In 1992, the novel Snow crash, from Neal Stephenson, was published.
First Matrix movie was released in 1999.
Second life was launched in 2003.
Today, with the progresses of virtual reality, the big firms have decided that the time to implement it has come.
There are many questions.
Access by helm or special glasses is a big limit.
A true metaverse supposes total interoperability between the different systems.
The metaverse suppose a total change in our ways of buying, interrelating and so.
The risks are real.
Some are the difficulties to police it, the risk of dictatorships using it, the explosion of our way of life, many people forgetting their real life and so.
A 32-year-old man was found dead in an Internet cafe in Taiwan after a marathon three-day gaming binge, the island’s second death of an online gamer this year.
If it were to be “safe”, it would have to be totally controlled.
If it’s “open source”, you open it up to all sorts.
2nd Life (there’s another one too) is a good example.
… and, well, the internet too.
Yipes, it’s even freakier than I thought. Perhaps it’s just as well we’re upending our climate engine, destroying biosphere, trashing our governmental systems, and abandoning all pretense of respecting and abiding by age old social and ethical norms.
Interesting article written by someone who’s actually in love with the technology and believes in it, but who also see some unavoidable pitfalls, that we should be aware of.
But, if history is any guide, we’ll ignore those, since Profits Über Alles is still the name of the game, while societal and personal health/safety, pretty much always take a backseat to blind greed.
Early augmented reality (AR), Louis Rosenberg, NOVEMBER 6, 2021
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… Personally, I find this terrifying. That is because augmented reality will fundamentally change all aspects of society and not necessarily in a good way. I say this as someone who has been a champion of AR for a long time. In fact, my enthusiasm began 30 years ago, before the phrase “augmented reality” had even been coined. Back then, I was the principal investigator on a pioneering effort conducted at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) with support from Stanford University and NASA. Known as the Virtual Fixtures project, for the very first time, it enabled users to reach out and interact with a mixed reality of both real and virtual objects. …
… But at the same time, I am very concerned about the negative consequences, and it is not because I worry about bad actors hacking the technology or otherwise hijacking our good intentions. No, I am concerned about the legitimate uses of AR by the powerful platform providers that will control the infrastructure. …
… If a family cannot afford AR hardware ( Cc: half the population, two-thirds?), they will live in a world where critical content is completely invisible to them. Talk about disenfranchisement. …
… If we have learned anything from the unexpected evils of social media, it is that good intentions are not enough to prevent systems from being deployed with serious structural problems. And once those structural problems are in place, it is extremely difficult to undo the damage. This means the proponents of AR need to get things right the first time.