The Rise of Simulated Spaces
How we are becoming more than human
Introduction
We each have a digital footprint, our unique digital information that can be used to track and trace our behaviours on the internet, but have you ever wondered how accurate that footprint is? How would your digital self compare with your everyday self? Previous modules have introduced you to the Digital Engagement, the Internet and the Individual, Identity and Ethics and how novel technologies are impacting our lives.
In this topic, we discuss how the techno world is imagining our potential next stages of digitisation. A world in which we become more than human, walking through the present history of companies like Meta and Neuralink and reflecting on the relationships we have to digital machines.
Facebook/Meta
In 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta in its release of the Metaverse. Angel investor Mathew Ball describes it as conglomeration of all 3D virtual worlds, developed by users, that each change dynamically in real time and allow the usage of and switching between worlds easily.
Since the early 1980s, science fiction and video games became platforms for toying with virtual identities that inhabit virtual spaces, separate from the physical world. These ideas were primarily explored through video game culture as prominent games like Second Life became popular. They marketed an immersive experience, limitless opportunities, living your idealised life through an avatar and finding your digital community.
Meta is taking these types of interactions to the next level, advertising an ‘embodied internet’ for individuals and businesses alike using the newest technologies to make it possible. The Metaverse and how we use it will fundamentally change how we experience the digital, and more importantly, the types of data stored about us. It can open opportunities for sectors such as healthcare, where simulated reality can aide with overcoming phobias, treating mental health disorders and allowing patients to better explain and show their ailments. Virtual reality has already been used in simulating operations for apprenticing surgeons and in test piloting airplanes. When we imagine the metaverse, we imagine the possibility of building your own mind palace, enhancing your memory and how you experience reality.
✅ Poll
Read the following prompt then vote below. All responses are anonymous.
How do you feel about your current social media use?
It will feel much more real than a zoom call. To make it come to life, companies are developing augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies like haptic gloves, headsets, and adequate software in the field of what is called ‘spatial computing’.
Spatial computing
Microsoft, NVIDIA , Unity Software are involved in the field of what is called ‘spatial computing’. This is the digitisation of physical objects, spaces and living entities. It is particularly important to have accurate sensing and representations of physical reality to better convince users of the ‘realness’ of the virtually simulated world.
Microsoft HoloLens
Omniverse
Unity Software
The difference between virtual and augmented hardware and software is how they interact between what is and is not real. Augmented reality (AR) enhances the real physical existence by overlaying something simulated. An example of this is a new trend in digital fashion. Customers of platforms such as Zero10 can now ‘try on’ clothes by having the clothing pieces be simulated onto their real physical body. These clothes do not necessarily materialise either, as some companies are directly producing clothes to be used in the metaverse specifically, examples include The Fabricant, RTFKT and Dress X.
VR simulates a completely fictional reality, i.e. a fictional you (body, identity) in a fictional 3D space. Jaron Lanier pioneered VR in the 1980s with his company VPL Research. Lanier and Co developed devices to input and output information from and to VR, such as the DataGlove or AudioSphere, which enabled the production of 3D sounds, and Body Electric, a programming language to integrate virtual reality components. Gonzalez-Franco and Lanier argued that if your brain found what it sensed as predicted, it could become convinced that the experience itself was real.
✅ Poll
Read the following prompt then vote below. All responses are anonymous.
Do you use augmented or virtual reality in any aspect of your life?
The darker side of Meta
There are darker sides to Meta’s utopian vision. According to metaverse researchers Egliston and Carter, Meta’s purchases and development of Virtual Reality Labs between 2018–2022 suggest that it wants to maintain its monopoly over the new technologies and infrastructuralisation of its services in society. Infrastructuralisation is whereby society becomes dependent on a specific platform and cannot function without it. This deserves critique for two main reasons: VR and AR will “collect far more sensitive information than traditional systems” and Meta is not planning to change its financial model (paywall article).
The types of data the metaverse could collect include your gait, biometric data, how you talk and how this changes depending on your mood or state of health, and more. Dwivedi demonstrates the double-edge sword of this data collection. On the one hand, they argue that psychological and sociological studies will be more accurate: instead of asking people to estimate how much soda they drink, the VR world would have sensed and recorded this. The collection of more sensitive data can be a serious security and safety threat as fraudsters will have more data to pose as you, and can have effects on the mental and emotional wellbeing of individuals.
Meta’s business model sells the data you produce (as a person who uses their services) to advertisers. As Lanier writes, the “incentive is to find customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour”, in this sense the ‘customers’ are the advertising agencies. We as consumers are already using a system known to give platform to misinformation, shift people into polemic discussions, and force into our subconscious the need to buy, buy, buy things we do not need. The data we currently share with tech giants like Meta and Google include our “communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs”. New technologies are pathways to making this data far more accurate. Additionally, as Meta’s privacy policies currently stand, there is open possibility that your data from VR and AR tech can be sold to advertisers will likely not change.
Perhaps a funding model that rewards the manipulation of people using their attention will hinder us from fully capitalising on the positives and beneficial aspects of the metaverse. What is the solution? Two ideas are decentralisation and data dignity. Listen to Jaron Lanier tell his story of what ‘data dignity’ means.
Decentralisation is a concept where the means of production and ownership are not attributed to a single company or entity. If you want to know more, check out these examples: a decentralised metaverse, this article on why the future of the metaverse should be decentralised, and and article on web3.
In thinking about these ideas, the following questioning is relevant.
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Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Should we accept novel technologies without democratic debate?
Our Virtual Bodies
In the digital world, virtual bodies live. We are considered not only physically in front of a computer, but also virtually present in cyberspace. Discourse surrounding virtual bodies pops up in Media studies, gender studies, cyber technology, psychiatry and many more subdisciplines in academia.
Scholarly work on virtual bodies has been discussed in two aspects. One aspect looks at information in the world of cyberspace, and the other looks the representation of identities in virtual bodies. The idea of virtual spaces, and information within technology, has enabled a discussion that transcends the physical, but now enters the digital space
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Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Do you think living in the digital world has allowed virtual bodies to assume a person’s identity?
In a book titled ‘How we became posthuman: Cybernetics, literature, and informatics’. N. Katherine Hayles views the posthuman as suggestive rather than a description of virtual bodies. Hayles’s book works to ask how does the human become the post human? The concept of virtual bodies is examined in retrospective of the narrative itself, examining the narratives surrounding abstraction and the separation between the physical body and the virtual one. Hayles emphasized the role that narrative plays in articulating the posthuman as a technical cultural concept. One example that Hayles uses to illustrate this is the narrative of artificial intelligence and the visualization of the cyborg. Hayles offer a way of understanding ourselves as humans living through bodied and the disembodied words.
There are complex cultural, and social issues that are intrinsic in the technological advancement of the modern world. The way we communicate with each other changes, and the way we see each other changes. The department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, the Graduate School of Global Arts in Tokyo University of the Arts organized ‘virtual bodies: Absence/prescence in media’ in which 14 artists based in Japan, Mexico, Germany, China, and Chile exhibit art that reflects on the post pandemic world, through ideas of the ‘virtual’.
This interesting exhibition opens a discussion on the world of media, one that has already become vital in our lives. Following the covid-19 pandemic, there is profound changes to the relationships between ourselves and the world around us. How we see ourselves changes too, and these perceptions intersect with issues of able-bodies, age, class race, and gender. Questions of identities are at the forefront of these changes, and at the same time, discussions of diverse bodies are open to evolve in the future of virtual bodies.
One issue that comes up when discussing virtual bodies is that, although virtual bodies exist in a digital space, humans tend to reproduce the identities of the physical self in the virtual bodies. There may be a tendency to presume old identities, inferring race, gender and class stereotypes.
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Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Does the posthuman call for new identities?
The gendered gaze
A popular discourse of late is the construction of the gendered gaze in virtual bodies. In Mulvey’s work on Visual pleasure and the narrative cinema, an academic discussion began on representing the female and male in media, and construction of their virtual bodies. Mulvey’s work examined how the camera’s gaze coexists with the male gaze. The audience is meant to enjoy seeing representations of the objectified female and the hyper masculine male. Visual forms of gender identities have continued to be studied, and the effects of these representation are still up to question. Mulvey’s work regards technology as one that pushes the male gaze as she describes it. In an interview by Sassatelli, Mulvey’s work highlights how the male gaze can also be the female gaze, that it is possible for females to view themselves through the male gaze and that the female body through the male gaze is not representative of the female body.
Mulvey’s work, though heavily criticized, remains am important conversation starter on the construction of virtual bodies. The female gaze can be hypothesized as one that explores alternative forms of representation that informs new ways to construct virtual bodies. Then introducing new dynamics via virtual bodies. Though in a particularly bold statement, Mulvey expresses the issue that the male gaze is ‘the gaze’, existing everywhere in media and by extension, virtual bodies. There is an argument that the female body was already detached from the physical body via the commodified version of it in media, and may be further detached in the virtual. There is a powerful dialectic between the culture of technology, representations of bodies, and their roles in the physical world.
Other notions may also regard the virtual body and the physical body as one and the same. The virtual environment might immerse the virtual body because of its connection to the physical.
Brain-Computer Interfaces
Whilst spatial computing uses a multitude of hardware and software to digitise the physical world, other technologies are being developed to bridge the human-machine divide. Brain-computer interfaces are devices that can enable the sensing, analysis and relaying of brain signals between a neuronal wave input and a digital device. They can be mono and bidirectional from brain to computer and vice versa. BCIs can be invasive, whereby electrodes are directly inserted into the brain, or non-invasive.
According to the Brain/Neural Computer Interaction: Horizon 2020, BCIs are viewed in three main ways: as rehabilitation devices to restore or regain function, as enhancers to improve users’ attention or stroke patients’ mobility, and, finally as research tools. BCIs can grant autonomy, mobility or improved living conditions, but there are still many challenges to develop all consumer products.
BCI devices differentiate between whether you choose to do an action (active) or it is done reflexively (passive). Any distractions can make sensing the brain waves and, thus, controlling the output difficult. This includes emotions. A study by Kögel and Jox interviewed BCI users about the experiences of using a BCI device, suggesting that, overall, BCI use was viewed as positive and beneficial. Interestingly, when the output of the BCI was different than what was intended by the user, users were likely to blame themselves for the failed output. However, Kögel and Jox also found that sometimes the users could trace back reasons behind the failure such as being in highly emotional states or being distracted, which make the usage of a BCI device very difficult. The study found that BCI users tend to maintain an ‘actor-centered understanding of technology’, a term meaning that they consider themselves in control of the devices they use.
💬 Contribute:
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Have you ever thought about enhancing any of your abilities? What were they and why? If you had to rely on a BCI device for rehabilitation or restoration of function, do you think it would feel different than enhancement?
BCI devices on the market
The diagram from Saha shows the transition of research interest and development in BCI technologies from the early 2000s to the 2010s. It shows a trend towards enhancing users’ brains and bodies, perhaps hinting at a future with more BCI technologies for all types of consumers.
Muse Headbands and Cognito Therapeutics are examples of non-invasive BCI devices tackling neurodegenerative diseases.
Released commercially in 2014, Muse uses electroencephalographical signals (EEG) to reward positivity and improve sleep quality. An EEG shows brain waves, detecting normal or abnormal functioning. Cognito are also developing a product in the form of a headset that stimulates brain waves to reduce neurodegeneration with a current focus on Alzheimer’s patients. The company received permission to do clinical trials on patients. These BCI devices show promise as alternative or replacement therapies for neurodegenerative disorders and as consumer-based devices aimed at managing health and improving capabilities.
Some companies are developing invasive and implantable BCI devices. An example is Neuralink, run and funded by Elon Musk. Their goal to help people with quadriplegia regain mobility by giving them control over digital devices using their thoughts. The long-term vision is to provide all types of consumers the ability to control, access and use the digital using a BCI device. How Neuralink differs from other BCI companies is its intention to interface with a large number of neurons, which is essential for accuracy and reliability of using the device. Their current design involves inserting a large amount of micron-sized electrode threads through a 78 mm large hole in the skull to individually attach neurons. Neuralink’s design has been critiqued as electrode numbers do not necessarily correlate to improved control using the device. In an animal study done by Neuralink, sources state that 15 out of 23 monkeys died from surgical complications and device-associated infections. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is investigating the trials’ animal rights abuses. BCI devices are still limited in their lifespan, as they do cause cellular damage from the implanted electrodes. There have been some successes in maintaining a longer lifespan, but more development still has to be done.
BCI usage is both mentally and physically demanding, with many challenges ahead for all types of consumer usage. Around 15–30% of individuals cannot produce brain signals that would operate a BCI device and it is still unclear of the ways to design the most accurate and safe for consumer brainwave sensing devices. As with the metaverse, an important question to ask is about who funds such projects and their overall aim. Medical devices are a heavily regulated industry, but once such devices are available to consumers, there is still the question of how best to use them.
In our future, our bodies may become malleable, part-machine, even non-existent. We’ll be shapeshifters, perhaps inhabiting more than one body in our lifetime, perhaps dissociating with our physical body in exchange for virtual ones.
💬 Contribute:
Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. Responses from the same person are the same colour. All comments are anonymous.
Reflect for a minute — where do you see yourself in all of this?
Summary
Building upon our knowledge from the Digital Society, we discuss how emergent technologies like VR, AR and spatial computing are bridging the gap between the digital and physical realities. In particular, how the rise of virtual identities brings about the question of the gendered self. We prompt you to engage with how the digitisation of ourselves has become integral to our identity and how this identity is influenced. We critically assess the connection between the ownership of a platform or technology and its usage, following Meta’s history in monopolising the newest social networks. We present and encourage you to imagine alternative futures to a Meta-owned everything.
