Mark Zuckerberg announced a much-awaited update for virtual avatars — legs. However, the demo video was apparently a sham.

On Tuesday, the Facebook founder appeared to show off his virtual legs by jumping for joy during his keynote at the Meta Connect event.

However, eagle-eyed developers were quick to spot that the video was too smooth to have been done on VR hardware. Turns out, they were right.

Meta’s demo showing its next-generation avatars with legs was actually animations created using motion capture technology, not live VR, as reported by UploadVR.

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

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Motion capture technology has been around for a long time and is used in most movies these days. Think, every Marvel movie ever.

While the updates expecting to bring full-body avatars aren’t expected until 2023, Zuckerberg led people to believe that the tech was ready when Meta is possibly nowhere close.

Sure, VR legs could look like that someday but there’s no guarantee that it will look anything like the demo we just saw.

‘Seriously, legs are hard,’ Zuckerberg said during his Meta Connect VR conference on Tuesday. ‘Which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.’

Still, it’s not a good look for the Facebook founder who has poured billions of dollars into his vision for the ‘metaverse’. Reality Labs, the Meta unit responsible for bringing the metaverse to life, lost $10.2 billion in 2021 and has lost nearly $6 billion this year. 

So far, Zuckerberg doesn’t even have the VR legs to show for it.

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