What it’s like to be in the Metaverse

What it's like to be in the Metaverse

Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern wore two Quest VR glasses and spent 24 hours in a hotel room and experienced some of this world’s current applications. Stern attended Zoom-like meetings with his avatar using the Spatial app through Horizon Workroom. He then navigated public groups like comedy shows, concerts, and chat rooms with Microsoft’s Altspace VR.

He was connected to Supernatural as his favorite practice in this universe, took part in physical activities in the Galapagos, and most recently meditated in the Azur Desert in British Columbia with Guided Meditation. The end result of all this is: “The virtual reality I lived one day is an escape from the real world.”

In her video “Inside the Metaverse” published on Bloomberg, Parmy Olson explained that being a woman in this world is quite strange and disturbing. She explained that there were too many men in the environment, women were in the minority, that she was watched and uncomfortable by men, and that she got rid of such approaches by silencing the other person (“muting”). As a result, he said that the first impression of this universe was not positive at all.

At this stage, it is understood that there are serious security problems in the metaverse, where technology companies have invested heavily. In the virtual reality world, harassment, assault, bullying and especially hate speech are common. For example, according to Frenkel and Browning from the New York Times to the Center for Combating Digital Hate (DNMM), a breach occurs every seven minutes on VRChat. With the spread of the Metaverse, people’s perception of unwanted touches in the digital world as if they are real will greatly increase the discomfort. A.Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta, owned by Facebook, openly stated in an internal memo that it is not possible to control these ailments to a meaningful extent.

More important than these experiences that force adults will be the difficulties that children will face. The 11-hour recording of VRChat, played with Oculus West glasses, reported that more than a hundred problematic events were recorded. The fact that some of them are related to children under the age of 13 increases the importance of the problem.

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