There’s trouble in virtual paradise, according to The Wall Street Journal, which says internal Meta Platforms documents show that its initial goal of 500,000 monthly active “Horizon Worlds” users by the end of 2022 has been revised to 280,000, which is over 80,000 more than it currently has. Meanwhile, Forbes says the debut of avatar “legs” demoed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at last week’s Meta Connect was actually “staged” using motion capture. However, a Meta spokesman explains that the company’s metaverse efforts were always expected to be a multiyear project, with ongoing improvements based on user feedback.

“Horizon Worlds” was conceived as a collection of immersive virtual environments in which users can interact as they play, shop and work in avatar form. “Yet there are rarely any girls in the Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party, and in Murder Village there is often no one to kill,” writes The Wall Street Journal, noting that “even the company’s showcase worlds, such as Questy’s, a virtual arcade featured in a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year, are mostly barren of users.”

Internal statistics show only 9 percent of Horizon’s virtual worlds “are ever visited by at least 50 people. Most are never visited at all. ‘An empty world is a sad world,’ said one document,” per WSJ.

While the bustling activity on Meta’s social media platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, collectively draw more than 3.5 billion monthly average users — “equivalent to almost half the world’s population,” WSJ writes, “Horizon is currently reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, SD.”

That could in part be due to the fact that Horizon is optimized for use with Meta Quest virtual reality headsets, which start at about $400. “In an effort to drum up some excitement around the metaverse, Zuckerberg unveiled his company’s newest virtual reality headset, dubbed the Meta Quest Pro,” at the Meta Connect conference, CNBC reports, noting “the device costs $1,500 and contains new technologies, such as an advanced mobile Snapdragon computer chip.”

In addition to complaints like few people to hang out with in “Horizon Worlds,” users griped that “‘people do not look real’ and that the avatars don’t have legs,” WSJ says. During what Forbes describes as “the most talked-about segment” of Meta Connect, Zuckerberg said legs are coming soon.

Appearing as avatars, Zuckerberg and Meta general manager product and engineering Aigerim Shorman “showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping.” But Forbes says their legs were “fake,” in that the sequence was “pre-rendered for the show.”

”Legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either,” Zuckerberg said during the presentation.

A Meta spokesman “said it is easy to be a cynic about the metaverse, but that the company continues to believe it is the future of computing,” WSJ writes.