The horrors of virtuality

From time to time I comment on the unfortunate fact that many people believe the tripe and worse that they read on social media, quite possibly curated by some tripe factory which has been well paid so to do.

Then yesterday I read of virtual groping at references 1 and 2; that is to say a male avatar making as if to grope a female avatar, the complainant, to whom it was all too real. From where I associate to the lesser complaint of being attacked by vertigo when watching a film about climbing Everest shown at the IMAX cinema at Waterloo. So if that seemed real, I can well believe that a head-set job is going to seem even more real, to be even more real.

So, as we used to say in the world of work, since the writer of reference 2 has a problem, then we all have a problem. We can’t just look the other way; something needs to be done. At the moment the something appears to be providing escape hatches; the problem seems to be making sure that people know about them and how to get to them.

Presumably, you get plenty of pests of one sort or another in Internet chat rooms. Hopefully there are protocols for dealing with them – although I imagine that there is a problem with their hiding behind aliases. From where I associate to being told at a Wikimania conference (noticed at reference 3) that some Wikipedia editors have to hide behind aliases because of the amount of abuse they get from people who object to what they are putting up. As I recall it, particularly a problem in countries with serious political problems, serious social problems, bad history or some combination thereof.

More pests in multi-player computer games. People who aren’t content just to play the game; they want to mess about with the other players.

And when the computer games – or whatever it is that Facebook are up to (noticed at reference 4) – start putting you inside an avatar you can find yourself in the present pickle. Pests there aren’t just being a pain, they are trying to touch you up or smack you across the face.

Let’s hope that the people who build and sell these things take a fair share of the responsibility for dealing with all this fall-out. Not that dealing with the tripe and worse I started with seems to have been a priority – not even with companies and corporations which you might think could well afford it.

I wonder about real places for meeting people, places like gyms, clubs and bars. Apart from a reasonable degree of collective responsibility from the customers, there are also real staff. Staff who should be keeping an eye on things and staff to whom one can go for help when there is a problem. I can see that doing that might be expensive online, but maybe something could be worked out. Maybe along the lines of security guards at buildings minding a whole bank of screens. Or maybe the DeepMind people could build some virtual staff, clever enough to work in real time.

I wonder also if the Guardian is on the case, has waded into this particular debate? Right up its street, I would have thought.

Going further

Speculating this morning, what might happen if the games consoles were enhanced to include fuller control of the avatars which one was playing inside? Perhaps to give one something like the control that a puppeteer has over a puppet? With appropriate video and audio feedback. Add a smell generator to the front of the head set, perhaps working off a basis of fifty basic smells, rather like a computer printer does colour with four or five basic colours? Put you inside a full body suit which gave you appropriate tactile sensations? Maybe painful ones? Add an inner voice with the avatar telling you quietly what was going on in its mind, what it was feeling – which I imagine would further confuse one’s sense of difference between self and avatar.

What if one started playing dungeon and dragon like games from inside such an avatar?

With avatars able to degrade, to get ill and die – or be killed. The possibilities sound both unpleasant and dangerous. Amateur dramatics run amok. Although I also remember reading a science fiction story in which the populations of two warring countries all donned headsets so that they could experience at second hand the fight to the death of the two champions to whom the task of deciding the outcome had been delegated. In the story, all very cathartic.

Who or what will hold talented geeks back from building such things? I worry that humans seem to be strongly motivated to explore the possible, without much regard for the consequences.

Then again, I know next to nothing about modern computer games. Maybe I am completely wrong about what is being done now and what might be done in the future.

PS: bearing in mind that in the image above, turned up by Bing, you are looking at the avatars. It has not been arranged so that you are behind the eyes of one of them, looking out. Does the Facebook effort do that yet?

References

Reference 1: The metaverse has a groping problem already: A woman was sexually harassed on Meta’s VR social media platform. She’s not the first – and won’t be the last – Tanya Basu, MIT Technology Review – 2021.

Reference 2: https://medium.com/athena-talks/my-first-virtual-reality-sexual-assault-2330410b62ee. 

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-another-six.html. The Wikimania conference.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/where-elephants-go-to-die.html. The Facebook thing.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/04/two-experiments.html. It seems that I last worried about all this more than five years ago.