Legs are coming soon! Are you excited?” Add an emoji of a partypopper and confetti, and you’ve got the strangest announcement from this year’s Meta Connect event, during which the company announced a new headset, a partnership with Microsoft, and appendages that evolved roughly 360 million years ago. It’s a phrase that seems purpose-built to induce semantic satiation. The more you read it, the more detached it becomes from any kind of meaning, which a cynical person might say is an ideal embodiment of the Metaverse.
Meta’s infuriatingly nebulous project to meld virtual reality devices with what ultimately amounts to a more ambitious version of is irresistibly easy to lampoon. Given the appropriate context, however, Meta’s fixation on legs isn’t quite as ridiculous as it may appear. Previously, the avatars of were rendered only from the waist up because VR headsets don’t track lower limbs. But having legless bodies floating around in stereoscopic 3D is deeply uncanny, and less than ideal in a virtual environment which, among many other things, is supposed to facilitate work. Hence, putting legs on those avatars is
