Legs featured in Facebook’s 'desperate' metaverse push are a lie

The avatar legs featured at Meta’s annual developer conference this week have turned out to be a “preview of what’s to come” that do not yet reflect users’ movements – the latest stumble in the company’s “desperate” attempts to sell the public on its virtual reality universe.

Shares of the Facebook and Instagram parent company fell to $127 – their lowest since late 2018 – on Wednesday after its Connect developer conference failed to convince Wall Street that its digital world will replace smartphones and personal computers.

Neil Campling, head of equity research at Mirabaud, told Insider that Meta’s metaverse push felt “desperate.”

"Captain Zuckerberg continues to steer the Meta ship towards an unknown path called the Metaverse and is determined to splurge billions and billions of dollars in an endeavor to reinvent itself," said Campling, referring to the $10 billion Meta spent on the metaverse last year.

Campling estimated that the company would spend $15 billion more on the metaverse this year.

A big announcement at the Connect conference was that metaverse avatars, which are currently floating torsos, would be getting legs and feet sometime next year. The news was accompanied by a video showing a virtual Mark Zuckerberg walking around and even jumping with his new stems.

But UploadVR has since reported that the legs in the video did not reflect the movement of Zuckerberg or other users.

“To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture,” Meta said in a follow-up statement.

Meta's next generation avatar legs demo at Connect was "animations created from motion capture", not live VR.https://t.co/hOFbi59CEh pic.twitter.com/bsw30fXgJX

— UploadVR (@UploadVR) October 14, 2022

In August, Zuckerberg was roasted for proudly sharing an underwhelming selfie of his metaverse avatar.

“I can find Nintendo DS and Sony PS Vita games with better, nicer-looking art and models than what we’ve been shown so far in Facebook’s metaverse,” Zack Zweizen wrote at gaming website Kotaku at the time.

The entire tech industry has been suffering from a downturn since pandemic lockdowns faded. Meta’s stock price has fallen over 50% over the past year, resulting in a $70 billion loss in net worth for Zuckerberg.