Meta introduce social distancing in the Metaverse
Back Story: Meta/Facebook have announced a virtual distancing mechanism for their Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues Metaverse. The intention is to give avatars a “personal boundary”. Horizon Worlds was opened up to the general public in the US and Canada in December after an extensive period of beta testing.
The social distancing mechanism is an invisible force field with a radius of several virtual feet that surround each avatar. The invisible field will simply stop the forward motion of any avatar that hits it, with no haptic feedback.
Meta/Facebook says they have done this to stop other avatars from “invading personal space”, although friendly avatars can break the invisible force field to give each other a high five.
This move comes after at least one Horizon Worlds’ participant claimed to have been “virtually groped” by another user during the beta tests phase. A Meta beta tester claimed that another user on Horizon Worlds molested her in November. She complained and barred the person, but said that the Horizon Worlds plaza guide, who acts as a type of moderator, did nothing. She requested a protective “bubble” that would keep others away in the report, which appears to have led to Meta’s announcement of the new feature this week.
Nina Jane Patel, a metaverse researcher and co-founder of the child-focused Metaverse startup called Kabuni, said she was gang-raped in one of the virtual environments. Within 60 seconds of her joining, a few male avatars encircled hers, snapped photographs, and verbally assaulted her. Other instances of virtual reality sexual harassment date back to the early days of virtual reality headsets.
So What?: This move is almost certainly an exercise in equalising before the other team scores. In other words, this looks like a PR exercise to me. And you can hardly blame The Zuck and the leadership at MetaFacebook.
The rename to Meta and pivot to the Metaverse is hardly 6 months old and already The Zuck is facing the prospect that his vision for the Metaverse will be accused of being a breeding ground for misogyny. Harm is something The Zuck knows a lot about from the Facebook family of apps. The Metaverse was meant to be an antidote to it.
The problem is that we’re talking about avatars, not humans. Legally, no crime could ever be committed between avatars in a Metaverse. I recently covered reports about Replika in this issue of Wiser! Users were creating digital personalities in the form of chatbots and then abusing them. They pushed the Replika algorithms to learn how to respond to hateful, abusive and vile language.
In both of these examples of pitiful human behaviour, however objectionable, no human was harmed in the process. But it does beg a bagful of questions about virtual life. Are we going to need laws to protect users in the Metaverse? If yes, how do we define them? How do we enforce them? And what are the penalties for breaking the law?
It’s hard to conceive that in the emerging virtual world (which is a shared make-believe utopia) we even have to ask these type of questions.
Meanwhile, in a related story….
👁 The EU’s digital regulator has its eye on the Metaverse. Margrethe Vestager has said the Metaverse poses new competition challenges. The EU’s digital czar says, “We should start thinking about it now” when it comes to regulating new digital spaces.
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The article was first published in the Wiser! Newsletter on 11th February 2022. You can read the full article here.
