This VR App Has Legs

If you stay in virtual reality for a long time, you'll feel like you're missing out. A headset covers your eyes. You are still feeling your way through the dark, and the threat of knee-capping yourself on a coffee table is still real, even though virtual boundaries create activity parameters within your living room. Hand controllers and preternatural hands can only do so much. You have no legs in the virtual version.

A company is trying to change that. Spatial, a New York-based virtual reality platform for artists, is now offering a full-body option in its app. Wolf3D's Ready Player Me platform will allow users to bring inavatars created in Wolf3D's Ready Player Me platform, which uses selfies to generate realistic-looking, full-body cartoonavatars for games. Spatial says it will support all of the customization options offered by Ready Player Me.

Some Spatialavatars can be sold as NFTs. The avatars can be used in other virtual reality, desktop, and mobile apps.

The addition of full-body avatars, a form of self-expression, is in line with what the company actually does: host and sell virtual art.

Spatial was an app for virtual conference rooms, shared PowerPoint presentations, and awkward happy hours. The founders of Spatial noticed that more and more people were using the conference rooms to display artwork, not discuss corporate synergies. Most of its users were accessing the app on the web, not in a virtual reality headset. As startups do, spatial pivoted. Depending on how you feel about NFTs, it's either super cool or a total grift.

It is a step forward for the industry to have a slow roll out of full-body avatars. The missing legs have the effect of bolding and italicizing the weirdness of the experiment. Last year, when Meta opened up its long-in-the-works Horizon Worlds VR platform, it was supposed to be an expansive, multiplayer universe that would let you interact with up to 20 friends at a time. In a cartoonized interview with Gayle King, Mark Zuckerberg was seated behind a table and appeared as half a person.

For good reasons, a lot of virtual reality platforms have held off on full-body avatars. The legs are difficult to get right. A virtual body with no legs that moves awkwardly could be more off-putting than a body with no legs at all. There are cultural and social reasons to ignore the issue.