in VR is something we can do today. But put those VR goggles on and have your head and arms tracked pretty well but when you look at your own feet you can't help but wonder why you can't feel them. It breaks the immersion.
      Of course any ordinary idiot could have rendered fake legs when you look at other pl

      • What surprised me was how obsolete the graphics of the avatars looked, they were perhaps on the quality level of Half Life 2. Which is from 2004. Now I'd say this is acceptable for a low budget game, but for a "metaverse" that wants to impress people with being something new and exciting, I call it a fail.

        By comparison, Tesla at least followed up on the robot suit person by showing some progress a few months later (on the Tesla AI day 2022). I won't call it groundbreaking yet, clumsily walking robots have b

        • They want this to support loads of people at once, all with lots of individual avatar customization, on those portable headsets with low-power hardware. It makes sense that it's not graphically dazzling, though that certainly makes for a tougher sell.

          • OK, but who does render the scene in that scenario (I think that is where most compute power is needed)?
            One could transmit the customized avatars once and after that only their movement data. I think that would need less bandwidth than streaming the rendered video. The original Counterstrike worked that way, and you could play on a dial-up connection. Not very well, but it was possible.

            If it is the portable headset itself that does the rendering? Then you might have a point.

            Is it the server and the video si

            • It's the headset. The original headsets were tethered to PCs, but they've been self contained for quite a while now. Streaming is not... I guess I can't say for sure that it isn't streamed, but I don't know why you'd think that it would be. I haven't heard anything about that and those headsets have nausea problems when you get any lag.

          • If anyone could have thought of rendering the hard stuff in the cloud, it's Facebook. Certainly others are doing game streaming.

      • Re:Legs are exciting, but that misses the point (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @01:24PM (#62966669)

        when you look at your own feet you can't help but wonder why you can't feel them. It breaks the immersion.

        Because being in a virtual world full of floating double leg amputees doesn't break the immersion?

        Or are you saying it feels less weird to render that than a world full of double leg amputees wearing stiff leg prostheses?

        • Because being in a virtual world full of floating double leg amputees doesn't break the immersion?

          No it doesn't. It is far less irritating to not see something at all than to see something in the wrong place or move in ways that doesn't reflect your own movement.

          Valve did some extensive research on this when developing Halflife. Early versions of Alyx attempted to use full IK to render your own body and arms and it was a horrible experience according to the playtesters which caused the developers to go back to the drawing board and completely rethink how the game should work. Eventually their backtrack

          • I am convinced VR will get nowhere without the avbility to see your own body in the virtual environment, from your own perspective, and the easiest way to get there is to put kinect/iphone-like 3D IR sensor on the headset where your eyes are. But I had a brief exchange with Carmack on this (kudos to him for engaging with general public) and he didn't think that's important, so it's probably not going to happen.

            Without your body in it VR feels like being in someone else's dream.

    • This is a story of schadenfreude. How can they seriously be so incompetent?

    • I can't believe having VR legs is a selling point

      It isn't. It's just shithouse tech reporting that was pushing this angle. Full body tracking is the selling point, and a very big one at that, and Fuckerberg lied about the capabilities of his device.

      We've had some form of full body tracking with HTC Vive but it required lighthouse trackers as well as devices strapped to all your appendages. Doing away with the lighthouse and away with all the strapped on devices would be a huge technical achievement. Oculus already demonstrated that for hand tracking where

      • A VR device could track your own body as you see it (with a 3D sensor on the headset projecting outward) but that would only work when you look down on yourself. That's great for you but not for others in the "metaverse". At least you would see your real hands though.

        I keep saying the only killer app VR (and "metaverse") will likely ever have is it being a plot device in SciFi stories.

  • He keeps shooting himself in the foot. Will he ever run out of ammo?

  • Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @10:07AM (#62965971)

    NO, I do NOT want to subscribe to your fucking newsletter.
    Stop popping up that fucking form already.

    • NO, I do NOT want to subscribe to your fucking newsletter.
      Stop popping up that fucking form already.

      Glad to see I'm not the only one seeing that annoying popup.

      I assumed it was some glitch that snuck through "QA" but it's been going on for at least a couple days.

      • I'm only seeing it on my mobile devices (might need to improve my content blocking on them?), which is, ironically, where they're most annoying because they cover the whole screen and more.

        I remember reading an article a few years back that proposed the notion that a previously happy employee usually enters a "shields down" state where they are receptive to job offers if the rightone lands in their lap. They aren't so dissatisfied that they're actively pursuing anything and they may not even be aware that t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Use an ad blocker.

  • Meta... making deepfakes easier for us all.

  • High Fidelity already had legs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @10:35AM (#62966043)
    The High Fidelity [wikipedia.org] VR platform already had legs years ago. Basically everything now being done at Facebook appears to have already been done and not really worked except for just plain old VR chat and beat saber (which is surprisingly not that different from an improved version of old MS Kinect games). It seems like VR chat will likely steadily improve and become more usable. Sadly we still don't have a widespread open protocol for audio chat. Pretty much everything in broad use is proprietary even though there have been multiple generations of open tools for this. The most successful current thing seems to be Signal.

    • The High Fidelity [wikipedia.org] VR platform already had legs years ago. Basically everything now being done at Facebook appears to have already been done and not really worked

      Here's a question for you: Why hasn't it worked. The issue was never if you could render legs or not. IK is simple to implement and bam, legs. The issue is in VR seeing your own body not move the way you want it to is far less immersive than not seeing your body at all. It's not a case of not rendering legs, it's a case of not having body parts which don't reflect your real world movements.

      Halflife Alyx in early playtests apparently the player had a full body, and play testers hated it when the body didn't

  • This is Elon Musk's "guy in a robot suit" thing all over again.

    Not that I don't think they can put legs in VR, but damn. At least wait until you can demo the actual feature.

    --
    We will soon have the option to harvest our farts, so we can post & comment on stats about them.

    • Leg animation in VR is even a thing already. It's possible and it has been done. It's hardly newsworthy. Search for VR chat legs detection and realize that even Furries beat Metastasis at their own game.

  • Legs and crotches almost universally invite unwanted groping in VR.

    • If you give people enough motion control over a crotchless avatar they can still make humping motions. And if you want to prevent all semblance of humping you have to let people prevent others from getting too close to them, but then how do you solve the problem of griefers standing in other people's way?

      Fundamentally the best option is probably how the Metaverse worked in Snow Crash, where on "The Street" avatars pass through one another, and in other spaces the rules vary. You can't prevent humping, but y

      • Just implement an ignore feature - the offending person is not rendered in your field of view, collision is turned off, no voice is transmitted, no text, nothing. Anyone put on ignore just doesn't exist as far as you are concerned. If you have any "property" they cannot access or interact with it.

        After a while nearly everyone will be ignoring the idiots. Sure, they can run around and hump things all they want... but nobody knows they exist. They are effectively in a single-player world.

        • Except there are millions of immature idiots in the world. You gonna sit there and block a million people who all run up and hump you? That would be too exhausting and off-putting to most people and they'll leave LONG before they complete said block list.

          • All the better... Fuck Zuck.

            But seriously.... this is a known problem from MMORPGs. Individuals can ignore individuals, and problem users get banned. Your (expensive) device can no longer access the Metaverse, and your facebook/instagram/meta/whatever account is locked. Ouch. Sucks to be you.

            Big ban-hammer. Apply as needed. The idiots wont last long.

  • ...a talking bear, a black panther, a giant python, & a gigantopithecus called Louie, as long as Disney don't sue.
    • "Look for the bare necessities The simple bare necessities Forget about your worries and your strife I mean the bare necessities Old Mother Nature's recipes That brings the bare necessities of life"
  • ... and this debacle points out The Problem perfectly.

  • Wait, what? (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @11:29AM (#62966241)

    They faked this embarrassment of a video? The whole thing looked like it's out of a Wii game, crappy graphics and horrible animation, and they faked that?

    They can't even cheat without embarrassing themselves? Jeesh, the only thing missing is that it was on Twitch and Metastasis is on the same level as the average game streamer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

      >The whole thing looked like it's out of a Wii game, crappy graphics and horrible animation, and they faked that?

      Well, to be fair, they probably were trying to match the crappy graphics and horrible VR of the platform as seen by the artists in charge of the animation. Maybe they did a good job mimicking the actual experience?

      • Animator: Here's the video segment you ordered, Mr. Zuckerberg.
        Zuck: Can you, I don't know, make it suck a bit more?
    • Nah man, if this was a Wii game, Matt would have kicked Mark's butt!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yep, pretty much. Like some other "tech leaders", ZuckTheFuck (or rather his minions) cannot even do basics stuff competently.

  • Metaverse is a product space that is not yet ready for prime time, that big tech companies are pushing on consumers. Consumers, seeing it is not ready, are refusing to adopt it.

    The end result of this is going to be much like 3DTV, entirely killing the technology outright for decades.

    If the companies would just pull back on their marketing and wait until it was actually ready, then maybe it could be salvaged, but I don't see that happening. I predict instead a massive crash-and-burn just like 3DTV went throu

    • The Quest Pro is a solution in search of a problem that justifies spending $1500 for a head set that gives you a worse view of the people you are talking to than their laptop's built-in web cam does.

  • That was literally the only thing preventing me from having any interest what-so-ever in the metaverse. If only avatars had legs. Now I'm excited and I can't wait to do whatever the fuck the metaverse is supposedly for. /sarcasm

  • This is like when people pulled the curtain at E3 and realized their precious console games were being rendered on a PC.

  • "Soon have leges"? Apparently not... (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday October 14, 2022 @12:53PM (#62966535)

    If they had to result to motion capture to "demonstrate" their upcoming legs, obviously their code base is nowhere near ready.

    This is actually quite funny. It seems like Zuck and his crew's technical skills are not broad at all. I guess when you devote all your work time to raping people's privacy, any other skills atrophy.

  • That sums it up, I guess.

    --

    Meta is doomed - we know, everyone knows it, even Zuck, whilst he sleeps knows it.

    The future of this kind of tech is there for the taking - and it isn't going to be easy.
    It's not an easy sell right now.

    "Hey, everyfolk, why not buy a smartphone you can strap to your face and ... yeah, do some VR stuff! Wh00t! - Metaverse thing, fun, fun."

    So, sure, the _concept_ is _totally_ going to happen in one form or another, but strapping a whopping big piece of plastic to your head just ain'

  • if anybody is curious about the actual tech they are using to predict legs position/movement without additions sensors/trackers check out this video [youtube.com].

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