Into the Metaverse by Cathy Hackl

Author:Cathy Hackl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399401791
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

A word to the wise

There’s huge potential to turn the concept of targeted ads on its head in the Metaverse. By creating more engaging experiences within the brands that consumers already want to engage with or want to learn more about, companies will be able to turn ads into experiences that attract these customers to their brands.

However, there’s a darker side to targeted ads in the Metaverse. Targeted ads in the 2D web rely on data collected about personal users based on things like click rates, dwell time, the context of other sites that they have visited, and the information that those sites have gathered—that’s a lot of data. Throw in head-mounted displays and the data is even more in depth.

While we think about our own experiences within VR, we often do not realize that those experiences are invasive because the headset needs to know our physical environment to establish the body’s orientation in physical space. This requires external cameras that, as we look into a VR headset, are looking at our homes or offices. This is doubly true for AR, which also inherently incorporates computer recognition and machine learning to understand even more about our surroundings. While we’re not aware of companies misusing this technology, it’s important to be aware that they certainly could.

Further, the headsets aren’t only reading our environment, they’re also increasingly able to read us. More and more headsets can determine and record a wearer’s gaze within experiences. This technology enables things such as more realistic social interactions, more efficient displays, and more user-friendly controls. However, it can also be used to learn a great deal about how users are thinking and behaving within experiences. This can be paired with other advanced trackers, such as the face tracker available for VIVE. Other even more advanced headsets, like HP’s award-winning Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition, promise even more detailed information about the state of the user within VR, including highly personal details like their cognitive load.

To be fair, the Reverb is targeted toward research, medical, high-end enterprise, and training applications—that kind of tech isn’t found in just any headset. Information HP can gather has huge potential benefits within those fields. However, as VR advances, it is conceivable that more headsets in the future will have these kinds of capabilities. Together, these technologies can be applied toward what XR ethicists are calling “biometric psychography”—the ability to essentially make a digital twin of a user’s mental identity. The concern isn’t that this data will exist; the concern is how this data might be used by agents other than the user.

There’s a lot to be said for the context in which this information exists. A person’s face is considered personally identifiable information. In fact, you have acquired personally identifiable information about the stranger you saw on the street this morning, but you don’t know who that person is. This is analogous to the kind of data that an HP headset gets from the user … but now it knows who it is.

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