Should We Be Scared of Virtual Reality? Current Technology vs. Its Promised Growth.
Virtual reality(VR) technology has been promised to be bright, shiny, and bountiful. It has also become a topic of recent discussion due to Facebook’s announcement of the proposed new reality, “metaverse” back in early December of last year.
-Admittedly, the company has officially re-branded as “Meta”, and the “Metaverse” is technically called Horizon World.
Nonetheless, when it comes to VR I get the sense that the conversation is always being cast into its promising future. If anything were to push VR technology into the mainstream for good, I surely thought a global pandemic that shuts out the physical world would have done it, but the fact is that VR technology is still in its infancy. Major logistical problems such as prominent motion sickness and steep price points show the technology is not yet ready for the mainstream market. Although the technology isn’t yet prepared for mainstream use, that is where it is projected to go. An approximate 60 million VR users were accounted for last year, along with the VR market hitting $3.1 billion in 2019 and is forecast to grow to 120.5 billion by 2026. This all begs the question…
Where does VR technology currently stand, where it is projected to grow, and most importantly should we be scared of that advancement?
Current VR Technology
V.R. is not what the sci-fi movies taught us to hope for. Although in technical terms, today’s V.R. systems are miles ahead of their predecessors, many newer systems still lack the experience that is marketed towards users. In a nutshell, V.R. technologies attempt to block out reality and replace it with a virtually generated world, but even with leading systems, outside of gaming, there isn’t much you can do with V.R. currently.
The most popular system currently on the market is the Oculus Quest (owned by Facebook), but the opportunities for enterprises exploring V.R. technologies are broad and deep. From organizations adopting V.R. training programs, to retailers exploring V.R. applications to establish closer ties to their customers and deliver more tailored memorable experiences. Even healthcare providers are exploring techniques to help consult, diagnose, treat, and manage ailments of all varieties.
Developers of V.R. experiences have derived that even the simplest V.R. technology setups can determine: motion data, gaze and eye-tracking, facial expressions, usage and interactions, and location and proximity of other systems. More sophisticated V.R. devices can also detect: posture, heart rate, blood pressure, subtle facial expressions, perspiration, cognitive load, and a wide spectrum of human emotional responses to specific stimuli. So, even though V.R. technologies are still considered new and improving products that haven't yet met the mainstream market, there are still current concerns.
Current VR Concerns
Scholars have identified a range of consumer harms in V.R. technologies. One of which is physical harm, such as nausea (motion sickness) caused by the headset, or epileptic seizures caused by the graphics. Another area of prominent concern is mental harms which includes addiction to alternate realities, distress, and depression caused by the highly immersive effects of the technology. Another salient harm connected to V.R. technologies is the privacy risks they pose. As mentioned prior in this blog, even the simplest V.R. systems collect a vast amount of data that other consumer technologies don’t have the capability to track. To explain further, this new privacy threat is due to extensive biometric data tracking, and the sensitive nature entailed in the data they are collecting and sharing.
The current regulatory landscape for V.R. technology consists of a patchwork of policies and lots of ambiguity. It is difficult to mitigate risks due to the decentralized nature of this emerging technology, and many V.R. experiences don’t even disclose their privacy policies, which only adds to the critical gaps in establishing privacy risks. With the reality of privacy exposure associated with V.R. technology currently, where is it further projected to go?
Predicted VR Technology
Now that we’ve discussed where current VR technology is and its manifold concerns, let’s discuss where V.R. is projected to go, the metaverse.
Leveraging their 2014 acquisition of Oculus, early in 2020 Facebook launched a closed-beta test of their V.R. social network, Horizon. If even a fraction of Facebook’s 2.7 billion users sign-up for the new immersive platform, that alone will push V.R. into the mainstream market. However, Horizon is only part of a broader sea of change known as the metaverse. The Metaverse can be defined as the sum-total of the Internet-connected virtual, augmented, and mixed reality world offering fully and semi-immersive experiences. An individual can represent themselves as an avatar and interact with other avatars, in a multitude of other real and virtual environments. Avatars will be controlled directly through human interaction, but also include artificially intelligent entities. Spanning the full breadth of XR, the Metaverse will blur the distinction between our online and physical worlds even more. The Metaverse will consist of experiences that leverage fully immersive VR technologies as well as enhanced reality applications that overlay information into the physical world. This paradigm shift will leverage augmented reality devices, nascent technologies such as holographic displays, and traditional information systems, including billboards, televisions, shop windows, and transport information screens.
Facebook isn’t the only player in this market. The world’s fastest-growing game platforms, Fortnite, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Roblox are all paving the way to the Metaverse, allowing billions of users to create and engage virtually; building their own worlds, with their own rules, and their own tradable currencies. While these companies might be classified as game platforms, their reach and potential are far greater than the gaming communities. Add to that the acquisitions, investments, and statements made by the big Internet companies, the Metaverse, like the physical world, will involve all of us. The Metaverse will be the merging of the physical and virtual worlds, where an action in one medium will translate to an outcome in another.
So, Should We Be Concerned?
From an interview done with Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”, Shoshana states…
“As we allow these companies to amass this huge scale of human-generated data, we’re changing the nature of our society…we’re allowing them to create these huge asymmetries of knowledge about people. Instead of this being a golden age of the democratization of knowledge…the last 20 years have seen, especially the last decade, the wholesale destruction of privacy…And operationally, what happens is they get to a point where they know so much about us that they can fashion targeting mechanisms. We’re not just talking about targeted ads. We’re talking about subliminal cues, psychological microtargeting, real-time rewards, and punishments, algorithmic recommendation tools, and engineered social comparison dynamics…What is so important for folks to understand is that these are all connected points in one process. And the process is called how knowledge becomes power.”
One of the core tenets of the Internet has always been “free”. This led to the development of the sophisticated, extremely valuable, and turgid Internet advertising market. In 2021, the Internet Advertising market was projected to be worth close to $400bn, and this huge economic growth was built on personal data that was being freely and mostly unwittingly shared by millions of Internet users.
In 2018 the world woke up to the value of personal data as the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal came to a head, wiping $100bn off Facebook’s valuation. In that same year, the European Union launched its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to help protect the personal information and privacy of individuals on the Internet. In other words, it took 24 years for the regulation to catch up with the market, and even today, GDPR and its international counterparts struggle to protect end-users fully from the misuse and abuse of their personal data.
So, yes. We should be concerned about current V.R. technology, as well as promised V.R. technology of the future. With each breach, or scandal, consumer trust is reduced which reduces the overall value, and bigger purpose this emerging technology can provide to the world. The V.R. ecosystem needs to learn from the Internet’s history and take action to mitigate the harmful impacts of misuse and abuse of its technology.
Reference
“An Imperative — Developing Standards for Safety and Security in XR Environments — XRSI — XR Safety Initiative.” XRSI, XR Safety Initiative, 25 Feb. 2021, https://xrsi.org/publication/an-imperative-developing-standards-for-safety-and-security-in-xr-environments
Dexter, A., & Ridley, J. (2022, February 14). The best VR headset in 2022. pcgamer. Retrieved February 18, 2022, from https://www.pcgamer.com/best-vr-headset/
Dick, Ellysse. “Balancing User Privacy and Innovation in Augmented and Virtual Reality.” Balancing User Privacy and Innovation in Augmented and Virtual Reality, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4 Mar. 2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/03/04/balancing-user-privacy-and-innovation-augmented-and-virtual-reality.
Jackson, L. (2021, May 21). Shoshana Zuboff explains why you should care about privacy. The New York Times. Retrieved February 18, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/technology/shoshana-zuboff-apple-google-privacy.html
Mhaidli, A. H., & Schaub, F. (2021). Identifying manipulative advertising techniques in XR through scenario construction. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445253
