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...
President Joe Biden wrote an Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 11, 2023 calling for “serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy.” Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint tweeted out that “I’ll sit down with anyone to explain why privacy...
On September 8, 2020, the XR Safety Initiative launched their XR Privacy Framework 1.0 which is a set of self-directed, privacy guidelines aimed to empower “individuals and organizations with a common language and a practical tool that is flexible...
There’s an upcoming Virtual World Initiative (aka the Metaverse Initiative) at the European Commission on May 31st, and I had a chance to get Florence G’sell’s thoughts on it. She’s a law professor in France teaching at the University of Lorraine...
The European Union’s AI Act is pending legislation that is classifying different AI applications across different tiers of risk, and there are a number of ways that this legislation could shape the future of how the Metaverse unfolds, especially as...
I interview Jameson Spivack, who is a senior policy analyst at the Future of Privacy Forum leading their work on Immersive [XR] Technologies of VR/AR/MR, neurotech, BCIs, biometrics, ad practices, and regulatory frameworks. We talk about how there...
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...
I had a chance to drop by the Brooklyn office of Brain Control Interface start-up OpenBCI in order to get a hands-on demo of Project Galea, which includes a range of different biometric and physiological sensors such as EOC, EMG, EDA, PPG sensors 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...
On October 21, there was a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference organized by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation as well as XR Association covering some other public policy issues relevant to XR technologies, but also really focused on...
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...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit that has been defending civil liberties & digital rights for over 30 years since it was first announced on July 10, 1990. My first conversation with the EFF was with Dave Maass at the VR Privacy...
In her Contextual Integrity theory of privacy, Helen Nissembaum defines privacy as 'appropriate flows of information' where the appropriateness is defined by the context and its contextual informational norms. Contextual Integrity is a paradigm...
Ellysse Dick is a policy analyst who has written 10 technology policy publications over the last year about VR & AR for the The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. The ITIF is a non-partisan, non-profit tech policy think tank, who says...
OpenBCI's Project Galea was originally announced on November 19, 2020 as a 'hardware and software platform that merges next-generation biometrics with mixed reality.' OpenBCI has been collaborating with MIT Ph.D. student Guillermo Bernal in...
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...
Brittan Heller is a human rights lawyer who recently published a paper pointing out that there are some significant gaps in privacy laws that do not cover the types of physiological and biometric data that will be available from virtual and...
On March 18th, Facebook Reality Labs Research announced some of their research into next-generation neuromotor input devices for mixed reality applications. I paraphrased the most interesting insights from their press conferences announcement, but I...
I participated in a Facebook press event on Tuesday, March 16th that featuring some Facebook Human-Computer Interaction Research on AR Neural Inputs, Haptics, Contextually-Aware-AI, & Intelligent Clicks. It was an on-the-record event for print...
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...
Stanford University has just published an important research paper that hows how motion tracked data in VR can be identifiable of specific users. The paper titled Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR...
The XR Association is a non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association with members including Facebook/Oculus, Google, Microsoft, Sony, & HTC. They're focused on general awareness and education, lobbying Congress on XR policy issues, and promoting research...
Virtual and Augmented Reality pose unique privacy challenges, and so it's worth going back to look at the evolution of privacy laws in the United States to see how we got to this point today. There's also a lot of current discussions for the need...
The Oculus Quest 2 was announced at Facebook Connect today, and I was able to get early access to it last week to try it out. I wanted to invite Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang to share his impressions, and to unpack some of my experiences as well...
I was invited to join the F Reality Podcast over the weekend with VR Oasis's Mike, Nathie, Rowdy Guy, and Zimtok5 to be able to talk about this past week's news about Facebook's new requirement that all new VR users and hardware will be required to...
The Oculus Quest launched on May 21, 2019. Nine days later I was at Augmented World Expo doing interviews and preparing a main stage talk about The Ethical & Moral Dilemmas of Mixed Reality.
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...
The IEEE VR 2020 Conference brought together the academic XR community to share their latest research, and to talk about topics that are of interest to the wider immersive technology industry. I participated on a panel discussion on Ethics and...
There have been a number of documentaries at Sundance over the past three years that have taken a critical lens the social impacts of technology including The Cleaners (2018), The Great Hack (2019), The Social Dilemma (2020), and Coded Bias (2020)...
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...
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...
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...
Sophia Batchelor is a recent neuroscientist graduate from UC Berkeley who focused on immersive technologies and neuroethics. We talk about the power of XR for creating new memories, the moral implications of experiential design when XR can be so...
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...
Tested editor Norm Chan has been covering the evolution of Virtual Reality since seeing a early prototype of the Oculus Rift at CES 2013, which was after the initial debut at E3 2012 & the successful Kickstarter in August 2012. So Chan has been...
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...
Doug North Cook is an assistant professor at Chatham University, and he holds an immersive design residency at Fallingwater architectural landmark in Pittsburg. North Cook is trying to synthesize the many different design frameworks and principles...
Walter Greenleaf has been involved with the intersection of virtual reality and medicine for 35 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect in order to get some of his impressions from the keynote announcements. He was at the...
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research invited me to moderate a panel discussion at GDC titled 'The Future of VR: Neuroscience and Biosensor Driven Development' featuring CIFAR scholars Craig Chapman and Alona Fyshe, as well as Jake Stauch...
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...