He has a point: The headset is decidedly antisocial. “You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing. I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. 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.” Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. 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. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their - Where are their fucking legs?īodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s - excuse me, Meta’s - home base in the metaverse. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. It’s in this strange scenario - alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know - that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester.
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