Meta may soon stop forcing you to view the Metaverse through the eyes of your Quest avatar

Meta captivated the hearts and souls of VR enthusiasts with the Quest 2, and even if the Quest Pro wasn’t for everyone, we all collectively agreed to patiently await the coming of our lord and savior: the Quest 3.

And it’s good that we did, because it’s great and it’s looking to become even better with time. Personally, I can’t wait for more augmented reality features to come, like placing virtual monitors across my real-life space through the Quest 3.

Yet there is one aspect of the Quest series of VR headsets that has always bugged me, namely: that I get to view my home environment and basically every other pseudo-UI element not through my sight, but through my Meta avatar's.

Because that guy can be super creepy! So it’s probably a good thing that Meta may finally be allowing us to turn this… Uh, feature? — off.


So, we’ve got a lot to unpack before we can get to the rumor, possibly leak at hand. First off: what’s a Meta avatar? This is a toonified version of yourself that you can set up as a graphical representation of how others see you in the Metaverse.

Now, if you’re not using a Quest headset for socializing or exploring specifically Meta’s Metaverse, you may not feel like you’re using your avatar a lot. But in all reality, your avatar is always with you. (queue thunder sound effects)

The result? A floating torso there, a T-posing avatar in the distance here and occasionally, the nightmare fuel of a random floating hand somewhere behind you. And these are all side-effects of the Quest headsets trying to estimate your body’s position in order to replicate it through your avatar.

But when nobody is looking at you and you aren’t planning on socializing in VR anytime soon, why would you want that anyway? Well, chances are that you wouldn't. That’s what others thought as well. But it took until possibly the near and maybe imminent future for that to change.

The toggle to turn off this unwanted feature has been datamined from a future update, meaning that it’s either developed or in development. So there remain two questions:

• Will it ever become available?
• Will that happen anytime soon?

And to both, we offer the same response: we don’t know. Meta is likely to remain silent about it, so your best bet is to check your Settings after each update. And we suppose that once you toggle the new setting, the good old ghost hands will make a sweet comeback!