The governance of the ‘metaverse’, underpinned by extended reality (XR) technology, has garnered increasing attention from policymakers, industry, and regulators. Despite highly productive critiques of industrial governance practices and initiatives – such as those focused on responsible innovation and diversity, equity, and inclusion within XR – there has been limited comprehensive examination of XR governance…
Over the past few years, my research has been focused on exploring the imagined futures of XR technologies. Beyond just trying to understand what kind of future projects industry envisions, I’ve been particularly interested in studying the values and logics that anchor these visions. There’s an essential set of questions that emerges when industry enthusiasts…
Recently, we submitted our VR book – Fantasies of Virtual Reality – to the publisher, at which point we turned our mind to the much-neglected art log. This has been, for Marcus in particular in the past week, quite the rabbit hole, where we learnt more about the earliest history of VR and further developed…
Last month, Apple revealed its long-teased Vision Pro headset, a device that uses augmented reality technology to project a digital image onto the physical world. But, Apple revealed, it won’t work — at least out of the box — if you wear glasses. Instead, you’ll need to buy inserts to attach to the device lens. Apple’s…
AR and VR intersect (and often conflict) with expectations of privacy in public space in ways that will only become more salient over time. There is a varied and sustained engagement with the topic in the AR literature, which act as sophisticated surveillance systems. As Mark Pesce notes – “[f]ar less a new beginning than…
Both augmented reality and virtual reality have increasingly pushed to become key players in the workplace. AR has had a much longer history within the workplace, particularly as an assistive technology in manufacturing industries. There is a body of research in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that presents experimental cases – with Funk…
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the “metaverse” – which the Meta founder describes as “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content – you are in it” – will radically change our lives. So far, Meta’s main metaverse product is a virtual reality playground called Horizon Worlds. When Zuckerberg announced his company’s metaverse push in October 2021, the prevailing sentiment was that it was something nobody had asked for, nor particularly wanted.
Gender in extended reality Kate Euphemia Clark, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston Gender-based discrimination in mixed reality is a pernicious problem, both at the level of experiencing gameplay, and more deeply at the level of the technology itself. This will only become more pervasive as metaverse products become more entwined in our work and social…
It’s been over 20 years since the original release of Pokémon Red and Green for the Gameboy, in which players travel the virtual environment to catch virtual creatures called Pokémon. Unlike the Gameboy game, where this encounter with Pokémon takes place in the virtual space resembling the Japanese region of Kantō, players of Pokémon Go…