After unpleasant encounters
Please distance! Zuckerberg’s digital dream world already has a harassment problem
Minimum distance in the virtual world: Characters in “Horizon Worlds” and “Horizon Venues” must not come closer than 1.20 meters.
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In the real world it would have decisively contained the corona pandemic, in virtual worlds it looks like an April Fool’s joke: Meta’s VR playgrounds are given distance rules so that the characters cannot bother each other.
A woman dares her first steps in Meta’s VR world “Horizon Worlds”. Shocked, she rips the VR glasses off her head. Outraged, she later recounts, “Within 60 seconds, three male characters approached me, all with a male voice, and touched me inappropriately.” The message made headlines worldwide, Meta’s perfect world has a harassment problem. In response, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s company announced that effective immediately, invisible barriers will be drawn around each character, and the virtual figurines will not be allowed to come closer than four feet.
“Personal Boundary is rolling out across Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues starting today, and by default it makes it feel like there’s a good three feet of separation between your avatar and other people,” explains Meta. “In the future, we will explore the possibility of adding new controls and changes to the user interface, such as the ability to adjust the size of the personal border.” In order to be able to continue giving each other high-fives or fist-bumps, Meta instructs players to fully extend their arms.
The Metaverse is in its infancy
The goal for Meta is clear: The first step on the way to the new Internet, the Metaverse, named after the model from the novel “Snow Crash”, must be a safe experience for all participants – or threaten to fail. Because even if the renaming of the former Facebook group and the many visions related to the future core business sound as if Meta already has a finished concept for Metaverse in the drawer, the concrete developments on the way to the brave new world are clear rudimentary.
So far, the Metaverse – or what you mean by it – is nothing more than three VR games implemented a bit thinly. “Horizon Worlds” is an open virtual world for users of the VR glasses Oculus Rift S or Oculus Quest 2, “Horizon Venues” is a kind of event platform, for example to be able to attend virtual concerts. There is now also a virtual office. Access is only available in the US or Canada. The projects are based on apps that Facebook has been working on for years to make the Oculus brand’s own VR glasses attractive.
No new ideas, but old problems
Those in the know know that all of Meta’s previous VR offerings are by no means new. Speaking to Business Insider, the former Evernote boss paints a bleak picture: “It’s an old idea. It’s uncreative, it’s been tried many, many times over the last four decades, and it never worked. ” And it’s true: At its core, “Horizon Worlds” is in no way different from alternatives such as “Second Life” or “Habbo Hotel” – and therefore struggles with the same problems.
Harassment, abuse and malicious intent when visiting a virtual world have been known for years. A brief digression: In 2006, a robbery of the children’s game “Habbo Hotel” caused a stir. Characters formed swastikas and no longer let other participants into the pool. In Disney’s “Club Penguin” there was a lot of work for the moderators when users made it their sport to violate the strict rules of the browser game as quickly as possible and thus be removed. “Second Life” also repeatedly hit the headlines, among other things because of virtual child abuse and trafficking in child pornography via the platform.
At least ten years of work
For the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg has more in mind. The company explains that star: “Building the metaverse is about evolving VR into a universal computing platform, much like our smartphone or laptop today. There has been a shift from the desktop web to the mobile internet in the last decade, and the next decade will be about the shift go to the metaverse.” According to Meta, it gives itself ten to 15 years for this. It remains to be seen whether users can be convinced with a problem-laden graphic chat.
Sources: Meta, Nina-Jane Patel, Technology Review, Business Insider, Teh Meme Wiki, Variety, Guardians