A holosafety scale?

Submitted by giulio.ruffini on April 14, 2008 - 21:29.
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As Virtual Reality (Presence) technology improves, ethical issues are bound to arise. Basically, future technologies will make the user strain to differentiate between what is real and what is virtual. Furthermore, as recent research shows, our bodies and brains assess reality at different processing scales. Your guts may be saying that what you are experiencing is real, while your brain knows you are part of an experiment.

To learn more about the ethical and legal aspects of future VR technologies, visit http://peachbit.org and, in particular, http://www.starlab.info/peach/?q=node/50.

As is discussed ther, consider the following scenario: A social psychologist has set up an experiment in an immersive environment that is designed to study language and gender in the interaction between avatars.  In the course of the experiment, an avatar controlled by a researcher exhibits abusive behaviour toward a participant’s avatar.

This is just an example in which a subject is part of a VR experiment in which he or she knows "it is not real", but in which the realism may be extremely high.

In this type of scenario I would propose there is not black or white answer: it all depends on the degree of realism!   I would therefore like to consider a scale we may call the Holodeck-Safety scale (HS), say ranging from 1 to 5.

You may do some types of experiments up to some HS value, as dictated by ethics boards. If the degree of realism is extreme (HS-5), then even telling the subject of an experiment that they are about to be part of an experiment in a holodeck without real people, will not warrant the mental or physical safety of the subject. I can think of many gore scenarios in which this could happen, but I will spare you!

I view the brain as a multi-layer system (in the data processing sense, from senses to perceptions to meaning layers), and fooling 90% of the layers into believing may do a lot of damage already.

Here is a rapid sketch of what this scale may look like:

  •     HS-1: mono display, mono sound (tv)
  •     HS-2: today's state of the art in immersive vision and audio
  •     HS-3: includes integrated haptics
  •     HS-4: futuristic, ultra-realistic immersion with limited feedback
  •     HS-5: same as H4 but with feedback (i.e., you can get hit).

 

That is, the idea is that we are today experimenting with HS-1 and HS-2 technologies. Realism is weak.  Someday we will get to HS-5 (and yes, the world will have changed a lot).

 

By the way, I would like to add that we have to be careful with words. By "realism" here I don't mean that we can create scenarios which are very real (e.g., found in nature). Rather, that we can make subjects feel (and therefore act) like what they are experiencing is real. This is the key behind the RAVE idea, and I believe it is confusing to some of its critics.