Regarding Meta's latest avatars, these avatars are fun to combine with novelty emoticons, but completely without legs. While full-body tracking can be achieved through an outside-in tracking system, Meta believes that it is not feasible to perform full-body tracking through the inside-out system on a headset like Quest 2.
Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, vice president of Meta Reality Labs in XR division, was asked in a recent Q&A about the company's potential for full-body tracking of future headsets, an idea he dismissed, arguing that it would not be feasible to track full-body movements through inside-out.
While Quest 2 is currently capable of head and hand tracking, the headset doesn't know where the user's legs, feet, or hips are, which is why the avatar seen in VR doesn't have a waist-below. On the other hand, other VR systems that use the headset's external camera are able to perform full-body tracking for a more realistic avatar.
It has been suggested that the position of the user's foot can be estimated using a tracking camera mounted on a headset through some computer vision tricks. Bosworth deduced that this is not only extremely difficult given the position of the camera on quest 2, but it becomes even more difficult as the headset shrinks.
Bosworth said: "Body tracking is very tricky because the headset worn on the user's head does not capture the user's legs very well. Since we wanted to make the headset smaller, the situation became worse, and the camera sometimes couldn't even see the user's cheeks and upper body. Now we can solve the upper body problem very well, because we can see the arms, elbows, hands, and we can estimate the musculoskeletal structure behind the user, but it is difficult to change to the feet. Therefore, for some full-body tracking use cases in people's minds, tracking using outside-in instead of inside-out may be necessary. So that's one of the things that we're looking at. Now there's a revelation about Quest's full-body tracking, which I think may actually be a bit premature... There's nothing substantive behind that. But it's something we've been paying attention to and keeping in mind. ”
Later, during a Q&A session, Bosworth spoke again about Meta's legless avatar and hinted that a "fake" leg might be designed for the avatar.
Bosworth adds: "It is very difficult to accurately track a user's legs, and from a physical point of view, existing headsets that use inside-out tracking are largely unable to achieve full-body tracking. Users can take outside-in for body tracking, but that's an extra component, which also means an extra cost and requires additional setup, which is a big problem. We can fake legs for avatars so that others can see a full avatar while they look at you, and no one will know the difference, which is a better direction. Obviously, we've seen jokes about our legless avatars and we appreciate them, which is very funny and fair. So we're working on how we can introduce some form of leg for the avatar... ”
Bosworth naturally understands that the introduction of prosthetic legs for avatars can't be applied to gaming purposes such as dancing, but at least in a simple social VR setup, it would be good to make the full avatar float in the air and enhance the social experience.
In addition to this, Bosworth was asked if Meta would consider a subscription-based approach to the Quest content library, arguing that the company "does not yet have a library of game content that can maintain subscriptions", and further stated that cross-platform content may also be necessary for the business model to function. But he made it clear that the company may launch gift cards for Quest stores in the future.