This is a 19-minute talk that I gave at Laval Virtual 2023 that is summarizing the work that I’ve done on XR Ethics over the past ten years. There’s around 60 slides in this talk, and so you may prefer watching the video version over on...
Consensus Gentium is took him the Grand Jury prize for SXSW Immersive 2023, and it’s the most immersive phone-based experience that I’ve ever had. The Latin title translated means that “If everyone believes it, it must be true,” and it’s a near-term...
Nita Farahany argues that we need to establish a new human right of Cognitive Liberty in order to address the threats of Neurotech like VR, AR, BCIs, & non-invasive neural interfaces in her new book Battle for the Brain: Defending the Right to Think...
Andrew Kissel has been recreating moral dilemmas like the Trolley Problem in VR at his Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab at Old Dominion University. I had a chance to talk about his work in moral philosophy around catalyzed by Morgan Luck’s paper “The...
Moral philosopher Erick J. Ramirez writes that we "we are now in the beginning stages of a methodological VR renaissance in moral psychology" in his book "The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Worlds: Building Worlds." He argues that our imagination...
There was an Existing Law and Extended Reality: A Research Symposium held at Stanford Law School on Friday, January 6th, 2023, that brought together legal scholars, industry experts, civil society researchers, and academics to look at how immersive...
The Metaverse and Its Governance is the final paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Education is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Medicine is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. This paper explores the applications of medical XR, trends of telemedicine, AI assistant bots, and some...
The new business models of the Metaverse have yet to be fully forged? Will the existing structures of surveillance capitalism be extended into the new frontiers of biometric & physiological data? Or will there be new emergent & disruptive models for...
The next series in the IEEE XR Ethics series is deconstructing the paper title 'Who Owns Our Second Lives: Virtual Clones and the Right to Your Identity' featuring the lead author Thommy Eriksson - Researcher and Teacher Chalmers University in...
The ethical questions around privacy in virtual and augmented reality are some of the most pervasive, unanswered questions in XR with the top two questions being: What new types of intimate biometric & physiological data are available through XR...
Continuing on my series on XR Ethics in collaboration with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, this episode dives into the White Paper on Diversity, Inclusion, & Accessibility featuring Isabel Guenette Thornton (Ph.D...
The IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality has published the first eight white papers investigating different ethical aspects of virtual and augmented reality. This has been a collaboration with dozens of XR industry professionals...
There are a lot of unsupervised children in different social VR applications, and hopefully this interview with Lance G. Powell, Jr. about his article Parental Guide for the Metaverse can be a part of helping inform parents about some best practices...
I was invited to participate on panel on Metaverse Ethics at Gamesbeat's Into the Metaverse 2 summit on January 26, 2022. Privacy in XR was the biggest theme and open question that each of the panelists focused on. This is a recording of the...
I caught up with the XR Safety Initiative CEO & Founder Kavya Pearlman as well as Kristina Podnar, who is an independent Digital Policy Consultant, XRSI's Global Digital Policy Advisor, & the chair of XRSI's Metaverse Reality Check. We...
I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called 'E3XR: An Analytical Framework for Ethical, Educational and Eudaimonic XR Design,' which looks at the intersection of XR ethics, best practice...
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I've received about the ultimate potential of VR over the past 7 years. I hope that it serves as a primer on the scope and...
Neuroscientist researcher Rafael Yuste started the Columbia University's Neuro-Rights Initiative to promote an ethical framework to preserve a set of human rights within neuro-technologies. He co-authored a Nature paper titled 'Four ethical...
Facebook's Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described it on Twitter by saying, 'Facebook will send...
I've been an executive committee member of the IEEE Global Initiative of the Ethics of Extended Reality for the past six months, and we had our official kickoff meeting on Friday, February 5th. The goal of this effort is to produce a white paper...
John Robb has a concept of Networked Tribalism, which is a result of the combination of filter bubbles, AI algorithms, and political polarization. Robb is a military analyst who looks at the impact of technology on culture, and he started his Global...
There is a lot of sensitive data that will captured by virtual reality devices that present a wide range of ethical and moral dilemmas that I've been covering on The Voices of VR podcast since 2016. During Facebook Connect, Facebook released their...
On August 7, 2020, I participated in a panel discussion about Ethical Design in Immersive Media organized by the University of Oregon as a part of Design Week Portland. The panel featured Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy...
Howard Rose has been working in medical VR for over 20 years now, and he's the co-founder and CEO of Firsthand Technology. He reached out to me after listening to the XR for Change panel on Ethics in order to talk about some of the specific ethical...
On March 25, 2019, the IEEE Standards Association published Ethically-Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (PDF) covering the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence embedded into...
Ethics in XR is a vast topic, and I had a chance to moderate a panel discussion for Games for Change / XR for Change Talk and Play salon with four people including Tom Ffiske (Editor of VirtualPerceptions.com), Galit Ariel (TechnoFuturist), Kavya...
I had a conversation with philosopher Lewis Gordon at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Meeting in January 2019 that really stuck with me. He writes about the philosophy of racism, and takes a very holistic and systemic approach in...
Asad J. Malik is an augmented reality artist and director who created Terminal 3, which premiered at Tribeca 2018, and Jester's Tale, which premiered at Sundance 2019.
Professor Mandy Rose of the University of the West of England, Bristol is one of the three principle investigators of the Virtual Reality: Immersive Documentary Encounters project that's funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research...
This is an XR Ethics Manifesto that I presented at Greenlight's XR Strategy Conference on October 18, 2019. This is the culmination of seven focused months of panel discussions, interviews, and talks exploring many of the nuances of ethics and...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR/VR Ad Strategy at Unity Technologies, and he's committing to taking an ethical approach to advertising. Much of the advertising at Unity is done within the context of a mobile game, and so there is less pressure to...
Wendy Seltzer is the Lead Strategist and Counsel for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and she says that the concerns of privacy and security on the web have been taking up a lot of her time lately. I had a chance to talk to her at Mozilla's View...
The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) published a set of Ethical Web Principles on May 30, 2019 in order to provide an ethical framework when evaluating new standards. The TAG group doesn't have any formal power in the W3C, but their...
Selena Deckelmann is the Senior Director of Firefox Browser Engineering, and she gave a great talk at Mozilla's View Source conference titled 'Our privacy and the web' that covered a lot of the work that she's been doing to protect user privacy...
Mozilla's Diane Hosfelt is the Privacy and Security Lead on Mozilla’s Mixed Reality Team, and I had a chance to sit down with her again a two months after our SIGGRAPH panel discussion. Hosfelt has been spending a lot of time writing academic papers...
At the VR Privacy Summit in November 2018, I met a number of privacy engineers who were actively implementing privacy-first architectures. I wanted to bring together some a group of these forward-thinking privacy architects together for a more...
Danny O'Brien is the Director of Strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been around since 1990. He describes it as the ACLU for geeks on the Internet as they're made up of technologists, activists, and lawyers who are trying to...
The Virtual World Society provided me an opportunity to give a main stage talk at Augmented World Expo on the Ethical and Moral Dilemmas of Mixed Reality. I tried to lay out as many of the ethical implications of XR as I could in this talk after...
Avi Bar-Zeev has been involved with immersive technologies for over 27 years, including working on the very first prototypes of Microsoft's HoloLens back in 2010. He's mostly been working on secret projects for the last 11 years, and so I got was...
Open AR Cloud held it's first symposium before the start of Augmented World Expo this year, and I participated on a panel discussion on XR Privacy & Security which included the following panelists:
For the past seven months, I've been investigating the topic of ethics in XR by participating on a number of panel discussions, conducting interviews, and presenting talks. At SXSW this year, I was invited by Rory DuBoff, who is Accenture...
Ethics in Mixed Reality is a hot topic, and I moderated a panel discussion at SIGGRAPH. This panel was attended by a number of people in the immersive industry including HTC's Daniel Robbins, who works as a principal UX designer at HTC Creative Labs...
Andre Elijah is an independent VR developer who recently launched Viewport Interactive working on branded experiences for car companies and beyond. We talk about the Elixir Quest Handracking demo that he tried at Oculus Connect 6, and how it shifted...
Brittan Heller is a technology & human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University where she is investigating the intersection of technology & policy when it comes to online harassment & hate speech within virtual worlds...
Ethical design of technology is a hot topic right now, and Tristan Harris has been catalyzing a lot of broader discussion about the perils of persuasive technologies. He quit his job as a design ethicist at Google after feeling limited in his...
The XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) was co-founded by Kavya Pearlman and formally announced at the Open AR Cloud Symposium on Tuesday, May 28, 2019. XRSI is going to be looking at the safety and security issues within XR in collaboration with security...
The Open AR Cloud is a volunteer organization whose mission statement is to 'drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.'...
There's a lot of intensity in the world right now, and it reminded me of a short excerpt about VR shooters from a longer conversation that I had with Danny Bittman back at Oculus Connect 4 in 2017. I think it speaks to some of what's happening in...