![]() In a November blog post, Meta also said it was investing $50 million in global research to develop its products responsibly. Kristina Milian, a Meta spokeswoman, said the company was working with policymakers, experts and industry partners on the metaverse. In March, Andrew Bosworth, a Meta executive who will become chief technology officer in 2022, wrote in an employee memo that moderating what people say and how they act in the metaverse “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.” The memo was reported earlier by The Financial Times. The companies are encouraging people to join the metaverse, with Meta, which makes the Oculus Quest headsets, cutting prices for the products during the holidays. But as Meta and other huge companies make the metaverse their platform of the future, the issues are likely to be magnified by the companies’ reach over billions of people. Toxic behavior in gaming and in virtual reality is not new. “With the full metaverse, it’s going to be so much more intense.” “When something bad happens, when someone comes up and gropes you, your mind is tricking you into thinking it’s happening in the real world,” Ms. That’s because virtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened. In one popular virtual reality game, VRChat, a violating incident occurs about once every seven minutes, according to the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.īad behavior in the metaverse can be more severe than today’s online harassment and bullying. ![]() Harassment, assaults, bullying and hate speech already run rampant in virtual reality games, which are part of the metaverse, and there are few mechanisms to easily report the misbehavior, researchers said. Yet even as tech giants bet big on the concept, questions about the metaverse’s safety have surfaced. In October, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, said he believed so much in the metaverse that he would invest billions in the effort. The world’s largest tech companies - Microsoft, Google, Apple and others - are hurtling headlong into creating the metaverse, a virtual reality world where people can have their avatars do everything from play video games and attend gym classes to participate in meetings. It’s the metaverse - I’ll do what I want,’” said Ms. “He shrugged as if to say: ‘I don’t know what to tell you. Shocked, she asked the player, whose avatar appeared male, to stop. The stranger then simulated groping and ejaculating onto her avatar, Ms. Once she turned on the game, she maneuvered her avatar into a virtual lobby in the immersive digital world and waited for the action to begin.īut as she waited, another player’s avatar approached hers. SAN FRANCISCO - Chanelle Siggens recently strapped on an Oculus Quest virtual reality headset to play her favorite shooter game, Population One.
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