• by Colin Kirkland , August 30, 2023

It may be the longest-running joke about Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision that users' avatars have arms, heads, faces and torsos, but no legs. That may be about to change.

In a recent image posted by virtual reality (VR) researcher and Threads user lunayiann, it is evident that Meta is live-testing legs for its VR characters in Quest Home and Horizon Worlds, despite there being no legs simulator available for tracking a user's leg movement.

Meta first reported working on avatar legs in September 2022 and then in October, announced that the feature was “coming soon,” although this was misleading.

Now, 10 months later, it seems that the tech giant may be close to adding legs for avatars to all users. “People will start to see avatar legs appear…over the next few weeks,” a communications manager at Meta told The Verge in an email on Wednesday.

“The Public Test Channel (PTC) for Quest v57 is starting to roll out for Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 2 soon,” wrote community manager Ryanality on Meta's forums.

The legs have not made an appearance in Horizon Worlds yet, though they do currently exist in betas for Meta's recently announced mobile and web versions of the immersive gaming platform. One tester posted the experience they had with avatar legs on X and said it's “a good start” but added that “the lack of crouching is probably the most glaring issue of it so far.”

Legs have become Horizon Worlds users' most requested feature, according to a quote by Mark Zuckerberg. This addition, along with upcoming mobile and web versions of the app, may help onboard more users, which the $36 billion metaverse platform needs after one user recently reported counting only around 900 daily active users.