The governance of the âmetaverseâ, 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…
In September 2023, Unity had to eat its words as the game production community “united” against the platform (Parrish, 2023b). Developers vociferously proclaimed boycotts and that the company was greedy, adding that titles made from its software of the same name would be removed from distribution store shelves (Parrish, 2023a). Their angst, directed at the…
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 wonât work â at least out of the box â if you wear glasses. Instead, youâll need to buy inserts to attach to the device lens. Appleâs…
Marcus: Thank you so much for joining us. Could you give us a bit of a brief introduction to your research on VR? What have you been interested in in the past and what are you working on now? Leighton: My interest in VR goes back. Personally, a hell of a long way. I remember…
RIP Metaverse. Not my headline, but the leading line of an article in Business Insider in May 2023. As I write this at the end of May, I can look back on a month of relentless articles informing us of the death of the metaverse. Requests for a momentâs silence for the death of the…
Most people who spend significant time with virtual reality become familiar with the queasiness that VR experiences can leave you with long after you remove the headset. In my case, I can locate this feeling in a very precise spot in my stomach: a knotted, vaguely poisoned sensation that sometimes takes hours to wear off….
We have no way of knowing exactly what form the metaverse will eventually take but that doesnât mean we canât start regulating it. What we know about the metaverse The term metaverse might invoke visions of gaming platforms and virtual worlds in which people socialise in real time as unique digital avatars. Platforms such as…
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 â with Funk…
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the âmetaverseâ â which the Meta founder describes as âan embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content â you are in itâ â will radically change our lives. So far, Metaâs main metaverse product is a virtual reality playground called Horizon Worlds. When Zuckerberg announced his companyâs metaverse push in October 2021, the prevailing sentiment was that it was something nobody had asked for, nor particularly wanted.
A growing body of research has documented multiple challenges with commercial content moderation conducted by social media platforms today, from appalling working conditions for moderators who are overwhelmingly located in the Global South, to the issue of biased algorithms, and the lack of transparency and accountability in moderation decisions. Moderation is no doubt an incredibly difficult task.