ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse?

Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!

It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”

I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.

“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.

He has a point: The headset is decidedly antisocial. Once the Meta Quest is strapped on, it’s adios to the real world, so much so that the headset prompts you to demarcate a “play area” by spraying a virtual boundary line on the ground. This is to stop me from crashing into real-world furniture, walls, spouse, etc., when I’m in the middle of my VR adventures.

Technology’s job is to solve problems, not create them. Or at least solve more problems than it creates. Meta Quest isn’t there yet.