On October 11, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg proudly announced that “legs are coming soonwhile showing off the addition of lower limbs to virtual avatars that users can inhabit in the metaverse.

However, a year after Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, this is one of the few notable advances the project has made. Despite the hype the nascent technology has received and the amount of investment it has attracted, questions remain as to whether the metaverse will be as transformative as its proponents insist.

Users of Meta’s flagship metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, are declining in number. According to leaked internal documents seen by the Wall Street Journalthere are less than 200,000 monthly…