Step 12: Legacy

It's an important part of any project like this that the hard work survives beyond the end of our limited time on it.

We are delighted that our research collaborators in VR have gone on to use Kilter's techniques in further Public Engagement initiatives.

Thanks to Stuart Gray for this post from the front line.

Bristol Futures: Up Late @ We the Curious (September 2019)

As part of FUTURES, an annual festival of discovery which takes place across Bristol and Bath, we took the opportunity to share the work undertaken by the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship VR team and Kilter Theatre at the evening event “Up Late at We The Curious”. FUTURES is part of European Researchers' Night which is funded by the EU Commission. It aims to engage the European public in celebrating the latest and most stimulating research at a local and an international level. Simultaneous events took place in over 300 cities, spanning 27 European countries.

The evening itself involved the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship VR team (Kirsten, Stuart, Chris, and Jo) presenting a poster which summarised several VR project threads, including the ethics collaboration with Kilter Theatre and our work exploring non-fiction VR documentary encounters (http://vrdocumentaryencounters.co.uk/). The team recreated the centrepiece activity from the school workshops, ‘the timeline’ - populating the next 100 years with some of the predictions given by the young people from the secondary school we worked with, as well as inviting event guests to contribute their own predictions. The team also made available five VR experiences for the event attendees to use for themselves, grounding them in a range of different ethical issues for the future of the technology - inspired by the Metzinger and Madary in their 2017 paper ‘Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology’. 

These issues included the appropriateness of VR for children, the effects of viewing emotionally distressing content, the implications of offering a more engaging reality, and the impact of using VR to empathise with the challenges of other people. Following use of the technology, attendees completed a short questionnaire which asked them to reflect upon the future ethical issues alluded to within the chosen VR pieces. One of the questionnaire activities asked them to rank the following future VR risks in order of importance:

• Violating users’ sense of control over their choices and actions

In VR we can be provided with a virtual body. We might assume that movements in the real-world will be mirrored by this virtual body, but this may not necessarily be the case. The creators of the VR experiences can manipulate the actions of the virtual body without our input. In a hyper-immersive experience, this could lead a person to question whether the actions they see their virtual body undertake are truly the product of their own decision making.

• Distorting users’ perception of real-world reality

Repeated long-term exposure to virtual worlds may risk people struggling to easily define what is real and what is a simulation.

• Offering users a better than real-world reality

It may be that the virtual world presented to users is more appealing than the “real” world, letting them go to places they wouldn’t be able to visit, do things they would otherwise be unable to do, and spend time with people they may never meet in the “real” world.

• Obstructing users from physical bodily care routines

Living extended periods of time in virtual worlds may distract users from taking care of their own physical bodies. For example, washing, taking exercise, attending to the medical needs of themselves and dependants.

• Overlooking the value of non-verbal bodily communication during human-to-human interactions

If our social interactions increasingly take place within virtual worlds, it may change the way in which we communicate with other people and change the way we view our relationships. This has already been seen by the advent of email and social media platforms like Facebook. With technology-mediated social interactions such as these, it can sometimes be difficult to fully represent important communication cues like body language.

• Alienating technologically-disadvantaged members of society

For citizens with limited (or no) access to VR technology, mainstream uptake in the use of virtual environments risks excluding them from aspects of society and placing new limits upon their lives.

• Allowing users to freely explore controversial content

VR may enable users to explore controversial content in a way which is far more immersive and powerful than current forms of media. While there are often debates about the effects of viewing controversial media (such as extremist, violent, or pornographic content) on traditional platforms (e.g. TV, video, internet content, games, books), the immersive nature of VR could present even more serious emotional or psychological risks.

• Encouraging users’ development of malevolent personality traits

Aristotle once said that “we are what we repeatedly do”. By allowing people to simulate and practice actions in VR, it risks shaping their behaviour in the real world. If VR content encourages users to behave in ways which are damaging to themselves or other people, and rewards them for doing so, there is the chance that this behaviour could be reinforced and normalised within their real lives.

• Granting the unauthorised recreation and manipulation of others’ physical form

Much like our image rights in video and audio media, we may need to be aware of other people representing us in VR. However, not only may other people be able to represent our physical form in VR, they may be able to programme the behaviour of this character – showing us acting in ways we would not ordinarily behave.

• Letting third parties invade users’ privacy

A series of recent scandals have shown how our personal data can be used to target ideas, products and services to us and even to shape our behaviour. Tracking user behaviour in VR is another extension of these concerns and could inform those collecting data in even greater detail about our thoughts, feelings, preferences and interests.

The evening was attended by more than 500 people, a significant proportion of whom visited the team’s VR exhibit. Involvement ranged from simply chatting with the team about the research to undertaking the VR experiences for themselves and interjecting their own thoughts about ethics. Participants were invited to write their thoughts about the ethics of the technology on post-it notes and stick them onto a board within the exhibit. The output of this visual barometer was a window to the complexity of the VR ethics debate, as well as validating the importance of our research to the general public. We look forward to developing many of the ideas raised within our upcoming VR ethics workshop in which we will engage with industry and academics at the BBC.