A Framework for Ethical Immersion
VR provides a powerful tool with which to shape our identity, a tool that could lead to powerful societal progress or terrible detriment. Now is the time for a discussion regarding ethical design, content, data management, and platform creation. Here, I propose a possible framework of an open-garden VR ecosystem with personal data ownership, design for mindfulness, a humane search engine, and ethical content.
We are our experiences
The miracle of the human mind is its ability to adapt to a wide variety of stimuli. This neural plasticity allows us to realize a huge range of actions beyond our innate programming.
Unlike other animals, human babies are born with startlingly little pre-programming. Other animals begin finding food in their first few days, while a human baby needs years of training to survive on its own. Throughout a human life, new neural networks are forged through experience that make the individual good at certain things, shape personality, and form a mental model or world view with which to operate. The same human baby could grow up to be a caveman or a spacecraft engineer. It is their experiences that differ.
What kinds of experiences are most impactful in shaping our identity and worldview? We receive significant programming through cultural influence, whether that be media, folklore, or environmental design. However, the most impactful way we shape our mental model is through direct experience.
The Power of Virtual Reality
With virtual reality, we have access to a medium that allows us to simulate direct experience. Our brain processes a VR simulation as if it is a real experience, stimulating the same areas and storing the memory in the same way. The best example of this is the “plank test”, in which the viewer is in a simulation at the top of a high building with a plank that extends off it. Even in low-quality renderings that don’t look real, your brain perceives the simulation as real. People with a fear of heights exhibit all the biometrics of fear. Many cannot step off the plank, even upon multiple reminders that it is not real. Over time, experiencing the simulation has cured people’s fear of heights, further proof that the virtual experience is tied indelibly to the real one.
The magic ingredient in VR is embodied cognition, the feeling of your body in the virtual space. Unlike movies or video games, VR brings your body into the 3D space, tricking your mind into processing the VR experience as a direct experience.
Madary and Metzinger explain this well in Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. [1] “Traditional paradigms in experimental psychology, watching a film, or playing a non-immersive video game cannot create the strong illusion of owning and controlling a body that is not your own.” They predict that “VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as ‘conscious experience’, ‘selfhood’, ‘authenticity’, or ‘realness’.”
This power of embodied cognition allows us to hack identity and perception with new audiovisual stimuli. VR has been shown to increase empathy with others, decrease pain, and even regain limb movement after a stroke.
The Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab led by Jeremy Bailenson has conducted extensive experiments on the impact of simulations on identity, changing the avatars of the user to different ages and races. When children embodied an older version of themselves, they were far more likely to save money later on, having empathy for their older self. Viewers that embodied a superhero were more likely to help the researcher when they “accidentally” dropped their pen after the experience.
At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA, patients going through painful procedures such as labor were transported to Yellowstone National Park and a tropical beach, reducing pain by 24% in one study.
Doctors have begun to treat stroke patients by giving them a virtual arm to move. After connecting a simple brain–computer interface (BCI) that measures electrical impulses from the motor cortex, the patient would imagine moving their limb and, instead of seeing their arm lie limply and receiving no positive feedback to reinforce the re-learning process, they would see the phantom limb move. This creates the rush of dopamine that indicates to the brain that learning is occurring and strengthens that neural pathway for future practice. This increased rapidity and potential for regaining motor control.
Traditional media has some ability to shape identity and perception, but with VR’s capacity for embodied cognition, we have a more powerful tool for hacking identity and perception than ever before. As we develop immersive media, we must recognize its potential for shaping our collective consciousness. Therefore, it is important to create with intention and understand that the work we do today will lay the foundation for the future. Below is a framework to guide us on our development today and into the future.
A Framework for Ethical Immersion
Five pillars for ethical immersion:
- Open-garden Metaverse — open internet with digital democracy
- Personal agency over data — personal ownership over data
- Design for wellness — shift from design for addiction to design for mindfulness
- Humane search engine — decide what content to deliver to whom
- Ethical content — create content reinforcing pro-social behavior
Open-Garden Metaverse
Monopolies hold dangerous power over society, but monopolies in information technology are even more insidious, leading to propaganda and omission of unwanted narratives. However, a competitive market is no solution to this either. Multiple walled gardens will only divide the user base and fragment our possibility for a great exchange of knowledge.
The promise of an open-garden virtual world or “metaverse” is the same as the promise of a free society: free speech, agency over your property, the ability to tell your story, to travel, to shape society. As we live more and more in the virtual world, we should have some agency over that world. I certainly don’t want to live in a world in which the police can spy on me and then sell information on what they see and hear me doing or a world in which I have no say over how I’m allowed to interact with my family and friends. We, the citizens of that virtual world, must make decisions as to how the world functions, how the interface works, and how and if data is used.
WebXR, integrated with a digital democracy built on blockchain technology, could provide an open and interconnected metaverse that represents the values of its users. Users would have the ability to vote or designate a rescindable vote to a trusted representative on issues that shape the virtual world.
Personal Agency over Data
The amount of data gathered for VR usership is massive. From eye tracking to interactivity and body movement, today’s headsets can already provide far more data than traditional computer interactions. VR rigs already in development incorporating BCI input, galvanic skin response, or vocal tonality generate even more. Moreover, the data gathered from VR usership is highly specific — specific enough to identify a user solely from the way they move their body.
How do we protect ourselves from having this gold mine of data used against us? Instead of relying on the technology to take care of itself and for platforms to use this information ethically, we must build a solution.
On top of the open-garden metaverse, a blockchain-based identity protection system could be implemented. Every user would hold personal information in a private wallet. When another entity needs information from them, instead of sending that data, they could issue a temporary key along with a smart contract that acts as a portal to that data only for as long as the smart contract was valid. This would eliminate the kind of data consolidation that creates both personal data breaches such as identity theft and widespread breaches such as the Cambridge Analytica leak. This could also be seen as beneficial for big companies as they wouldn’t have to spend as much on cyber security.
This would be particularly helpful with developments in Augmented Reality (AR). With facial recognition and AR, the current Facebook system could display your friend’s data beside them when they walked up to you (great for those of us who tend to forget people’s names at conferences), but would have the same privacy issues we face today — with far more data. Instead, we could own our own data and write smart contracts or use decentralised applications (DAPPs) to determine what different people see, becoming masters of our own data.
There is a constant balance between privacy and self-expression. As we have seen in the social media boom, more and more people share more and more of their private lives, signing away their rights for a chance to connect. However, the desire to connect and share doesn’t have to mean consolidation of data onto a central server.
Designing for Wellness
Virtual reality has the possibility of being a highly addictive and isolating medium. This might compound in a positive feedback loop, as Bruce Alexander’s “Rat Park” study found that creatures who are isolated turn more and more towards their addiction. [2] Apps are already being designed to keep the user hooked and scrolling. App designers at major tech companies admit to studying slot machine usage to determine just the right delay before displaying notifications.
While the information age has laid the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, the mental cost of this fire hose of information is becoming clear. According to Twenge and Joiner’s 2017 paper in Clinical Psychological Science, adolescents with increased screen time were more likely to experience depression and commit suicide. [3]
Girls are more likely to experience this, which may be a key to part of why this happens. Social media metrics have created quantitative ways of measuring self-worth. Women are measured more by their physical appearance and with an image based platform, this can be extremely damaging to their overall sense of self-worth. The ego is a tricky beast to feed and numbers are infinite.
Instead of designing for addiction and ego, we have the opportunity to design for mindfulness. Traditional techniques for improving happiness and focus through mindfulness can be adopted in this design strategy, such as allowing a user to focus on something positive and recognize themselves within their environment. VR is inherently immersive and therefore offers a unique opportunity for focused and tranquil environments.
For physical wellness, virtual reality is also very promising. Giving us the ability to interact spatially with data will free us from carpal tunnel, back pain, and a sedentary lifestyle. The office of the future could be more like a playground in which to analyse data on a human scale, edit films by dragging clips around, and sculpt 3D assets in mid-air.
While building virtual worlds, we must design with the intent of empowering and releasing the person to go out and live their lives better. Currently, an application’s success is measured through the amount of time users spend on them, which I believe is a poor measurement of value. This may require a shift of value in our culture away from ad dollars and may require people to pay for social media services. Those shaping the future of VR must be mindful of the strengths and weaknesses of this medium and create content and platforms that create stronger, happier, more functional humans.
Humane Search Engine
In a world made of senses instead of words, a keyword search engine is obviously ill-suited. We will need to develop a new search engine that understands the nuances of senses and how to curate highly personalized experiences. Given the massive database required and the unique parameters for each user, it could very well be that the best technology for this task is artificial intelligence (AI).
This AI would have a huge influence on our collective consciousness, and our influence on it should therefore be carefully thought out. Like any intelligence, AI is highly influenced by its creators and those it spends its time around. Its “experiences” — the datasets it is fed to recognize patterns — create much of its world view. In addition, this AI must be given a clear goal.
What are its goals? If its goals are to protect users, we must ask what protection means in this context. An easy answer would be that you don’t serve children damaging content such as violence or pornography. However, does protection also mean maintaining the user’s worldview? Do you serve content that people might disagree with or allow them to live in their bubble, never to learn anything new?
When deciding the goals and parameters (rules of operation) for an AI that curates our direct experiences, we need input from a counsel of neuroscientists, ethicists, psychologists, and systems thinkers. However, no one counsel should make these decisions. With their guidance, these rules could be continuously created and revised through a direct democracy in the open garden metaverse.
Ethical Content
With the power of embodied cognition, there is the potential to inflict post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), encourage violent tendencies, create phobias, destroy body image, and much more. Calvert and Tan’s research documented in Impact of Virtual Reality on Young Adults’ Physiological Arousal and Aggressive Thoughts found that “young adults who played an aggressive virtual reality game exhibited increased physiological arousal and increases in aggressive thoughts” and noted that VR was “a more potent purveyor of aggression” than video games or TV. [4]
In Fox and Bailenson’s paper exploring The Effects of Exposure to Female Characters’ Sexualized Appearance and Gaze in an Immersive Virtual Environment, they found that “gender-stereotypical [provocatively dressed and promiscuous as well as conservatively dressed and virginal] virtual females enhance negative attitudes toward women, whereas those that violate expectations and break stereotypes do not.” [5] This suggests that, through creating unique characters that defy stereotypes, content can help combat rape culture and sexism.
Content creators should understand the nuances of what they create and stay clear of this kind of destructive creation. This sounds like it should be easy to avoid, but it is already occurring. A significant portion of the VR gaming content is incredibly violent and contains stereotypical portrayal of women. If we as an industry extol the powers of embodied cognition, why are we still exploiting it in this way?
Some may argue it is easier to prevent this kind of harmful content within a walled-garden metaverse, but this is a false assumption. This only prevents the kind of harm the gatekeepers deem harmful. Many large platforms already support hyper realistic first person shooter games that graphically depict murder and war. Ethical content creation comes from a cultural shift, not a technological one. It is a huge determining factor as to whether this technology will be a force for societal progress or detriment.
The Future of Immersion
When we think about the future of VR, we must forget about the hardware and focus on the purpose: sensory immersion. Technology today is beginning to be developed to deliver this without the middle-men of screens and headphones.
The concept of a read/write brain–computer interface promises the possibility of direct sensory simulation through neural stimulation. For example, I could live stream my senses — the soft feel of keys against my fingers, my satiated after-dinner feeling, and the sound of a train horn far in the distance as I write this. You could tune in to my stream and perceive my reality, at least until you decided to opt for something a bit more exciting.
This would mark a massive shift in the human race as significant as the creation of language. In slipping into another’s perception, the ego melts away. The Virtual Human Interaction Lab’s study on switching avatars to other ages and races caused deep subconscious shifts towards empathizing with the “other”.
Like any technological changes, this will likely proceed incrementally. 5G networks, cloud computing and AI will make livestreaming 3D environments possible far before read/write BCIs. Google’s DeepMind neural network can already construct a 3D environment from a 2D photo, opening the door to true outward-facing volumetric video. We still have time to determine the language of the medium.
Conclusion
In summary, our work today informs the content and ecosystem of tomorrow. Working with intention, we can build the foundation for a metaverse that supports wellness, privacy, and freedom. We might envision an open-garden VR ecosystem with a focus on ethical content and design for mindfulness, a humane search engine, and personal agency over data using a digital democracy system. This is in no way an exhaustive list or holistic plan, rather an idea to spark discussion on the ethical development of immersive media. Developers, content creators, business owners, and, most importantly, users must join this discussion to shape the technology that will in turn shape us.
Sources
[1] Madary, Michael et al. (2016). Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology. Front. Robot. AI 3:3.
[2] Alexander, Bruce K. et al. (1981). Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, Vol 15, 4:571–576.
[3] Twenge, Jean M. et al. (2017). Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time. Clinical Psychological Science, Vol 6, 1:3–17.
[4] Calvert, Sandra L. et al. (1994). Impact of virtual reality on young adults’ physiological arousal and aggressive thoughts: Interaction versus observation. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Vol 15, 1:125–139.
[5] Fox, Jesse et al. (2009). Virtual virgins and vamps: The effects of exposure to female characters’ sexualized appearance and gaze in an immersive virtual environment. Sex Roles, 61 (3–4), 147–157.
