Virtual/Mixed/Augmented Reality

[MachineGhost]

Which raises another issue. One of the underappreciated aspects of synthetic reality is that every virtual world is potentially a total surveillance state. By definition, everything inside a VR or MR world is tracked. After all, the more precisely and comprehensively your body and your behavior are tracked, the better your experience will be.

During a virtual journey, whether it lasts two minutes or two hours, the things your gaze lingers on, the places you choose to visit, how you interact with others and in what mood could all be captured in great detail to customize the experiences to your preferences and tendencies. But many other uses for this data are also obvious. This comprehensive tracking of your behavior inside these worlds could be used to sell you things, to redirect your attention, to compile a history of your interests, to persuade you subliminally, to quantify your actions for self-improvement, to personalize the next scene, and so on. If a smartphone is a surveillance device we voluntarily carry in our pocket, then VR will be a total surveillance state we voluntarily enter.

As far as I can tell, there are no VR systems that currently store the data they track or do anything with it beyond the first-order job of creating the world and your avatar. While they’re aware of this potential, they are simply too consumed with getting the virtual worlds to work to bother with exploiting the data feed. Inevitably, however, some will graduate to view this immense trove of personalized data as a commercial treasure. The familiar puzzles of its legal status, who has access to it, what government claims apply, and what can be done with it will occupy us as a society in the near future. It’s very easy to imagine a company that succeeds in dominating the VR universe quickly stockpiling intimate data on not just what you and 3 billion other people favorite but what you do on weekends, what people you pay attention to, what scares you, where you go when you’re tired, how you greet strangers, whether you’re depressed, and a thousand other details. To do that in real life would be expensive and intrusive. To do that in VR will be invisible and cheap.

http://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/