virtual reality argumentative essay

109 Virtual Reality Topics & Essay Examples

When writing a virtual reality essay, it is hard to find just one area to focus on. Our experts have outlined 104 titles for you to choose from.

🏆 Best Virtual Reality Topics & Essay Examples

🕶️ good virtual reality research topics, 🤖 interesting virtual reality research paper topics, ❓ research questions about virtual reality.

Humanity has made amazing leaps in technology over the past several years. We have reached frontiers previously thought impossible, like the recreation of virtual environments using computers. These three-dimensional worlds can be accessed and explored by people. This is made possible with VR headsets, such as Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. If you’re eager to find out more, peek at our collection of VR research topics below!

• Virtual Reality Versus Augmented Reality In fact, this amounts to one of the merits of a virtual reality environment. A case example of this type of virtual reality is the Virtual Reality games.
• Virtual Reality Technology The third negative impact of virtual reality is that it causes human beings to start living in the world of fantasy.
• Virtual Reality Tourism Technology In the world of virtual tourism, we can be transported to any country and have the ability to interact and manipulate the elements within the world we are touring in a way that would not […]
• Virtual Reality Technology for Wide Target Audience Due to the numerous applications in both leisure and industry, as well as massive popularity with audiences of different ages, there is a chance that, in several years, evaluating the target audiences of Virtual Reality […]
• Virtual Reality: A Powerful New Technology for Filming The creation of VR highlights a new perception of space because, through technology, people can be transmitted to a different environment.
• Rusnak’s “The Thirteenth Floor” and The Concept of Virtual Reality In such consideration, this paper conducts a comparative analysis of The Thirteenth Floor and how the concept of virtual reality was developed and is applied in today’s films.
• A Growth Trajectory of the Virtual Reality Drilling Rig Training During the final three months of development, the VR training program will be refined and tested for usability and effectiveness. Collecting feedback from users is essential for the success of the VR drilling rig training […]
• “The Role of Virtual Reality in Criminal Justice Pedagogy” by Smith The journal is titled “The role of virtual reality in criminal justice pedagogy: An examination of mental illness occurring in corrections”.
• Virtual Reality and Cybersecurity As a result, it is the mandate of the framework entities to establish solutions to the inherent barriers to the implementation of the business plan.
• A Stand-Up Comedy Virtual Reality Platform for Qatar Tourism Choosing the right number of avatars, customization of the product, and pricing the product were the three major challenges that were faced in this project. The second challenge that emerged in the development stage was […]
• Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Virtual Reality In terms of the practical context, the research will focus on the organizations and sectors which are the primary beneficiaries of virtual reality and remote work during the pandemic.
• Virtual Reality Space Product Project Challenges During the project, several challenges came up, which included providing leadership to the team, identifying the customer segment for the product, and understanding the “pains” of the customer segment.
• Reflection on Aspects of Virtual Reality Videos For instance, the video Wolves in the Walls has good graphics and gives the independence to look at every section of the set-up separately.
• Augmented and Virtual Reality for Modern Firms The business environment is not an exception, as firms seek to maximize their value through the implementation of high-tech solutions. AR is another major component of contemporary professional training, as it contributes to the better […]
• The Rules of the Virtual Reality Online environment has been providing the platform for casual interactions as well as economic activities for quite a while.
• How Virtual Reality Is Changing the World of Interior Design In order to become competitive in the sphere of luxury interior design, “More” must make its projects look modern and trendy.
• Top Companies in the Virtual Reality Industry Currently, Google is the leading search engine company, and there are signs that the company might emerge as one of the heavyweights in the virtual reality industry.
• Internet, Virtual Reality, and World Wide Web Defining the concept of the Internet is a challenging task, mostly because of the changes that it has undergone over the course of its development.
• Virtual Reality Technology and Soccer Training Moreover, the level of interactivity needs to be significant, and the most attention should be devoted to the modeling of situations that are viewed as the most problematic.
• Char Davies’ Osmose as Virtual Reality Environment On the following position, the installment suggests the invitees a chance to trail the discrete interactor’s voyage of imageries from end to end of this counterpart of natural surroundings.
• Virtual Reality in Healthcare Training The objective data will be gathered to inform the exploration of the first question, and it will focus on such performance measures as time, volume, and efficiency of task completion; the number of errors pre- […]
• Scholar VR: Virtual Reality Planning Service Studio To ensure that the small and mid-sized companies in the United Kingdom understand the leverage they can get by using VR technology.
• IOS and Browser Applications and Virtual Reality From the consumer’s point of view, any mobile application is good if it is of interest to the public and covers a large target audience.
• Virtual Reality’s Main Benefits The rapid development and the growing popularity of virtual reality raise a logical interest concerning the advantages and disadvantages that are related to the application of this new technology in various spheres of knowledge and […]
• Virtual Reality’ Sports Training System Working Steps The efficiency of the given technology is evidenced by the fact that it is used by various coaches and teams to provide training for their players. For this reason, it is possible to predict the […]
• Virtual Reality Technology in Soccer Training Therefore, it is imperative to invest in this area to protect the safety of our technology and ensure that we have a viable product.
• Virtual Reality Technology in Referee Training Referees need to experience the practical nature of the profession during the training process, and the VR technology will eliminate the underlying challenges to the development of experience in the profession.
• Surgeon Students’ Virtual Reality Learning Programs In order for the students to feel like they are operating on living patients instead of waving instruments in the air, it is necessary to provide the environment that would compensate for the shortcomings of […]
• Virtual Reality and Solitary Confinement Nowadays, the majority of the representatives of the general public all over the world are familiar with the concept of virtual reality, and many of them have already experienced it.
• Samsung Gear Virtual Reality Product Launch The paper at hand is devoted to the analysis of the launch of Samsung Gear VR from different perspectives: the product development model, the business analysis, its technical implementation, etc.
• Virtual Reality in Military Health Care The purpose of the research is to identify the capabilities of VR and its applications in military health care. This study will explore the current uses of VR, its different functionalities, applications in the field […]
• Virtual Reality Ride Experience at Disneyland Florida The basic concept of the proposed ride is to utilize the current advances in VR technology to create a simulated experience for park-goers that is safe, widely usable, and sufficiently immersive that there is a […]
• Imagineering Myths About Virtual Reality Walt Disney Imagineering team, which encompassed a wide range of professionals responsible for various entertainments offered by theme parks, resorts, and other venues, is currently devoting a lot of time and effort to unlock the […]
• Virtual Reality Industry Analysis While it is true that the production and sale of virtual reality headsets could be in the millions in the future as the technology develops and becomes more acceptable, it cannot be stated at the […]
• Virtual Reality in Construction Originally, the use of virtual reality in construction within the past decade has been limited to 3D object design wherein separate 3D representations of the exterior and interior of the buildings are designed utilizing 3D […]
• Virtual Reality’s Benefits and Usages in Concurrent Engineering Figure 1: Phases of concurrent engineering Source As shown in the figure above, the initial stage of concurrent engineering is the identification of the components of the design system.
• Virtual Reality in Soccer Training The following work will focus on the analysis of the use of Virtual Reality in the training of soccer players with the evaluation of the practices adopted by particular soccer teams.
• Abstract on Architecture and the Role of Virtual Reality
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Escapism and Virtual Reality
• Strategic Analysis of the Creation of a New Rating System in Virtual Reality Gaming
• Study on Real/Virtual Relationships Through a Mobile Augmented Reality Application
• Benefits and Dangers of Virtual Reality
• Can Virtual Reality Kill?
• Cognitive Psychology & Virtual Reality Systems
• Computer Science and Virtual Reality
• Development of Virtual Reality Technology in the Aspect of Educational Applications
• Difference Between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
• Role of Virtual Reality in Education
• Humanity Versus Virtual Reality
• Simulation and Virtual Reality in a Sport Management Curriculum Setting
• Smart VR: A Virtual Reality Environment for Mathematics
• Sports Management Curriculum, Virtual Reality, and Traditional Simulation
• SWOT Analysis: The Lego Product and the ‘Virtual Reality’
• The Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Market Forecast and Opportunities in U.S.
• Tracking Strategy in Increased Reality and Virtual Reality
• Using the Virtual Reality to Develop Educational Games for Middle School Science Classrooms
• What Is Virtual Reality?
• What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Virtual Reality?
• What Do Consumers Prefer for the Attributes of Virtual Reality Head-Mount Displays?
• Virtual Reality and Its Potential to Become the Greatest Technological Advancement
• Lucid Dreams as the First Virtual Reality
• Development of Virtual Reality
• Introduction to Virtual Reality Technology and Society
• Issue “Virtual Reality in Marketing”: Definition, Theory and Practice
• Applying Virtual Reality in Tourism
• Application of Virtual Reality in Military
• Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality Industry Forecast and Analysis to 2013 – 2018
• Breakthrough Virtual Reality Sex Machine
• Components Driving Virtual Reality Today and Beyond
• Data Correlation-Aware Resource Management in Wireless Virtual Reality (VR): An Echo State Transfer Learning Approach
• Gaming to Health Care: Using Virtual Reality in Physical Rehabilitation
• Smart Phones and Virtual Reality in 10 Years
• Evolution of Art in Virtual Reality
• Use of Virtual Reality in Molecular Docking Science Experiments
• Use of Virtual Reality for Concussion Diagnosis
• Virtual Reality as Analgesia: An Alternative Approach for Managing Chronic Pain
• Virtual Reality: The Real Life Implications of Raising a Virtual Child
• When Virtual Reality Meets Realpolitik: Social Media Shaping the Arab Government-Citizen Relationship
• Can Virtual Reality Ever Be Implemented in Routine Clinical Settings?
• What Is More Attractive, Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality?
• What Is Virtual Reality and How It Works?
• What Are the Benefits of Virtual Reality?
• Is Virtual Reality Dangerous?
• How Is Virtual Reality Used in Everyday Life?
• What Are the Risks of Virtual Reality?
• What Is the Future of Virtual Reality in Education?
• How Do You Think Virtual Reality Devices Will Change Our World?
• What Are Three Disadvantages of Virtual Reality?
• What’s the Point of Virtual Reality?
• How Can Virtual Reality Optimize Education?
• How Did Virtual Reality Affect Our Lives?
• Will Virtual Reality Eventually Replace Our Real Reality?
• What Are Some Cool Virtual Reality Ideas?
• When Will We Have Full-Sensory Virtual Reality?
• What Do I Need to Develop Virtual Reality Games?
• Why Did Virtual Reality Never Take Off so Far?
• What Are Medical Applications of Virtual Reality?
• How Virtual Reality Can Help in Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder?
• What Are the Biggest Problems Virtual Reality Can Solve?
• What Unsolved Problems Could Virtual Reality Be a Solution For?
• How Would a Fully Immersive Virtual Reality Work?
• When Will Virtual Reality Become Popular?
• What’s the Best Way to Experience Virtual Reality Technology?
• How Will Virtual Reality Change Advertising?
• Which Are the Best Virtual Reality Companies in India?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Virtual Reality?
• What Are the Coding Languages Required for Virtual Reality?
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Virtual Reality: Ethical Challenges and Dangers

By ben kenwright on january 14th, 2019 in editorial & opinion , ethics , magazine articles , social implications of technology , societal impact.

Physiological and Social Impacts

According to Moore’s Law, there is a correlation between technological advancement and social and ethical impacts  [13]. Many advances, such as quantum computing  [22], 3D-printing  [11], flexible transparent screens  [1], and breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence  [17] have social impacts. One area that introduces a new dimension of ethical concerns is virtual reality (VR). VR continues to develop novel applications beyond simple entertainment, due to the increasing availability of VR technologies and the intense immersive experience. While the potential advantages of virtual reality are limitless, there has been much debate about the ethical complexities that this new technology presents  [9],  [19]. Potential ethical implications of VR include physiological and cognitive impacts and behavioral and social dynamics. Identifying and managing procedures to address emerging ethical issues will happen not only through regulations and laws (e.g., government and institutional approval), but also through ethics-in-practice (respect, care, morals, and education).

Including Ethics in the Design

Integrating ethics and moral sensitivity into design is referred to as “anticipatory technology ethics” by Brey [4] and “responsible research and innovation” by Sutcliffe [23]. These researchers emphasize the vital importance and responsibilities that designers have on technologies and their capacities, as well as designers’ moral obligations to the public. These obligations may include a wider long-term view, taking into account social involvement, environmental impacts, and other repercussions. Moral responsibilities related to technology have long been a subject of debate. For example, guidelines presented by Keith Miller [12] and other researchers on the topic of moral responsibilities emphasize that people who design, develop, and deploy a computing artifact (hardware or software) are accountable for that artifact, and for the foreseeable effects of that artifact.

Traditional moral responsibilities in the physical world do not necessarily translate to virtual worlds created by designers.

However, it is unclear how to predict the impact of virtual reality technologies (i.e., foreseeable effects). There is also a question of “foreseeable use” versus “intended use.” Hardware engineers may develop virtual reality technologies that are then used for unintended purposes in applications and by software developers.

In the wake of society’s exposure to VR, and due to today’s powerful computer systems, designers are able to create and develop complex interactive virtual worlds. These immersive environments offer numerous opportunities — both good and bad. But organizations and designers are not obligated to obey ethical restraints. There is also the element of hackers, and the issue of immoral exploitation of the technologies. These ethical questions arise partly because VR technologies are pervasive and difficult to classify and identify, and because it is difficult to predict their short- and long-term impacts. VR technologies also raise questions about legal responsibility, for example if software and hardware are used incorrectly or in unethical ways (see  Figure 2  for an outline of the ethical challenges connected with VR technologies).

So as VR has hit the mainstream, much debate has arisen over its ethical complexities. Traditional moral responsibilities do not always translate to the digital world. One aspect we argue is essential to ethical responsibility for virtual reality is that VR solutions must integrate ethical analysis into the design process, and practice dissemination of best practices. In the digital era, organizations and individuals need to uphold ethical and professional responsibilities to society and the public. Creativity should be combined with diligence. Decision making, ethics, and critical thinking should go hand in hand throughout the development process. Development needs to include future predictions, forecasting impact, evaluating and elaborating on possible consequences, and identifying any issues with openness and transparency.

Benefits and Applications of VR

VR technologies are commonplace in today’s marketplace, with key players including, Google, Microsoft, Oculus, Sony, and Samsung seeking to push the limits and applications of VR. VR first appeared in the 1980s, but then faded away. This time VR is here to stay  [3].

Related to VR, we need to acknowledge the importance of active real experience. Active real experience is a fundamental element within VR (i.e, the illusion of “real”). Real, or close-to-reality, experiences have an impact on the user by providing “positive” experience. VR with these touted benefits include games, films, education, training, simulations, communications, medical (i.e, rehabilitation), and shopping.

Due to the availability and flexibility of VR technologies, the number of virtual reality users is forecast to reach 171 million by 2018, with the VR market set to continually grow at an extraordinary rate  [20]. In 2018  [21], the value of the global consumer virtual reality market is estimated to be U.S. $4.5 billion (see  Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Number of active virtual reality users worldwide beginning in 2014, in millions  [20]. Forecasts for the future are based on previous trends.

Figure 2. Ethical questions and challenges around VR technologies.

Need for Investigation

Currently, there is a lack of information on the short- and long-term physiological impacts of VR. There is also not enough known about who and what types of individuals are using VR (age, types of experience, attitudes, and levels of digital sophistication). Many questions relate to individual attributes, and to what degree the user needs to possess “critical reasoning” abilities.

The intersection of ethics and virtual reality has to date focused primarily on individual issues, for example, specific content, or blood or violence. While these dilemmas are important, many other subtler ethical issues relating to virtual reality demand the attention of designers, scientists, engineers, and related communities. Designers, programmers, and testers usually focus on specific areas, yet they could be involved in contributing to solutions to ethical issues, or they could be responsible for inputting ethical concerns. Frequently, designers must make decisions based on the lens of their knowledge and experiences. But designers’ scope of knowledge does not always encompass the wide range of areas that might impact the public related to physiological, social, or ethical aspects.

Ideally, consumers should be entitled to know what “tests” have been done to ensure public safety, including physical and mental safely, for young and old, in all situations and environments. In addition, any “possible” problems or “neglected” issues should be explicitly stated as a matter of public and moral obligation, not just for legal purposes. Of course, this might be challenged by managerial decisions — any “questioning” or “refusal” (or even public announcement without permission due to NDAs) might impact the individual’s career. Hence, regulators need to step in and ensure “designers” are accessible and the facts are not compromised. Prevention is better than “correction.” We want to avoid reacting to a disaster after it has happened. We want to solve the problem before it manifests itself, using forward thinking, preventative measures to create a safer more reliable future-proof technology or solution.

There is also debate about corporations “waiting” for regulators and legal liabilities to push them towards more moral, safer designs. This attitude can cause significant harm to the public.

Complex Intercoupled System of Components

We need to look VR solutions as a whole, and not just at individual components such as specific components, interactions, or sounds. The interrelated and synergistic operation of the system can have a broader impact on the user. VR combines multiple senses (audio, visual, touch, and movement) each of which influences the immersive experience.

Passive and active involvement of the user, where a user may sit back and “watch” or experience the situation “autonomously” is one possible experience. Another can be more active involvement, where the user is required to “hammer” home the activity or action. The complexities of designing a VR solution involves millions of lines of code and a myriad of three-dimensional content elements that provide texture and geometry, not to mention sounds and specialist hardware like headsets and head-tracking tools. While software testing has always been challenging  [15],  [25], testing the physiological, ethical, and social aspects introduces a new level of difficulty. Challenges of addressing specific scenarios and the complexity of the system are compounded by the new levels of freedom in VR – by the variety of uncertainties and situations that are possible.

VR designs need to account for human interfaces, environmental perceptions, levels of freedom, user-user interactions (social/networking), coordination, and control. Different users and developers will use the hardware/software in different ways, creating multiple outcomes and choices. Strong trends towards online solutions, with user-user interactions and communication increase the possible complexity, and also may lead to “swarms” of virtual users – another area where further research is needed.

We anticipate that before long, swarms of virtual users will be able to interact and communicate. We need to ensure this is done safely. Close coupled interactions of multiple users will also raise questions of privacy and hacking, i.e., of possible intentional tampering or non-legitimate accessing of user resources.

Over-Trusting

The public and users have a predisposition to trust technologies from big brands, often involving acceptance without questioning. While VR solutions possess the power to entertain, engage, and tantalize users, they also have the power to cause significant physiological trauma. There are worrying concerns about over-trusting new technologies. Some questions, designers and users need to ask themselves are:

• Is it possible, for example, for the VR system to be “hacked” without the user knowing (i.e., modifying/injecting changes into the user’s virtual world).
• How much does “age” impact the experience in terms of digital awareness, overall experience, mental sensitivity, etc.?
• How will a user respond to unforeseen troubles? (For example, will they jerk, fall over, scream, harm themselves?)

Interestingly, with regard to the last point, if a person is immersed and believes they are really acting out the experience, they will react as they would in a real situation (i.e., behaviors could emerge). The user would be actively and cognitively engaged with the virtual environment. The ways that VR intertwines user’s psychological and behavioral aspects must be taken into account by the designers.

Regulations

As VR developers and manufacturers pursue significantly different design pathways, it makes it difficult for regulators to keep up and to develop rules and regulatory standards for safety. Among the crucial divides relates to the “applications” of VR, that is, to the type of interfaces, uses, the people who use them, etc. Of course, companies seek competitive advantage and are less interested in sharing information that might injure trade secrets. There needs to be a balance achieved between openness, reliability, and corporate rivalry and profit. Arguably, standards for VR technologies would need to have a specialized set of safety features, beyond traditional engineering tests and approaches to evaluate safety.

While some issues could be evaluated using traditional standards, such as violence and types of content, the immersion aspect of VR introduces additional risk factors that need to be accounted for, including aspects related to VR’s training and manipulation of the mind. Designers will also need to take into account approaches and solutions to reduce risks and harm. They need to insure that users are not left free to expose or harm themselves without guidance.

Relevant professional communities need to become collectively involved in developing rules and guidelines around the design process. Importantly, designers need to incorporate ethical thinking when creating innovative and creative solutions using virtual reality that incorporate safety and impact considerations. Each designer should look upon their creation or design and consider her or his ethical obligations. Designers, testers, and managers need to take a “value-sensitive” approach, and contemplate the implications of what they are creating.

How would we “demonstrate” that a virtual reality technology is safe? This also leads onto questions of levels of safety and risk, and to consideration of ratings. There may also need to be “warnings” emphases, about possible side effects. Also there is the question of how the design will impact others, and questions of social factors. For example, could the technology incite or promote unlawful behavior?

Risks to Children

Studies have shown children are most vulnerable when it comes to VR technologies, as they are highly susceptible and can more easily confuse what is real and what is not real, i.e., they likely may be less able or unable to distinguish between the real world and the virtual world  [18]. For example, in a study by Segovia and Bailenson  [18], young elementary children watched their virtual doppelganger swimming with orcas. When these kids were questioned a week later, they said they believed their virtual experience to be real. In recent studies  [2], young children would connect with “virtual characters” (avatars). Children would see the “avatar” in VR as more real (compared to characters or avatars on other mediums, such as television). The avatar in the virtual environment would be more influential compared to the television equivalent, making it more difficult for the children to inhibit their actions or not follow the avatar’s commands. And it is not only young children who internalize VR scenarios – these scenarios also impact young adults.

For example, elder adolescents have been found to be particularly sensitive to being socially excluded in a virtual environment. What this means is that parents need to be particularly careful about the type of VR content they allow their children to view (see  Figure 3 ). Note that the majority of research has been done on young adults, with little understanding of what happens to younger children when they are exposed to virtual worlds  [5],  [18].

Figure 3. Psychological Factors – Stages of learning and human development impact how our environment and experiences change as we get older.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is commonly caused by a directly witnessed real-life event that is life threatening or violent in nature. Current clinical diagnosis of PTSD excludes exposures that occur through electronic media, including movies and pictures  [6],  [8],  [16]. However, given the increasing ability to stimulate the range of senses beyond sight and sound, due to the immersive and interactive nature of VR, one has to wonder if at some point these experiences will result in the brain’s fear centers getting rewired in a similar way to that seen in PTSD. One could hypothesize that if a person felt that their VR experience was real (i.e., if they really felt they were at risk of harm), and if they did not have a way of voluntarily ending the experience, they could experience rewiring of fear circuitry of their brain in a manner similar to PTSD. They would then perhaps have a range of PTSD like symptoms.

Desensitization

Funk  et al.   [7] believe repeated exposure to real-life and to entertainment violence could alter cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes, possibly leading to desensitization. The study showed a relationship between real-life and media violence exposure and desensitization as reflected in related characteristics. One-hundred-fifty fourth and fifth graders completed measures of real-life violence exposure, media violence exposure, empathy, and attitudes towards violence. Regression analyses indicated that only exposure to video game violence was associated with (lower) empathy. Both video game and movie violence exposure were associated with stronger pro-violence attitudes. The active nature of playing video games, intense engagement, and the tendency to be translated into fantasy play may explain negative impact, though causality was not investigated in the present design.

Not all Bad

There are “dangers” with anything – however, we must not forget the huge benefits of combining VR with games, in education, rehabilitation, training, and of course, entertainment  [10],  [14],  [24]. VR is a technology – how we use VR, for good or bad, is up to us.

And VR is not the only issue affecting a user’s mental health. Many other factors outside VR influence the individual’s mental health, e.g., work, social life, or family.

VR and games also offer a means of escape. Virtual reality lets our imagination go to new heights because anything is possible. Virtual Reality helps us to test the information learned in a “real-life” situation so that we are able to evaluate – simulate – theoretical knowledge in a practical implementation. With VR we can simulate how machinery works and responds, and we can replicate soft skills such as human actions and behaviors. Another huge area is how virtual reality impacts learning, making learning fun, exciting, and visual.

There has been and continues to be rapid growth in Virtual Reality technologies. It is estimated that there will be 300+ million VR users worldwide by 2020. There remains room for debate around the topic of ethical responsibilities for these technologies. While it can be argued that makers cannot be held 100% responsible for their designs, each company and individual designer should demonstrate reasonable caution, through monitored trials and testing. Designers should not ignore possible mental health and safety issues, or physiological impacts or social and ethical factors. Steps to address these issues might include interactive testing using human and automated users.

We suggest adding additional investigation and analysis testing stages to the development of virtual reality technologies in efforts to protect the public. These tests might not focus on physical health and safety concerns, but rather on physiological and social influences. Currently, no such trials related to physiological or social factors are required, monitored, or enforced. But a large number of virtual reality applications are already on the market, suggesting that technological and economic forces may overrun efforts to protect the public good. The fact that VR is already available does not mean there is no need to address this issue, and it should not be left until it is too late.

The growth of VR technologies leads to an increase in new products and accelerated development of VR in industries such as education, healthcare, household management, tourism, and video games, impacting social and economic sectors. On one hand, there will be huge opportunities for new and innovative VR applications, beyond entertainment uses. On the other hand, there are numerous challenges and ethical issues that need to be addressed. More research needs to be done to investigate the psychological impact of VR, especially on young children, both in the short and long term. However, if the VR economy is to continue to grow while maintaining sustainable healthy new developments, it must be supported by scientific research to investigate the social and ethical issues around these technologies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author would like to thank the reviewers for taking time out of their schedules to provide insightful and helpful comments to improve this article.

Author Information

Ben Kenwright is with the University of Bolton, Bolton, U.K. Email: [email protected].

To view full article, including references and footnotes, click HERE .

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Computers — Virtual Reality

Essays on Virtual Reality

The importance of writing an essay on virtual reality.

Virtual reality (VR) is an increasingly important and influential technology that is shaping various industries and everyday life. Writing an essay on virtual reality can help to educate others about its potential and impact on society, as well as provide a deeper understanding of its applications and implications.

Here are some reasons why writing an essay on virtual reality is important:

• Educational purposes: By researching and writing about virtual reality, you can help to spread awareness and knowledge about this technology. This can help others to understand the potential benefits and risks associated with VR.
• Impact on industries: Virtual reality has the potential to transform various industries, including healthcare, education, gaming, and entertainment. By writing about VR, you can explore its impact on these industries and how it is changing the way people work, learn, and play.
• Ethical and social implications: Virtual reality raises important ethical and social questions, such as privacy concerns, addiction, and the blurring of virtual and real worlds. Writing an essay on VR can help to explore these implications and provoke critical thinking on these issues.

Writing Tips for an Essay on Virtual Reality

When writing an essay on virtual reality, it's important to consider the following tips:

• Research extensively: Start by conducting thorough research on virtual reality, including its history, current applications, and future potential. This will provide you with a solid foundation for your essay.
• Organize your ideas: Consider the structure of your essay and how you will present your ideas. You may want to start with an introduction that provides background information on VR, followed by sections that explore its impact on different industries and its ethical implications.
• Provide evidence: Back up your points with evidence and examples. This could include case studies, statistics, and expert opinions to support your arguments.
• Consider different perspectives: Virtual reality is a complex and multifaceted technology, so it's important to consider different perspectives and viewpoints. This can help to make your essay more balanced and thought-provoking.
• Revise and edit: Finally, don't forget to revise and edit your essay. Check for clarity, coherence, and grammar, and make sure your writing is engaging and persuasive.

By writing an essay on virtual reality, you can contribute to the ongoing conversation about this groundbreaking technology and help to shape public understanding and discourse about its impact on society. It's an opportunity to explore a fascinating and rapidly evolving field that has the potential to change the world as we know it.

Best Virtual Reality Essay Topics

• The impact of Virtual Reality on mental health treatment
• The ethical implications of Virtual Reality in gaming
• Virtual Reality and its potential for revolutionizing education
• The use of Virtual Reality in architectural design
• Virtual Reality and its role in the future of healthcare
• Exploring cultural implications of Virtual Reality experiences
• The future of Virtual Reality entertainment
• Virtual Reality and its influence on marketing and advertising
• The use of Virtual Reality in military training
• Virtual Reality and its potential for environmental conservation
• The psychological effects of Virtual Reality on users
• Virtual Reality and its applications in the sports industry
• The role of Virtual Reality in simulating historical experiences
• Virtual Reality and its impact on workplace training
• The intersection of Virtual Reality and art
• Virtual Reality and its potential for addressing social issues
• The implications of Virtual Reality in travel and tourism
• Virtual Reality and its influence on remote collaboration
• The future of Virtual Reality in virtual social interactions
• The use of Virtual Reality in immersive storytelling experiences

Virtual Reality Essay Topics Prompts

• Imagine a world where Virtual Reality has replaced traditional forms of entertainment. How would this impact society and culture?
• If you could create a Virtual Reality experience to simulate any historical event, what would it be and why?
• Explore the potential ethical dilemmas that may arise from the widespread adoption of Virtual Reality technology.
• Create a narrative set in a futuristic world where Virtual Reality has become indistinguishable from reality. How does this impact the characters and their perception of the world?
• Write an essay discussing the potential implications of Virtual Reality on the future of work and productivity.

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Virtual reality (VR) is the use of computer modeling and simulation that enables a person to interact with an artificial three-dimensional (3-D) visual or other sensory environment.

The term virtual reality was coined in 1987 by Jaron Lanier, whose research and engineering contributed a number of products to the nascent VR industry.

Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), education (such as medical or military training) and business (such as virtual meetings).

Simulation-based virtual reality, avatar image-based virtual reality, projector-based virtual reality, desktop-based virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, cyberspace, head-mounted display.

171 million people use VR technology today. The first VR Headset came out in the 1960’s. Seventy-eight of Americans are familiar with virtual reality.

Relevant topics

• Digital Era
• Computer Science
• Cyber Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Disadvantages of Technology
• 5G Technology
• Cell Phones

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Matt Karamazov • February 16, 2022 • 16 min read

The Simulation Argument: Why We Might Already Be Living in Virtual Reality

Philosophy Random + Awesome Science & Technology

The essay that you (or your avatar) are reading right now is about the Simulation Argument, formulated by Professor Nick Bostrom of Oxford University . But really, it’s a story about uncertainty.

It’s a cautionary tale against intellectual hubris and snobbery, as well as an admonition to enrich your own life and expand your range of possibilities.

Take the plunge with me, and we’ll see why Professor Bostrom thinks it’s possible we’re living in a computer simulation, run by advanced humans in some distant future.

THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT

In a famous paper entitled, Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? , Bostrom argues that at least ONE of the following propositions must be true:

(1) The human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.

(2) Any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).

(3) We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Think about it: If crazy high-tech future humans simulate billions of universes, there will be billions of fake universes and just one “base reality.” The chances of being born into the base reality (as opposed to one of the simulations) would be astronomically low. Thus, if such a thing has already happened, we’re probably in a simulation right now.

However, we may not be. If our species is sufficiently volatile and self-destructive, such that we’re unlikely to survive long enough to become posthuman, or if for some reason our posthuman descendants don’t care much for simulating universes, we’re probably not living in a computer simulation.

And that’s the Simulation Argument. It’s really pretty straightforward and easy enough to understand. But as you can see, it’s the sort of idea that could keep you awake at night, wondering how “real” our reality really is.

For his part, Bostrom doesn’t claim to actually believe that we’re living in a computer simulation; he just admits that it’s possible.

In fact, Bostrom states:

“We may hope that (3) is true since that would decrease the probability of (1), although if computational constraints make it likely that simulators would terminate a simulation before it reaches a posthuman level, then our best hope would be that (2) is true.”

In other words, hopefully we are in a simulation, Bostrom says, because that would mean we aren’t likely to destroy ourselves entirely. However, if we are in a simulation and the simulators might “turn off” our reality sometime soon because keeping it running requires too much computing power, we should hope that our descendants simply don’t tend to simulate their past for whatever reason.

Personally, if one of those three propositions must be true, I hope it’s (2) regardless. I’m not sure why we would hope first and foremost that we are living in a simulation, rather than hoping that our descendants don’t care much for running ancestor simulations.

I highly recommend reading the original Simulation Argument, and I think you’ll find that it’s not nearly as intellectually intimidating as it might first appear. Indeed, compared to Nick Bostrom, my skull is a bag of hammers, and I didn’t have TOO much difficulty understanding it (although I did have to read it twice before I felt like I finally “got” it).

Now, while attempting to avoid references to The Matrix , let’s dig deeper into the Simulation Argument and its relation to the world of dreams, in hopes of further illuminating its mind-bending implications.

SIMULATIONS, DREAMS, IGNORANCE

“We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” — Christof, The Truman Show

Doesn’t it strike you that existence is really quite weird?

I said that I wouldn’t make too many Matrix references, but I didn’t say anything about Men in Black references, so here goes:

Think back to what we used to KNOW about life on earth:

We used to know for a fact that the earth was the center of the universe.

We used to know that leeches were the cure for freakin’ everything.

We used to know that our hands were always clean and that washing them before performing potentially life-saving surgeries was a waste of time.

In light of all this, reflect for a moment on the likelihood that what we “KNOW” today represents some kind of absolute truth.

There seems to be an unbreachable chasm between the subjective and objective world. So says Chuck Klosterman in one of the most thought-provoking books I read in 2017, But What If We’re Wrong? .

Speaking of weirdness, Klosterman says:

“Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one’s teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we’ve stopped trying to figure out what they mean.”

Every night, most of us enter a dream-state where the physical laws of the universe are completely suspended, and we have little to no idea what this means.

Many people don’t think dreams are worth looking into. But I think that in dreams, such as in life, it all matters, or none of it matters.

Would a simulation be much different from a dream, experientially?

There is nothing to suggest that a technologically advanced civilization with enough computing power couldn’t recreate everything that we think is real.

The precise values of gravity and the mass of electrons could have been set by a simulator which created the experience we’re all having right now.

Nobody is really sure about the existence of any possible “upper bound” on the amount of computing power that may be available in the future. And as Professor Bostrom explains, a hypothetical simulator would only need a sufficient amount of computing power to ensure that the simulated humans (us) don’t notice any “irregularities.” You know, cars starting themselves, or cats barking—that kind of stuff.

He goes on to say:

“The microscopic structure of the inside of the Earth can be safely omitted [from the simulation]. Distant astronomical objects can have highly compressed representations: verisimilitude need extend to the narrow band of properties that we can observe from our planet or solar system spacecraft. On the surface of Earth, macroscopic objects in inhabited areas may need to be continuously simulated, but microscopic phenomena could likely be filled in ad hoc . What you see through an electron microscope needs to look unsuspicious, but you usually have no way of confirming its coherence with unobserved parts of the microscopic world…Should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem.”

Who might this “director” be?

Could it be “us” in the future, curious enough about our evolutionary past to want to run a simulation in order to view history over again, or perhaps to play around with the variables?

Chuck Klosterman chimes in with a humbling proposition:

And in that case, there IS a simulator – maybe some kid in his garage in the year 4956 – who is determining and defining the values of the constants in this new universe that he built on a Sunday morning on a supercomputer. And within that universe, there are beings who will wonder, “Who set the values of these numbers that allow stars to exist?” And the answer is the kid. There WAS an intelligent being outside that universe who was responsible for setting the values for these essential numbers.”

Turning the microphone back to Professor Bostrom, he says:

“If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense “real”, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.”

And just like a dream… we would NEVER be able to know for sure.

Except, perhaps, when it ends.

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” — Zhuangzi

Bostrom then considers an “objection” that I had been carrying around while reading the first part of his Simulation Argument paper: Why does it have to be an ancestor simulation?

Couldn’t it be some sort of training program or virtual reality experience solely for entertainment?

He cuts me off by saying that:

“In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious.”

(I KNEW those people at the Department of Motor Vehicles were just “shadow-people”!!!)

All right, time to hold onto something to keep the room from spinning. Let all that sink in, and keep forging ahead.

CRITICS AND SUPPORTERS OF THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT

There are people out there who *GASP* don’t think that the Simulation Argument is worth considering at all.

These are likely the same people who keep turning my music down at the gym, or tell me that being a writer isn’t “practical”.

But they also include physicist Lisa Randall, author of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, and several other hyper-intellectuals.

Commenting on claims made by some that a recent glitch at the Oscars meant that there were visible “cracks” in the simulation, she said:

“At this point, we cannot prove that we do or don’t live in a simulation. More to the point, there is no reason to believe that we do. However, we can pretty much be sure that people will do amazing things and they will also mess up in spectacular ways.”

In contrast, a hero of mine, Elon Musk , claimed publicly that “the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions .”

Another really smart dude, David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at New York University, said that we’re not going to get proof that we’re not in a simulation, because any evidence that we get could be simulated. He’s also said:

“If it turns out we really are living in a version of “The Matrix” [his reference, not mine], though — so what? Maybe we’re in a simulation, maybe we’re not, but if we are, hey, it’s not so bad.”

Some have said that it’s also a lot of hubris to think that WE would be what ended up being simulated, but Max Tegmark (a professor at MIT) has some words of wisdom for us in this case:

“My advice is to go out and do really interesting things, so the simulators don’t shut you down.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s follow the evidence!

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THE EVIDENCE OF SIMULATION

As David Chalmers observed, we’re never going to get “evidence” that we’re living in a simulation, because any evidence that we could possibly obtain might just have been simulated.

But we can look for clues. Glitches in the program, if you will.

Also, we can try and figure out if the structure of our perceived reality could even allow for such a state of affairs to exist.

The first step in all of this, of course, is to suspend your certainty about what’s really going on here.

I have no first-hand, empirical claim to absolute truth, and neither do you.

So where can we look for evidence that we may be living in a computer simulation?

Well, my first choice when it comes to evidence of living in a simulation would be the mathematical nature of our universe itself. It’s broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like pixels in a video game. The laws of physics are computable and they have definite parameters. That means that they can be simulated.

The Simulation Argument also accounts for a lot of strange stuff related to quantum mechanics, such as the measurement problem, which deals with the fact that things only become defined when they are being observed.

Maybe you DO need a conscious observer, like a conscious player of a video game, in order to resolve this measurement problem. This strikes me as the second-greatest “evidence” that we may be living in a computer simulation.

The possibility still exists, too, for near-incontrovertible evidence to emerge that we are living in a simulated world. That is, if we were to go on to create our OWN simulations, we could be fairly certain that we were not in the base reality.

Nick Bostrom states in his paper that:

“If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Creating simulations would be evidence that we might live in one.”

Beyond all this, there may be one final piece of evidence which could tell us conclusively whether or not we are living in a computer simulation: The moment of our own eventual death.

The moment of death may be the moment of truth. Do we see ones and zeroes? The face of a loving and expectant god? Impenetrable darkness?

Or do we apprehend nothing at all, questions left unanswered, because we have ceased to exist and to be conscious of anything? Maybe Epicurus accurately described the nature of death in this classic statement:

“Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?”

Perhaps death will be the moment when the veil is pulled back and all is revealed, or perhaps it will be nothing at all.

CAN WE SIMULATE GOD?

One of the things I find fascinating to contemplate is the relationship between the Simulation Argument and ideas of God.

As a radical skeptic in the same tradition as Diogenes and Montaigne , I hold no personal illusions about a kind and loving God who is waiting for my return to His kingdom.

But I have to admit that I like that idea. Part of me wants it to be true.

And it could be true, even if we’re living in a simulation. The base reality would have to have emerged inexplicably from nothingness at some point, leaving open the possibility that it was created by some kind of omnipotent being.

Furthermore, it’s interesting to consider the similarities between a hypothetical “director” of a simulated universe and a deity.

In fact, most all of the classical questions we ask about a hypothetical God can be asked about a hypothetical simulation-director:

“Why did the director of our world decide to include evil and suffering? (Can they change these settings in the preferences?)”

“What does the director want from us? Is there a specific way that he or she wants us to be living our simulated lives? Or is it purely for his or her own entertainment?”

“Where did the original, non-simulated world come from?”

Could we, somehow, maybe by virtue of our acts here on earth “graduate” to a higher level of the simulation? Someplace “better”?

Or, conversely, could we be punished for our cruelty and waste here on this level of the simulation and be sent to a much worse place for our next “generation”?

How should we live in order to prevent that from happening?

In our universe, we create simulated worlds all the time. Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, “We don’t think of ourselves as deities when we program Mario, even though we have the power over how high Mario jumps.” There’s no reason for Mario to believe that we’re perfectly omnipotent, even though we control everything that he does.

Basically, anyone who created the simulation we may or may not be living in would be akin to a god, at least to us. Maybe it’s some kid in the next universe up, as Chuck Klosterman postulated, but it really could be anyone.

How should we live in light of these considerations, especially given that we can never KNOW if we are living in a computer simulation? It’s to this question that we now turn.

HOW SHOULD WE LIVE IN A SIMULATION?

Ah, now we get to the good stuff. If we really are digital beings living inside a simulation, or if there’s even a remote possibility of that being true, how should we live?

I’ll give the first word to Chuck Klosterman:

“In fact, I’d say the first principle to adopt in this scenario would be the same as the one we use in regular life – don’t get terminated. Stay alive. But beyond that?”

Point well taken.

What Bostrom says, and what looks like the right idea at first glance, is that because we have no reason to believe that either of these possibilities is more likely than the other, the Simulation Argument provides no real reason to change the way we live our lives.

But I disagree, and here’s why…

First, the technical objection from Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute:

“In general, your decisions should be based on a weighted average over the different possible worlds you might live in. If you assign a non-zero subjective probability to the possibility that your descendants will create sophisticated simulations which include people (real or simulated) like us, ignorant of their status, then you should assign a non-zero subjective probability to the possibility that you now live in such a simulation. So to the extent that there are consequences of your actions which are different in a simulated world, and you care about these consequences, a non-zero probability of simulation should influence your decisions.”

To put it more simply, Hanson is saying that if you think there is any chance we are living in a simulation, and if you would behave differently in a simulated world for whatever reason, you should probably behave somewhat differently than you otherwise would, given your belief that we may be living in a simulation.

Here are what I would consider the “rules” for living in a simulation:

1) Don’t get terminated. Unless you’re aiming to experience the evidence firsthand regarding whether or not you live in a simulated universe (though, again, death could easily be inconclusive, as we may just cease to be aware of anything). I, for one, want to see where this hypothetical simulation leads.

2) Spend the rest of your life testing the limits, and, in effect, trying to figure out what you “can’t” do. For this to work, assume there is no “can’t”. What is your body capable of? Can you make one person’s life demonstrably better? Can you save an endangered species? Can you become CEO? Can you become world champion? Can you get her to like you? What are the thoughts you can’t have? Are there aspects of this simulation that its creator never considered? What’s beyond the stars?

3) Look for ways to “break” the simulation. A simulated world is a theoretically “solvable” world, and maybe you can crack the code. Maybe, to save computing power, the stars only light up when you’re looking at them. Or buildings turn into ones and zeros once you leave a particular city.

4) Assuming you don’t want the simulation to be turned off, you should do everything in your power to keep the director interested in maintaining the simulation. Go out and do wild things; make a name for yourself; create something epic; become larger than life. Be part of history, or better yet, MAKE history. Cause dramatic shit to happen. At least, that’s what you would do if you assumed the director had a human-like interest in the entertainment or intrigue value of their simulations.

5) Find out what kind of behavior is rewarded in this simulation, and then live your life that way. If you find Erich Fromm’s idea appealing that love is the only rational answer to the problem of human existence, then maybe you should find a way to bring more of that into the world.

In the end, learning that you’re not real doesn’t feel any different from the way you felt before. Even if you’re not “alive”, life goes on, says Klosterman.

Let’s tie this all together and bring it back to “base reality”…

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” — Dylan Thomas

An overarching theme of this essay is that when you get right down to it, we humans can’t be sure about even the most fundamental “facts” of existence that we take for granted.

Yet, when you survey the history of human thought (and especially listen to how people talk today), you are struck by the fact that everybody seems so SURE of themselves.

The fact is that it’s impossible to have satisfactory knowledge of anything without knowing all things — and that’s just not going to happen.

I’ve laid out the case for why we might be living in a simulation, and I’ve given some possible avenues of exploration with respect to how we might lead our lives in the face of this possibility.

But we each need to step out in front of the unknown for ourselves. There may be a darkness coming for you that you can’t escape, but there may also be a benevolent “director” waiting to welcome you home.

Nobody knows.

Existential courage then becomes the highest virtue.

We then have a reason to hear each other out, and to doubt our own certainties. We also have innumerable reasons to stop hiding, and to aim to live our best lives. Not fearing disaster, nor taking refuge in sentimentality, but rather engaging meaningfully with the world, for as long as this privilege is to be ours.

The Simulation Argument, then, serves as an empowering thought experiment and a call for radical humility, healthy skepticism, and above all, infectious joy.

Because if ours is a simulated universe, there is a good chance that it will someday end. How will this knowledge change your life?

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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Virtual Reality Argumentative Essays Samples For Students

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Real moral problems in the use of virtual reality

• Original Paper
• Published: 26 July 2018
• Volume 20 , pages 249–263, ( 2018 )

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• Erick Jose Ramirez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9042-6942 1 &
• Scott LaBarge 1  

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In this paper, we argue that, under a specific set of circumstances, designing and employing certain kinds of virtual reality (VR) experiences can be unethical. After a general discussion of simulations and their ethical context, we begin our argument by distinguishing between the experiences generated by different media (text, film, computer game simulation, and VR simulation), and argue that VR experiences offer an unprecedented degree of what we call “perspectival fidelity” that prior modes of simulation lack. Additionally, we argue that when VR experiences couple this perspectival fidelity with what we call “context realism,” VR experiences have the ability to produce “virtually real experiences.” We claim that virtually real experiences generate ethical issues for VR technologies that are unique to the medium. Because subjects of these experiences treat them as if they were real, a higher degree of ethical scrutiny should be applied to any VR scenario with the potential to generate virtually real experiences. To mitigate this unique moral hazard, we propose and defend what we call “The Equivalence Principle.” This principle states that “if it would be wrong to allow subjects to have a certain experience in reality, then it would be wrong to allow subjects to have that experience in a virtually real setting.” We argue that such a principle, although limited in scope, should be part of the risk analysis conducted by any Institutional Review Boards, psychologists, empirically oriented philosophers, or game designers who are using VR technology in their work.

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Ethical Issues with Simulating the Bridge Problem in VR

Virtual Reality and Computer Simulation

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VR technologies comprise a large class of hardware devices that can include room-sized projection systems into which subjects are placed, head-mounted displays, and augmented reality (AR) devices which overlay additional content onto a subject’s experience of the actual world (Parsons et al. 2017 ). We focus on head-mounted displays because such systems are, by far, the most widespread form of VR researchers and the public are likely to use. Although we focus our analysis on head-mounted VR displays, much of what we say will also apply to other forms of VR and AR interfaces.

The substantial philosophical literature on simulation is centered heavily around the role of simulations and models in experimental science, and the metaphysical and epistemological issues that are prominent in that discussion are not particularly germane to our concerns in this paper. However, we share some areas of overlapping interest. Frigg and Hartmann ( 2012 ) have a useful discussion of a range of views concerning what has to be true of a model for it to successfully “represent” its target. On the difference between models and simulations, see Krohs ( 2008 ) and Morrison ( 2009 ). Winsberg ( 2009 ) distinguishes some different sorts of simulation. Knuttila ( 2011 ) has a useful discussion of the senses in which scientific models may be said to represent the physical reality they model that could have some bearing on simulations and the things they simulate, particularly emphasizing the intentions of the creators/users of the simulation. Godfrey-Smith ( 2006 , p. 733) points out how different scientists can construe the same model as having different success criteria in a way that tracks our point below concerning the context-dependent nature of success in simulation.

For example, the computer program Microsoft Flight Simulator , in simulating what it is like to fly an airplane, attempts to be relevantly like an actual airplane by providing the user of the simulation with visual and auditory feedbacks that are experientially similar to what an actual pilot would hear and see in her airplane (e.g. the clouds and horizon, the instrument panel, the roar of the engines), but it remains a simulation because there is no actual airplane involved, and the game “pilot” never leaves her desk chair. If one were to try to simulate flying an airplane by putting someone in an actual airplane and having them work the real controls to really fly the airplane, that person wouldn’t be simulating flying the plane, she would be actually flying it. On this view, while a digital environment could simulate a real environment, it could never be a reinstantiation or reproduction of that environment. It would lack the necessary substance. It may nevertheless be possible, however, that certain elements of the digital environment may be reinstantiations of elements of the real environment. The example of reproduced sounds that we discuss later in the paper would constitute such a case.

We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this issue and for helping us clarify the nature of our particular moral concern. Although we believe that encouraging users to simulate immoral actions raises concerns about the nature of simulation, our own concerns in this article focus on what we believe is a different and under-examined problem concerning the possibility of VR experience itself to cause subjects harm.

The literature on the possible social and psychological effects of media like films and video games is vast, and we do not propose to give a thorough survey here. The following sources are, however, representative of the sort of work we have in mind: Krahé and Möller ( 2010 ) finds some increase in violent behavior among adolescents who engage in violent gameplay while Fischer et al. ( 2009 ) finds an even larger increase in violent behavior from those who play games that allow you to customize your avatar. Valkenburg and Peter ( 2013 ) offers a general model that aims to explain how cognitive, emotional, and “excitative” features of games can help to explain why media, especially violent media, affect people differently. Two meta-analytic studies reach opposed conclusions about the correlation between violent media and aggression: Anderson et al. ( 2010 ) suggests such a correlation, while Savage and Yancey ( 2008 ) resists that conclusion.

Sanchez-Vives and Slater ( 2005 ). Psychologists call this sense of being actually transported into a virtual space “presence”; we discuss this concept of presence and its relationship to our concepts of perspectival fidelity and context-realism below.

Won et al. ( 2015 ). Though subjects may feel like their virtual avatars belong to them, we want to distinguish a subject’s perception that she has a tentacle from the perception she would have if she actually had a tentacle. VR may provide subjects with the former but not the latter perception.

Sanchez-Vives and Slater ( 2005 ) and Fox et al. ( 2012 ).

We would like to distinguish experiences of presence from virtually real experiences. Although all virtually real experiences require a subject to experience presence, many experiences of presence will lack the context-realism and perspectival fidelity that we argue are distinctive of virtually real experiences. We say more on this distinction later.

We use the term “neurotypical” here as a descriptive statistical term to denote the range of sensory capacities available to the average adult human being. We embrace what some have referred to as ‘neurodiversity’ movements (Herrera and Perry 2013 ) and do not intend to use the term neurotypical normatively. Deafness is, by all accounts, not neurotypical though arguably it is not a disability or disease for those in the deaf community. An experience that lacks auditory inputs, however, is less perspectivally faithful than one that includes such inputs. Perspectival fidelity will relativize to the typical phenomenology of the subject population (e.g., perspectival fidelity for gorillas will look differently than for neurotypical humans and perspectival fidelity for the deaf will vary in many respects from that of hearing persons).

For similar reasons, such a soundtrack would diminish the degree of context-realism of the representation.

As augmented reality devices become more widespread and such meta-content becomes a standard component of lived experience, simulations that include this sort of meta-content may thereby become more context-real.

This is an empirical conjecture on our part. As we noted above, we do not wish to produce a view on the necessary and sufficient conditions for context-realism or perspectival fidelity. That is a task better suited to psychologists and neuroscientists. What we do wish to do is to mark out the concept of virtually real experience and its connection to VR experience in order to generate what we believe is a novel and underappreciated ethical concern about such experiences.

We are interested primarily in how subjects experience VR simulations in-the-moment, as it were. Our analysis, therefore, focuses on virtually real experiences and describes those as experiences that are treated as if they were real in the moment they are being experienced. A treats VR experience b as if it were real if A, either behaviorally, physiologically, neurologically, or psychologically reacts to b in a similar way as they would react to a real-life experience of b. It is entirely possible that subjects may re-frame these experiences after the fact (“it wasn’t real anyway”). We believe that moral issues can arise with respect to how subjects process their experiences after-the-fact, though these are outside the scope of this article. We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us clarify this concern.

Sanchez-Vives and Slater ( 2005 , p. 333).

For similar reasons, we have doubts about the ability of VR environments to allow for any form of “in-their-shoes” empathic perspective taking (Goldi 2011 ; Ramirez 2017 ), though we do not deny that subjects in such environments feel a high degree of presence in them.

Feinberg ( 1985 , p. 10).

Note that our analysis of the potential harms of a film would be different if the film were not a simulation of fictional events but a documentary of actual events; the ethics of filming and viewing a simulation of someone being stalked and killed, for instance, are, we assume, different from the ethics of filming and viewing an actual murder. In what follows we will be focusing our attention entirely on simulations.

Strictly speaking, the sounds of a nails on a blackboard or of insipid conversation would be recreations or instances of an aspect of an experience but would not by themselves rise to the level of a recreation or instance of the whole experience . This is because of the different situational factors (subdoxastic elements of experience) that would be missing from the film version of the experience relative to the first-personal experience of being on a bus. For example, while a threatening gesture aimed at the camera may be visually similar to the same threatening gesture aimed at you in reality, your experience of the two gestures is likely to be qualitatively different.

In assessing these offenses, we set aside the very real issues that others have raised with encouraging subjects to themselves engage in unethical behavior, concerns sometimes discussed in terms of the “Gamer’s Dilemma.” Although we agree that simulations which encourage subjects to rape, torture, or kill virtual persons raise important ethical issues (especially in terms of long-term effects on individual and societal norms), we sidestep this concern here to focus on the nature of the subjective trauma that may be experienced by the subject of the experience herself. Thanks go to an anonymous reviewer for asking us to clarify this concern.

As VR technology develops, it is possible that some things that are only simulatable now might become reproducible, and smells seem a likely candidate. If VR simulations someday include elements like reproducing the odor of flatulence, and if we arrive at a consensus that being exposed to reproduced flatulence is so unpleasant that people would reasonably want to be protected from the experience, we would have to consider moving such offenses into a different category.

Our point becomes even stronger if we assume olfactory elements can be introduced to these simulations. However, even if a reader thinks these particular cases are still not morally problematic when experienced as virtually real, so long as they can imagine a scenario in which an experience becomes morally problematic when it becomes virtually real, the argument progresses.

Also, for a modern audience watching a film, part of the phenomenology of viewing a film involves the consciousness that the events one is watching on-screen were filmed at some point in the past, and so are not genuinely present. This is not true of traditional and VR computer simulations.

Although the products of imagination are almost always incapable of the sort of perspective-taking that produces virtually real experiences, they are capable of triggering trauma in some subjects. This is a significant concern and we do not wish to downplay it. Such scenarios’ ability to induce trauma appears not to depend on their medium (text, film, VR), and so we do not focus on it in this paper. It should, however, remain a real concern for those who wish to expose naive subjects to potentially traumatic scenarios in any form.

For example, our concern, stated very generally, is about a form of “imaginative resistance”: “imaginative resistance occurs when an otherwise competent imaginer finds it difficult to engage in some sort of prompted imaginative activity” (Szabó and Liao 2016 , p. 405). In our case, however, we argue that the problem runs deeper than finding it “difficult” to imagine the scenarios of these thought experiments. Specifically, we believe that features of first-personal perspectives themselves can make it all but impossible to carry out these thought experiments via the imagination (Goldie 2011 ; Ramirez 2017 ). We thank an anonymous reviewer for this clarification.

In fairness, Slater et al. ( 2006 , p. 7) appear to appreciate this concern: “[t]he actual conditions of Milgram’s experiments can, of course, never be exactly replicated in virtual reality since the participants will always know that the situation is unreal—and if eventually virtual reality became so indistinguishable from reality that the participants could not readily discriminate between the two, then the ethics issue would arise again.” However, they fail to appreciate that virtually real experiences are dimensional and may be generated even without photorealistic environments. Their own research provides evidence for this claim.

While it would surely be wrong to amputate a subject’s healthy limbs in real life even if the subject consented, surely it is not wrong (at present) to simulate lopping off limbs in VR. On our view, this is true only given the limitations of existing VR technology. If in the future companies produce VR bodysuits with the capacity to, for instance, inflict high levels of pain on their wearers, we might well decide it is no longer morally acceptable to simulate experiences that cause extreme pain in VR. As the levels of context-realism and perspectival fidelity that technology permits increases, we will need to recalibrate our intuitions about what is and is not acceptable to simulate. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need for clarification on this point.

For examples of game developers expressing concern about VR simulation-induced trauma, see Hudson ( 2016 ) and Handrahan ( 2016 ).

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Funding was provided by Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and Oculus Education Grant.

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Ramirez, E.J., LaBarge, S. Real moral problems in the use of virtual reality. Ethics Inf Technol 20 , 249–263 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9473-5

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Published : 26 July 2018

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9473-5

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The ethics of realism in virtual and augmented reality.

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• 1 Digital Catapult, London, United Kingdom
• 2 Event Lab, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
• 3 Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
• 4 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom
• 5 Magic Leap, Plantation, FL, United States
• 6 Dimension – Hammerhead VR, Wimbledon, United Kingdom
• 7 BBC, London, United Kingdom
• 8 HTC Vive, Slough, United Kingdom
• 9 Facebook AR/VR, London, United Kingdom
• 10 Jigsaw, New York, NY, United States
• 11 Facebook AR/VR, Menlo Park, CA, United States
• 12 Nesta, London, United Kingdom

“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn it.” (The Golden Rule of Reciprocity, Negative Form, Hillel).

Introduction

The golden rule of reciprocity (“treat others as you would have them treat you”) is present in most philosophical traditions and religions, and can be thought of as a fundamental human moral imperative. The first and most positive aspect of virtual reality (VR) is that it is possible to give people the experience of the golden rule in operation. For example, VR can place people virtually in the body of another, such that an “ingroup” member can temporarily occupy the body and position of an “outgroup” member: a person with pale skin can temporarily have dark skin ( Maister et al., 2013 , 2015 ; Peck et al., 2013 ; Banakou et al., 2016 ) or vice versa, an adult can become a child ( Banakou et al., 2013 ; Tajadura-Jiménez et al., 2017 ), and someone can experience a world where they are taller or shorter than their real height ( Yee and Bailenson, 2007 ; Freeman et al., 2013 ).

Besides changing bodies, VR enables one to have a myriad of possible experiences from a first-person perspective. One can for instance be exposed to a virtual representation of a phobic agent (for example spiders), the participant knowing it is not real but feeling it as if it were. Thanks to this, VR has become increasingly used for therapeutic purposes including pain management ( Matamala-Gomez et al., 2019 ) and treatment of phobias and anxiety disorders ( Freeman et al., 2017 ). The therapeutic potential in other realms has already been experimentally tested, such as for physical rehabilitation, for example, ( Levin et al., 2015 ), for the rehabilitation of violent offenders ( Seinfeld et al., 2018 ), and for the assessment of symptoms and neurocognitive deficits in people experiencing or at risk of psychosis ( Rus-Calafell et al., 2018 ). Its use for training purposes in several areas including military, medicine, surgery, and disaster response, among others, is also gaining popularity ( Spiegel, 2018 ; Vehtari et al., 2019 ). All these advantages rely on the extent to which the experience is perceived as real. It is reasonable to imagine that more realism in these VR scenarios increases their effectiveness.

In augmented reality (AR), virtual features are added to the real environment through some sort of device (for example goggles or a smartphone) and the information presented often requires the actual location of the user. For instance, when visiting some ruins, one could see a depiction of what the site used to look like superimposed over the remains. This is useful not only for historical representations but also for educational purposes (for example architects and engineers). With AR, one can also visualize a product before purchasing it—even try it on virtually—or see relevant information on the car windshield. AR also offers a huge value for companies that employ it for marketing aims. Similar to VR, augmenting the realism of AR technology is likely to boost its impact.

In addition, VR and AR (XR) systems can be employed for data visualization, for industrial design in architecture and urban planning and, naturally, for entertainment—the gaming industry has enormous potential in this field ( Brey, 1999 , 2008 ; Wassom, 2014 ). Moreover, it is commonplace today to be able to have a conversation in a virtual (VR) or real (AR) space with another person who is physically somewhere else but whose virtual representation is in that same space, which eventually might reduce the need to travel for meetings.

Despite all the benefits, however, XR technology also raises a host of interesting and important ethical questions of which readers should be aware. For instance, the fact that XR enables an individual to interact with virtual characters poses the question of whether the golden rule of reciprocity should apply to fictional virtual characters and, with the development of tools that allow for more realism, whether this should also extend to virtual representations of real people.

Thus, along these lines, is it wrong to do immoral acts in VR? This is explored in a play called “The Nether” (2013) by Jennifer Hayley 1 , where in a fully immersive virtual world a man engages in pedophilia. When confronted by the police in reality (in the play), he argues that this is a safe way to realize his unacceptable drives without harming anyone at all. As stated by Giles Fraser writing in The Guardian newspaper 2 , “Even by watching and applauding the production I felt somehow complicit in, or at least too much in the company of, what was being imagined. Some thoughts one shouldn't think. Some ideas ought to be banished from one's head.” But on the other hand, “Policing the imagination is the ultimate fascism. Take Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the point is surely this: imagination is not cut off from consequence. We all end up being shaped by what we imagine.”

The latter point was part of an argument by Brey (1999) , who considered ethical issues associated with virtual reality. Following Kantian Duty Ethics (a version of the golden rule), he argued that it is a fundamental moral principle “that human beings have a duty to treat other persons with respect, that is, to treat them as ends and not as means, or to do to them as one would expect to be treated by others oneself.” But does this apply to virtual characters? He gave two arguments suggesting that it does. First, following Kant in relation to treatment of animals, we should treat virtual characters with respect because if not we may end up treating people badly too (note that this is a philosophical rather than an empirical argument). Second, if we treat virtual characters with disrespect or act violently toward them, this may actually cause psychological harm to people that those characters might represent. Of course, this happens in movies all the time (think of the “bad guys” in movies, they are often typified as members of particular ethnic groups or social class). In XR this is different though—in movies it is other people who treat other people badly whereas in XR it could be ourselves doing so, or other (virtual or online) people may treat us badly. While this already takes place in video-games, particularly when the character in the video-game is seen and controlled from a first-person perspective, XR goes one step further in the sense that it can feel more real if the participant is fully embodied as that character. Therefore, Brey concludes that designers of VR applications—also applicable to AR—must take into account the possible immoral actions that they might depict or allow their participants to carry out.

It should be noted that causing harm in itself may not always be objectionable. For example, there has been considerable discussion in law about whether consensual harm, where a perpetrator claims that the victim agreed to the harm, can be exonerating ( Bergelson, 2007 ). As another example, children may be required by law to be vaccinated against an illness, for the greater good, even if the parents consider this to be potentially harmful to the children. The utilitarian philosophy of choosing actions that maximize happiness and minimize pain for the greatest number can also justify the causing of harm, again for the greater good. There is, however, also research suggesting that moral judgements may depend not on the outcome but the action involved in achieving the outcome. For example, in the famous trolley problem ( Thomson, 1985 ) a runaway trolley car on a track is about to kill 5 unaware people, but could be diverted onto another track where it would kill just 1 person, thus saving the 5. Utilitarianism would suggest that diverting the trolley is the right action, even though it involves harming the one person. However, people find personally pushing a “heavy man” off a bridge to block the trolley ( Hauser et al., 2007 ) more objectionable than pulling a lever to throw the heavy man off the bridge, even though both actions would result in exactly the same outcome. Several experiments that demonstrate this result are discussed in Miller et al. (2014) . What is interesting is that VR is proving to be an excellent method for finding out how people might behave in practice in these types of circumstance, rather than how they think that they might behave in answer to a questionnaire ( Pan and Slater, 2011 ; Navarrete et al., 2012 ; Friedman et al., 2014 ; Skulmowski et al., 2014 ).

Ethics of XR Use

Before we delve into the ethics of a specific aspect of XR—superrealism—we should consider ethical matters that have already been debated concerning XR use in general. As discussed later on, some of these issues are exacerbated with increasing realism of the virtual experience.

In a scientific context, the use of XR technology is controlled by ethics guidelines and laws that vary across countries but that tend to abide to some general principles. In the United Kingdom, for example, typical research ethics requirements in a scientific context include respect for autonomy and dignity of persons, scientific value, social responsibility, and maximizing benefit and minimizing harm 3 .

On top of the risks in research in general (for example exposure of vulnerable people, exposure to sensitive topics, data-related issues, impact on the physical and psychological well-being, and on the social standing of the participants), XR research must also take into account risks specific to this technology. Behr et al. (2005) summarizes these risks in VR research as follows: (i) motion sickness; (ii) information overload; (iii) intensification of experience (any feeling may be intensified in a VR environment, potentially straining the participants' coping abilities thereby instigating adverse responses), and (iv) cognitive, emotional and behavioral disturbances after re-entry into the real world following the VR experience. Although these were described for VR, they are as well valid for AR (especially ii–iv).

The above though refers to what takes place in a scientific laboratory under strictly controlled conditions, subject to review and oversight by authorities. However, XR is on the verge of becoming a mass consumer product, and since we know that presence, first-person experience and agency are very powerful cues to the brain that “this is really happening,” careful attention needs to be paid to the presentation of violence or abusive behavior in these contexts.

There is already some literature on the ethics of VR and AR use. Some authors discuss this in detail and raise a number of issues of importance to XR industry and practitioners, and ultimately for regulatory authorities at various levels to consider ( Wassom, 2014 ; Madary and Metzinger, 2016 ):

• Virtual embodiment can lead to emotional, cognitive, and behavioral changes. Although those investigated to date have been for what would generally be regarded as beneficial to the individual and society (for example against racial discrimination) there is the possibility that the same technique might be used for harmful applications.

• Exiting from VR may be problematic in some circumstances where individuals had been living in a virtual fantasy world with an enhanced virtual body. This is the downside of positive transfer effects known to occur from psychological therapy that employs VR.

• Long-term and frequent use of XR might lead to people prioritizing the virtual world over the real one.

• It should be clear what the legal and ethical responsibilities are for actions carried out at a distance if embodied in a virtual body or a remote robot controlled by some interface. Suppose the remote representation causes psychological or physical harm to others. Who is responsible—especially in a case where the participant might argue that her or his intentions were not properly realized through the interface, so that the harmful behavior was not intended? In the case of a physical robot, under which legal jurisdiction does the issue fall—that of the participant, the robot or the robot's manufacturer?

• It will be possible in XR to represent situations that might cause psychological harm such as the representation of deceased relatives with whom one will be able to interact. It is not clear whether this will affect, for example the process of acceptance after a loss or whether it could engender feelings like grief or anger.

• XR technology is highly persuasive—that is the whole point and that is how it exerts its benefits (for example training for disaster response in a virtual setting is a form of persuasion). Persuasion can nevertheless be used for ill-intended purposes, for example to incite someone to do something they would not naturally do or even to do something illegal or immoral.

• Personal data acquisition, use, and sharing with third parties is a vast topic that deserves careful attention. Because large amounts of personal data may be collected, so this data can be hacked and/or used for malicious reasons. Of particular relevance are data collection, including for example face recognition, data sharing policies (should the government or other third parties have access to what you do virtually?), scams that use someone's data or identity, and fake commercial transactions (for example you buy a product through a fake virtual store that steals your bank details).

• Virtual violence and pornography will be readily available—as they are currently in video games and on the internet—and it will feel more real. This might have significant social consequences.

The point of this list (and there are other issues) is to pose the challenges. Some of these are completely novel issues. While XR has been mostly confined to the lab, the clinic, and training/education institutions, these issues could be considered as worthy of academic and business discussion. Now that XR is about to become a tool widely used in society, they may become pressing problems. A particular problem set may be caused by what we refer to as “ superrealism ” where elements and even experiences in virtual or augmented reality may become indistinguishable from reality.

Superrealism

Very high quality visual and behavioral realism of virtual humans is becoming increasingly likely and available in the near future. For example, Facebook has been carrying out research and development in this area with impressive results 4 , and similarly Dimension Studios 5 . This will only improve over time as increasing resources are applied to this issue by researchers and companies. In this section we consider some of the implications.

High-Quality Sensory Feedback

In a hypothetical superrealism we require first that sensory rendering becomes of such high quality that it becomes indistinguishable from reality. Advances in computer graphics such as real-time ray tracing, radiosity and, most powerful of all, light field rendering have reduced the gap between photographic realism and virtual realism enormously over the past three decades. However, the evidence (such as there is) suggests that in the context of how people respond to events and situations within XR, the level of such visual realism is not so important as might be imagined. People found VR compelling even in the late 1980s and 1990s when the quality was orders of magnitude worse than now, and, for example, people became anxious talking to a poor-quality rendering of an audience ( Pertaub et al., 2002 ), or standing in front of a virtual pit ( Usoh et al., 1999 ). Zimmons and Panter (2003) found that participants exhibited the same level of anxiety in front of a pit irrespective of which of five levels of rendering were used (ranging from wire frame through radiosity). In two experiments ( Slater et al., 2009 ; Yu et al., 2012 ) it was again found that higher quality rendering (real-time ray tracing or a light-field based method), compared to lower quality rendering, did not influence the responses of participants. However, dynamic elements of the rendering, such as real-time shadows and reflections that moved with the movements of the participant, did enhance anxiety in response to an event within the virtual environment.

In today's XR systems, enhanced visual realism is increasingly facilitated by stereoscopic vision, head tracking and eye tracking to attain synchronization with the person's eye movements. Immersive sound rendering can also be highly realistic. However, there is still a massive way to go with haptic rendering; handshakes and light touches on the shoulder can be done, but not in a way that is going to be available to consumers in the near future. Advances in recent years have included air vortex generation to produce tactile feedback from a distance ( Sodhi et al., 2013 ) and skin integrated wireless interfaces that present a potentially remarkable advance in tactile feedback ( Yu et al., 2019 ). However, tactile feedback is only one half of the haptic interface. There is also a requirement for force feedback (for example, a virtual human character pushes you). Whilst there are advances in force feedback haptic devices in particular domains such as health care and surgery—e.g., ( Vaughan et al., 2016 ; Rose et al., 2018 ), the problem with force-feedback haptics is the requirement for bulky and expensive robotic devices, and its lack of generality. With vision or sound, in principle, it is possible to render anything. Wherever participants look in VR they will see and hear something. However, an accidental collision of their knee with a moving virtual object requires a device that can generate contingent effects anywhere on the body. This is unlikely to be realized as a consumer product in the near future. Olfactory (odor) cues are also not available at the consumer level and are unlikely to be for some time, although there are advances toward this ( Niedenthal et al., 2019 ; Yanagida et al., 2019 ). Therefore, primarily we are concerned with the visual and behavioral aspects of superrealism.

Sensory input and synchronization are far from being the only aspects of superrealism. For example, if humans are represented then not only must they look real (for example in terms of geometry, light reflection, light scattering, etc.) but their behavior must be realistic, ranging from subtle changes in facial expression, eye movements, body movements and gestures, to changes in folds of clothing as the characters move. Realism includes characters apparently seeing and looking at the participant, being able to engage in meaningful interactions even if not conversations. This is becoming possible to some extent with volumetric capture and rendering of people—certainly on the rendering side, if not yet with respect to interaction.

The Device-Gap

Even if all this were achieved, there is still the further problem: the virtual representations in VR must be displayed through a device. Head-mounted displays (HMD) today, and into the foreseeable future, cannot display at a resolution anywhere near that of natural vision, together with the well-over 180-degree horizontal field-of-view and around 150-degree vertical field-of-view that humans have. Moreover, the fact of putting on the HMD itself demarcates reality from virtual reality—so that unless participants are induced to somehow forget that they are wearing the HMD, they will not believe that the virtual scenario is a real one. We refer to this as the device-gap , which provides a clear demarcation between reality and VR through the act of donning devices.

AR may be different with respect to the device-gap. We can imagine a future where AR devices become as ubiquitous as smartphones are today, with people typically wearing devices for long periods, for example in the street. Since “reality” would be experienced through the device, then virtual aspects may become indistinguishable from the real—assuming though that there are significant advances with respect to field-of-view and resolution. Accordingly, the device-gap is arguably diminished or may even be eliminated in an AR system where a “known ground truth” (the real world) is merged with virtual content that obeys the laws of physics and with which the participant can interact. AR systems thus create a paradox of visually validated truth comprised by the simultaneous appearance of real truth and possible (virtual) truth, possibly further challenging the separation of real and virtual worlds. This concept could introduce a variant to superrealism in which what the participant believes he/she knows about the real world can be altered in the virtual experience. On the other hand, the very reality of the ground truth may enhance the realism of virtual aspects apparently present in the physical reality.

Physical vs. Psychological Realism

Despite the advances in realism in XR, it is extremely important to distinguish between belief and illusion . We do not envisage in the foreseeable future that people are actually going to believe that virtual situations and events are real. There are many studies over the past 25 years that show that people do nevertheless respond realistically in virtual environments, even when they know with certainty that nothing real is happening ( Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016 ). Hence, many of the issues arising with respect to superrealism are likely to also apply even to today's XR systems. For example, someone may automatically, without thinking, try to sit on a virtual chair that has no counterpart in reality, possibly resulting in harm.

It is therefore worth noting that there is a difference between physical and psychological realism, the former referring to the physical appearance of the virtual features and the latter to the psychological sensation that what happens virtually in an XR world could be happening in reality. It is expected that (physical) superrealism in XR systems achieved through advances in computer graphics enabling more photographic realism, improvements in sensory feedback, and the possibility to interact with virtual elements, among others, also increases the sensation that the virtual experience is real, i.e., the psychological realism.

Worst Case Ethical Problems of Superrealism

In this section we outline some possible ethical problems in XR that are exacerbated by the improvement in realness owing to superrealism. In other words, the issues described below might occur to a certain extent with the use of XR systems but are likely to be aggravated due to the sensation that what is happening virtually could be really happening. It is to be emphasized that these are worst case scenarios, based not at all on evidence, but on speculation . The intention here is to provoke debate and to highlight the need for further research as these represent concerns ahead of facts. The issues fall into a number of categories and we consider each in turn: the vulnerability of certain groups of people, the after-effects following XR use, the discrimination between real and virtual, data issues, XR as an interface to inflict physical harm, and the potential psychological and social implications. The ordering does not reflect levels of importance.

Vulnerable Populations

An implicit assumption in the introduction was that participants in a virtual environment would typically be drawn from adult and non-patient groups, and generally non-vulnerable populations. However, as XR devices and applications become consumer products, there is no guarantee whatsoever of that being the case, unless subject to some regulatory controls (for example, like those applied to cigarette purchase, X-rated movies, and so on). For example, children or adolescents may not distinguish well between reality and virtual reality. This may also be the case for certain patient groups, such as those prone to psychosis. With such populations it is a reasonable assumption that even the device-gap would not necessarily operate, perhaps most especially for very young children. We have limited evidence regarding these possibilities although one study that concentrated specifically on postural stability and simulator sickness amongst children concluded that VR led to no changes from baseline ( Tychsen and Foeller, 2018 ), supporting the idea that young children do not discriminate VR from reality as adults do.

After-Effects

In the grand majority of use cases, the primary point of XR is to provide people with an experience that is apparently happening personally to them in the space in which they seemingly are right now. So although the experience is based on virtual sense data and virtual actions, it is nevertheless real as an experience . For example, when a virtual character smiles at a participant and the participant automatically smiles back—the “being smiled at” and the smiling—are real experiences ( Chalmers, 2017 ). We change through our experiences: experiences produce changes in the body and the brain. In other words, just as real-life experiences have after-effects, so virtual experiences may have physical, emotional, and cognitive after-effects which may be beneficial or harmful. For instance, motion sickness after XR use may result in an accident, or being insulted by a virtual character—be it fictional or an avatar controlled by a real person—may influence the person's well-being in real life. Some of the consequences may be long-lasting.

Another key subject is how the perception of our body can be manipulated with XR—and the ensuing repercussions. In VR it is possible to give people the illusion that they have another body ( Yee et al., 2009 ; Slater et al., 2010 ), and that their body has changed in some fundamental way. For example, adults can have the illusion of having a child body ( Banakou et al., 2013 ), or white people a black body ( Peck et al., 2013 ; Banakou et al., 2016 ), and these experiences change the participants—for example parents changing their behavior toward their children ( Hamilton-Giachritsis et al., 2018 ), white people becoming more ( Groom et al., 2009 ) or less implicitly biased against black ( Maister et al., 2015 ), domestic violence offenders improving their recognition of fear in the faces of women after being embodied as a woman subject to abuse by a virtual man ( Seinfeld et al., 2018 ), and so on. Scientific research has tended to explore positive benefits such as these. However, continued exposure to such embodied experiences may also cause confusion in people about their real body, leading to a type of body dysmorphia. The body may be changed in a dramatic way such as having a tail ( Steptoe et al., 2013 ) or an additional limb ( Laha et al., 2016 ), or a very long arm making the body asymmetric ( Kilteni et al., 2012 ). It has been found that the disappearance of a virtual arm may elicit some cortical reorganization (for example changes in brain connections) after a short exposure ( Kilteni et al., 2016 ). It is possible that repeated exposure to extra limbs or other dramatic body transformations may bring about unwanted changes, or even pain (inducing virtually caused phantom limb pain). However unlikely, such outcomes should be considered.

As people spend more and more time online in XR, their virtual bodies may tend to be evaluated as more beautiful or preferable in various ways in comparison to their real bodies. Just as present day social media such as Snapchat is apparently leading to higher rates of body dysmorphia (body dissatisfaction) leading to greater demands for cosmetic surgery 6 ( Rajanala et al., 2018 ), so the same may occur with respect to future virtual bodies.

Is It Real?

To the extent that a VR system supports natural sensorimotor contingencies (being able to use the body to perceive in a manner similar enough to perception in everyday reality) it will typically lead to participants experiencing “place illusion,” the illusion of being in the place depicted by the virtual reality. A VR system may support (i) credible responses to the actions of the participant, (ii) contingent events that are directed specifically and personally toward the participant (for example a virtual human character smiles at the participant), and (iii) scenarios that are faithful to expectations when they simulate events that could occur in reality in a domain in which the participant has expertise. To the extent that these three are supported, the VR experience may become a plausible one, where participants have the illusion that the depicted events are really happening (to them). These two illusions, place illusion and plausibility, provide the basis for people responding realistically in virtual environments ( Slater, 2009 ). In AR, these illusions may be more easily attained because the virtual components are superimposed or inserted into the real world.

Imagine now repeated exposures to XR with strong place illusion and plausibility. The following are possible negative outcomes:

• Uncertainty of past and current events : Participants remember virtual events as if they had been real, and fail to distinguish over time events that really happened and those that happened in XR. This could also lead to mistrust of events that are actually occurring in reality. After spending some time in a scenario people forget the device-gap and become unsure about whether they are experiencing reality or virtual reality.

• False attribution toward a specific group of people : An event may have occurred in XR where a participant has a negative interaction with a representation of a particular type of person (for example another race or gender). Although this only happened in XR the participant generalizes beyond this, and attributes, for example harmful intents to real people of that type. This may occur even with representations of individual people known to the participant (see Identity hacking below).

• Dangerous presuppositions leading to physical harm : People carry out some physical action in XR that has no counterpart in the real world in which the XR is embedded. We have previously mentioned the chair problem where someone attempts to sit on a virtual chair that has no physical counterpart. Imagine that in VR or AR a participant sees others diving into a swimming pool, and decides to follow suit—and in reality they dive into a hard floor.

• Difficult real-world transition : After an intense and emotional experience in XR, you take the headset off, and you are suddenly in the very different real world. We are not good at rapid adjustment of behavior and emotion regulation. Re-entry to the real world ( Behr et al., 2005 ; Lanier, 2017 ), especially after repeated XR exposure, might lead to disturbances of various types: cognitive (did something happen in XR or in real life?), emotional (cause of emotions is not real , for example your avatar was insulted by a fictional virtual character), and behavioral (for example actions accepted in XR may not be socially accepted in the real world).

XR as an Interface to Physical Assault

A type of “VR” is typically used in drone strikes. The operator, thousands of kilometers away from an intended target, uses an interface to guide a drone which fires a weapon at designated hostile personnel. There is a debate in the military ethics literature about the ethical standing of such strikes ( Braun and Brunstetter, 2013 ), with some arguing that they follow the doctrine of proportionality (since typically there is less “collateral damage”) and others arguing that it nevertheless violates the principle of justice of force short of war ( jus ad vim ). Less dramatically than drone strikes, studies have been done where participants through VR become embodied in, and control in real-time, a remote physical robot. Such robots could also be used to inflict harm. One can also imagine in AR that a person is convinced by others, or by the situation, that a superrealistic avatar seen in physical space can be attacked, because it is only an avatar—yet it turns out to be a real person. It is not clear that these examples are ethical problems in the domain of XR. In the drone strikes, a type of VR is used solely as an interface. The case of a remote robot is just a modern version of a teleoperator system. The VR interfaces are used to deliver sensory information from the remote robot to the participant, and to track the participant to deliver movement instructions to the remote robot. Is this an ethical problem intrinsic to VR itself? The bigger problem may be the distancing and dehumanizing effects. In the AR example, it may happen by accident, or may be by design that a real person is attacked because the attacker had believed that the person was only virtual.

Privacy and Data Issues

Superrealism can be enhanced by collecting personal data such as location, body movements, preferences, and actions in the virtual or semi-virtual environment. This has great implications for a number of applications, from storytelling to advertising to health, but it also raises important ethical issues related to privacy, data sharing, and the misuse of personal data for hacking and other criminal purposes.

Personal Data

With the increase in realism may come an increase in personal data acquisition by the XR system, for instance to better articulate movements of a virtual representation of the participant, to personalize advertising or to enable features relevant to the geographical location in which you are. Traits including motor actions, patterns of eye movement, and reflexes (a person's “kinematic fingerprint”) and information about preferences, habits and interests may be recorded ( Spiegel, 2018 ). This type of personal data is not commonly collected by non-XR current products or experiences on the market today, and so new thinking and consideration will be required to address data collection specific to XR. It is also a critical issue for the uptake of XR. If by default XR devices collect and log such personal data, even if anonymously, then it would not be possible to use such systems in places such as hospitals without violating data protection rules, and in Europe especially the strict regulations of GDPR would have to be followed.

The right to privacy is the right to one's identity in any form (including name, image, voice, preferences) remaining private, that is, not becoming publicly disclosed. Brey (2008) contrasts the right to privacy to the right to free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of artistic expression. Whereas, the latter three deserve their own attention, it is crucial to maintain the right to privacy of individuals given that disclosure of private information may be seriously harmful to the psychological well-being and social standing of the affected person. Legislation may have to be changed in order to accommodate the type of individual data that can be stored as a result of XR use. An example of misuse of disclosed private information is identity hacking, described below; another example could be misuse of deeply personal data, such as someone's phobias, for blackmail or other illegal purposes.

Data Protection and Data Sharing

As happens with current technologies, so will data collected by XR systems be shared with third parties. The implications are similar to those already existing today in other forms of media except that the amount and type of information may put the individual whose data are being shared at a higher risk (as described in the next paragraphs). Additionally, because of the realism in XR worlds, if, for example, someone carries out an act in XR that would be illegal in reality and if that has been monitored and recorded, it might be later used in evidence about the character of that person in legal proceedings relating to acts in the real world.

Identity Hacking

With superrealism it will be possible to make virtual “copies” of people that look, act, talk like a real person, even demonstrating aspects of personality (for example through the use of machine learning applied to behavior based on recordings of the real person). In this case, some potentially nefarious uses of this would include:

• Fake news : People could be portrayed as carrying out actions and saying things that they did not do. This is already powerful enough in photos and videos, but in XR could be even more dangerous because plausibility includes the automatic attribution of realness to virtual humans. Once having experienced a virtual rendition of someone carrying out an action, it may be difficult to remove this from memory, and may stimulate implicit changes of attitude toward that person. One step further is defamation , whereby a person is depicted in XR doing something immoral or ridiculous, consequently negatively affecting their social standing or reputation.

• Deliberate mistaken identity : In XR you are in a private conversation in your living room or in a virtual space with a significant other who is physically remote but apparently in the same space as yourself. You talk about private information or security issues that you would never mention to someone else. However, although the representation is of the significant other, in fact it is someone else who has hacked the avatar of that person.

• Identity theft : The same technique could be applied to virtual renditions of ourselves that are not “owned” or controlled by ourselves. We could be portrayed as carrying out virtual actions that we would never do in reality, with negative consequences in our relations with others generally, or with employers, or other authorities.

• Body swapping : The technique of body swapping in VR, where one person converses with themselves by successively occupying two different virtual bodies has thus far been used for positive means, such as solving personal problems, for example, people can alternately switch between describing a personal problem while embodying a virtual body closely resembling themselves, and offering themselves counseling while embodying a virtual representation of Dr. Sigmund Freud ( Osimo et al., 2015 ; Slater et al., 2019 ). It is possible—if unlikely—that the same technology could be used to gain insight into another person's mind, insofar as the mind reflects in some sense the physical body, and thereby gain advantage. This could be very similar to role-play, and might not be considered an ethical problem intrinsic to VR.

Psychological and Social Implications

Using XR entails modifying our current perception of reality: entering VR necessarily involves paying little attention to physical reality (other than obvious aspects such as gravity and physical constraints such as walls), and using AR does the same albeit perhaps to a lesser extent since the virtual features are embedded in the real world. This is not particularly new—the same could be (and has been) said about TV viewing or playing of computer games. However, it could be argued that place illusion, plausibility, and transformed agency puts XR in a special category where the following should be considered:

• Social isolation : If the frequency of XR usage were to match or come close to current mobile use for example, it is possible that people's ability to interact in real life may be strongly hampered.

• Preference for virtual social interactions : Perhaps social interaction in XR could become more enjoyable and desirable than real-life interaction so that people withdraw from society (an extreme case being Hikikomori in Japan). Taking this to its extreme, we could eventually become an abstract society , as Karl Popper defines it, in which people never meet face-to-face ( Popper, 2012 , Chapter 10). As with any new technology that gains widespread use (for example, television, games, social media) questions will arise about the potential negative effects on mental health and social norms, and XR is expected to be no different.

• Body neglect : Extreme cases have been reported of people who have spent so much time playing video games that they end up neglecting their body and even their children—sometimes culminating in death 7 , 8 . With more realism and more desirability for the virtual life, it is possible that body neglect also occurs in people who would overuse XR.

• Imitative behavior : The power of virtual experiences might encourage behavior that the person would not normally carry out in reality. This could be through exposure—for example, it may be difficult for a person to carry out their first act of violence in XR, but eventually it becomes easy, and leads to a greater propensity for violence in reality—or it could also occur through copycat behavior—mimicking the harmful behaviors of other virtual characters, for example, peer group pressure seems to operate in VR ( Neyret et al., 2020 ).

• Persuasion : VR and AR are necessarily persuasive in the sense that they provide the participant with an alternative experience that seems real and that can even change their perception, and even more so if the virtual world is superrealistic; however, persuasion directed at modifying someone's emotions or behavior for detrimental ends is highly unethical. Everyone may be at risk and particularly vulnerable populations.

• Unexpected horror : As part of, for example, an artistic virtual environment people may be exposed to horrors that they did not expect and of which they were not forewarned, resulting in a kind of post-traumatic stress response or, conversely, in desensitization for obscene sights.

• Pornography and exposure to violence : People will undoubtedly be exposed to realistic scenes with pornographic or violent content (this is already a fact in other forms of media). The consequences of such images being more realistic and being experienced from a first-person perspective (as already happens in video-games) is likely to have consequences for society. Nonetheless, these seem to be more attributable to pornography and violence themselves and not so much to XR technology.

• Extreme violence and assault : The realistic depiction of very obscene scenes portraying extreme acts of physical or sexual assault, including the representation of virtual characters with childlike features involved in any kind of sexual context, raises critical ethical concerns. Whether this would increase or decrease obscene behavior in real life is not clear and is very difficult to assess experimentally. On the one hand, engaging in or observing these acts carried out by virtual characters may trigger desensitization, which could normalize and thus increase these acts in real life; on the other hand, it may suppress the urges of aggressors to engage in such actions in the real world.

• Lack of common environments : Social science teaches us that our environment gives us norms for behavior and identity (defined, for example, by advertising in the media or fashion industry). The environments that we experience in XR may become the new normal, if we use XR enough. The particular ethical challenge here is that other people do not know or have access to an individual's XR environment, whereas everyone can see real-world environments and have public debates about them. Prolonged XR use on a large scale might challenge the normal public and societal mechanisms for monitoring, discussing, and improving the environments that we live in. The combination of immersion and personalisation could lead to a fracturing of what social and political thought calls “the public sphere.”

• Lack of ground truth : There are risks associated with the power of XR to provide convincing sensory evidence that people take as ground truth. For example, in legal settings, a witness may say “I saw the suspect leave the suitcase at the station entrance, look around, and then quickly walk away.” The visual experience of the witness is crucial for justice, and the law court trusts that the visual experiences of witnesses generally correspond to ground truth. XR potentially allows the people who control the system (i.e., the generated sensory data and possibilities for interaction) to control, reorganize, and manipulate the sensory experiences of others. Society is based on the premise that sensory experiences give ground truth. XR at societal scales has the capacity to decouple sensory experience from ground truth, potentially undermining some core elements of social fabric.

• Persuasive advertising : Potential negative manifestations of advertising content in XR should be considered. Up until recently advertising was public: everyone watching the same material on TV or reading the newspapers would see the same adverts. Later advertising on the web and social media became personal so that one person would see a set of personalized ads based on their own online profile and history. However, such advertising can be easily ignored. Now with AR it is possible that as we go about our daily lives (wearing AR headsets) we might be bombarded by advertising where virtual human characters continuously approach us acting out advertising scenarios, selling products, and directly trying to persuade us. It is also possible that we may not know that we are being actively persuaded in this manner. This cannot be ignored, and could be highly persuasive. Perhaps following certain types of web and games advertising, people will have to pay to stop such bombardment.

Principles for Action

Rather than try to deal with each of the above raised issues separately, here we outline some general principles that might be applied to each type of problem. Note that these principles are particularly relevant to superrealism in the context of XR rather than XR per se .

Minimizing Potential Harm of Immoderate Use

First of all, it is essential to distinguish between the risks originating from immoderate use and those emanating from the content of XR applications. Spending 2 h a week in a virtual world is clearly not the same as devoting most of one's waking hours to creating and living in a virtual life. Indeed, a study of adolescents showed that moderate use of social media is not inherently harmful and may even be beneficial ( Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017 ), so the same may be true about XR use. However, there is not yet a societal norm for what constitutes a reasonable frequency of use, or indeed an understanding of who is responsible for limiting or indeed enforcing the amount of time the user spends in XR. For example, withdrawal from the public sphere of shared reality into a “private world” of individual experience that (although not real) is lived as if it is a private reality could be a real risk for the well-being of XR users. Yet, is living in this private world a right ? Can we require people to be part of a shared public sphere? Can we justifiably prevent XR providers from providing the world into which they withdraw?

In fact, social norms are helpful here: we normally do not allow providers to supply a potentially harmful product and then devolve all of the ethical risk to the user. Instead, we regulate the supply of the product to ensure that the use is appropriate. For example, if a product is potentially addictive, we are cautious about providing it (think about tobacco or alcoholic beverages). It is therefore essential that developers are aware of the ethical implications that can arise as a consequence of how their products are constructed, that they recognize they have a major role in preventing dangers of immoderate use and that they must accept evidence-based regulation to minimize harm. Together with legal authorities, providers have a huge impact on how the use of their products is perceived by society. However, it is also recognized that, in order to do this, developers and authorities alike need access to more research on which to base their response and recommendations.

Minimizing Content-Induced Risk

The other critical factor involves the risks posed by the content of XR applications. Again, one cannot compare racing cars with committing extremely violent crimes in XR. This is relevant particularly for how applications are designed, such as games, products for training or therapy, or applications for research. Brey states that designers should consider what kinds of actions are made possible within XR, how these actions are represented, and whether these actions are encouraged or dissuaded ( Brey, 1999 , 2008 ). In a game or another application in which killing is possible, for example, is this action encouraged or is it dissuaded? Is it rewarded or is it punished? Is the depiction of such action realistic or is it toned down ? Is a specific social group (for example, a specific race) the target of such action? Whether one particular event taking place in XR is moral or immoral depends on multiple factors, some of which have been described here, and not on the event per se . Some authors have suggested that developers disclaim the potential effects of the content on the users. If developers are transparent, and openly and understandably transmit the possible effects on their users, they limit their legal liabilities on top of protecting individuals from potential harm ( Brey, 2008 ; Spiegel, 2018 ).

In fact, certain principles that apply to other forms of media—such as broadcasting—are also appropriate for XR technology. For instance, many aspects relevant to XR systems are covered by existing BBC editorial policy guidelines 9 . In conventional media, there are clear warnings, for example, that what is being shown is a reconstruction, or that some material contains images that may be disturbing to some, so that people are not caught off-guard or misinterpret the veracity of what they observe. Trust is critical; if the BBC reconstruct something (for example, a crime scene), this has to be very clearly labeled—to show visually that this is not the reality. However, XR has a different level of intensity—and often a different objective—that calls for the development of new conventions and sometimes the modification of existing ones (for example, clear depictions of violence may be necessary in military training with XR, and principles or guidelines intending to ameliorate the distress of the participants may not apply in this case). Clear warnings are always advisable and minimum age requirements may be adequate in some instances. Moreover, the short- and long-term effects are unknown; hence, guidelines of XR use will need to be modified as research unravels new findings.

Selecting Levels of Deception

Along with the expectations from the XR industry, we should consider the nature of XR tools as well as which type of use society gives them. VR and AR are intrinsically “deceptive” in that they deliver virtual sense data that may be perceived by people as an alternate reality, and they provide the means to interact within that reality. Although this is “deceptive,” it is the point of XR. People are freely able to choose to enter into this deception, and there is an implicit contract with the designer of the virtual experience where the participant says “I want to experience your virtual world,” and the designer/implementer says “Suit-up in this way with these devices and you will experience it.” The question is then: how much should the contract go beyond this?

To reduce the level of realness, implementers (for example, researchers) and participants may be able to select a level of deception. For example, level 10 means that the XR should try its absolute best to completely convince participants that what they are experiencing is real. Level 1 might be “give me some experience, but do your best to keep reminding me that this is not happening, it is not real.” How this might be done is already problematic—for we have seen that, for example, rendering everything in wire frame (i.e., something that clearly appears unrealistic) in itself is almost certainly not sufficient to completely diminish place illusion and plausibility. An example might be that participants in AR may want to have a setting where virtual human characters are always with (for example) a halo, so that they always know that they are not real. What would the settings between 1 and 10 mean? We have no data that could shed light on this question. It would be important to uncover factors that influence the probability of people being able to distinguish real from virtual when they are wearing the device, and after they no longer wear the device again distinguish between real and virtual memories. Confusion is the heart of the problem given that the very idea of XR involves confusion. A simpler alternative to selecting the level of deception within an XR application would be to at least be aware of how realistic it is, perhaps based on some sort of standardized rating scale that allows users to select an XR application based on the level of deception. Broadcast and film have well-known and understood ratings but there is no known rating system for VR and AR.

Educating Implementers and Participants

Education of implementers and participants about the power of the technology should be a fundamental principle and responsibility of producers of material. Realism is certainly vital in extremely important applications such as for training (flight simulators are a good example of this). However, as well as emphasizing the positive aspects, potential negative effects should also be considered. Perhaps we may apply the same principles as for medicine: we take it for positive effect, but we are also warned of potential side-effects. Education should also take into account that although XR can result in surreptitious influences on behavior, this is nothing new. There are innumerable attempts in everyday life to influence our attitudes and behavior. The question though is whether people know that this is occurring. For example, in the 1950s there were attempts at subliminal advertising in cinemas (flashing an advert so fast it could not be consciously seen), which was eventually discovered and banned.

Education also includes training of end users. For example, when watching TV or playing a video game, if the content becomes uncomfortable or distressing to the viewers they can simply look away and immediately see the real world. In XR, the most obvious thing to do when in trouble would be to close your eyes and take off the device. However, it may not be so easy to disengage—precisely because place illusion and plausibility may lead some participants to simply forget that they can do this. Some form of training to remind users of their ability to “opt-out,” or else a stop button may therefore be an important concept, in order to always respect the participant's right to stop. Additionally, some kind of post-experience “cleansing” may be needed.

As well as education, a related and fundamental issue is trust. Some people might be afraid of a hypothetical case in which reality and XR are not discernible, for example, they might be afraid about themselves or others becoming confused by using superreal XR before even trying it. This would be evidently assumed out of lack of experience but can nonetheless be resolved if there is trust. How can consumers of virtual experiences be assured that they can trust the content? A way forward on this is to develop industry standards or even a cross-industry code of conduct to which producers of virtual content must adhere. A technological solution may involve some concept such as a “watermarking” equivalent of XR. For any approach toward avoidance of negative influences, there have to be standards developed that are agreed upon across industry, with education amongst participants about what particular effects mean. As a simple example, if virtual characters always have a halo, then the meaning of this convention needs to be understood.

Protecting Personal Information

Finally, data issues should be carefully addressed. Some authors have proposed that companies publicly disclose what kind of personal information they obtain and share with third parties, some encouraging “no share” data laws or options for the user to opt out ( Pase, 2012 ; Spiegel, 2018 ). In Europe this is almost certainly already covered by the GDPR legislation, in particular Article 6 10 . The benefits of these legal restrictions, they defend, would outweigh the harm imposed on personal liberty, like the right to privacy. In the context of superrealism in which large amounts of personal data may be used, this option seems at the very least cautious. If this were to be done, the disclosures for the lay public should be made simple and comprehensible.

In all cases, it seems that legal authorities in particular may benefit from considering the implementation of the precautionary principle , whereby discretionary measures are taken when the consequences of a new situation are not yet known; in this case, the effects of XR use are not yet fully understood, it is not clear how the content, and in particular superreal content, may influence individuals and society as a whole, and data issues remain a debatable topic. Research is thus warranted to bring insights into these matters.

Scientific Questions

As we have seen, there is essentially no data that can help in addressing these ethical issues. The problem is that while XR was confined to the lab and industry, it was under tight control through the standard ethical procedures of the institutions, which were guided by the rules and principles briefly outlined in the introduction. Now that XR technology is being released for mass consumption, there are no controls, and no relevant data.

Moreover, it is important to understand that ethical problems do not end with a particular experience—what happens in the longer term is critical. An after-effect might be prolonged. Even a single traumatic episode can have lasting consequences. After watching a movie, you move around in real space where other people are visible, you interact with the real world, and maybe that process diffuses the experience. But it might be the case that this does not work in XR—since as we argued earlier, an XR experience is a real and personal experience, even though the source of the experience is virtual. What was experienced was not about someone else (as it is in a movie) but personal.

Short-term after-effects should be experimentally tractable now. Suitable behavioral tests and measures could compare participant behavior in simple cognitive and social tasks immediately after a brief period in VR or AR, perhaps comparing two XR scenarios that elicit contrasting emotions.

Long-term acculturation effects are not easy to study experimentally, at least not at the moment. We do not know how much exposure is required, and we cannot control for the additional stimulation the participant gets while not in the XR.

Sensory grounding could be studied now. This could start by investigating whether VR or AR can be successfully used to manipulate memory for an event. In a pre-test, for example, I might experience that Bill gave me an apple, and Jane asked to borrow my phone. Can a subsequent session of XR overwrite, erase, or change those memories? This type of research has huge ethical implications for the field of “false memory” and historic child abuse, and would generate a lot of ethical discussion. It would be highly morally and politically sensitive. It would open up a debate on whether AR and immersive VR should or should not be used in situations of recovered memory and historic child abuse; if this use is not yet present, it seems likely to develop. It would be important to involve appropriate academic and clinical researchers in any experimental work, and to think carefully about stakeholders.

We can consider additionally the following issues for experimentation, presented as a series of questions:

• Do people trust virtual characters more if they are more realistic?

• Does greater realism lead to greater confusion between the real and the virtual?

• Does greater realism lead to greater behavioral and emotional impact?

• Does greater realism lead to a greater chance of negative after-effects?

• Can people already today be confused between reality and virtual reality?

• Will there be greater plausibility (illusion that the events are really happening) in interactions with superrealistic characters?

• What, if any, are public perceptions of these issues today?

• How can there be longer term follow-ups of the effects of a virtual experience?

• What are the long-term cultural effects of superreal XR usage?

The other way to think about this might be to explore the concept of discernment in virtual environments. We are familiar with the uncanny effects of viewing avatars and even though animation is capable of producing more and more lifelike figures, we can still tell what is real and what is not real. So, is there a skill of discernment that allows people to learn to distinguish between the real and the virtual? Under some circumstances, some consumers might be more able to discern than others, some might be able to be taught to recognize—just as some people can be taught to tell fake news from real news online—but many would not. There may be longer term questions about the speed with which such education could be developed and extended into the community: what might the lag be between creation of virtual content and development of discernment skills?

Conclusions

The development of increasingly realistic virtual worlds allows for advancements in XR technology to be used in training, education, psychotherapy, physical and mental rehabilitation, marketing, entertainment, and for further applications in research. The benefits of superrealism are clear: realistic virtual scenarios can make XR applications more efficacious. For example, aviators can be better trained because the virtual simulation in which they operate is more accurate and closer to reality; exposure therapy in which a patient is presented with a realistic virtual version of the agent they are afraid of (for example, a spider) may be more efficient if the agent seems real, and so on. As occurs with most things in the world, with benefits come potential misuse, abuse or neglect, all of which bring about ethical concerns.

We started with a version of the golden rule: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn it.” This is not at all about “empathy,” but very practical guidance. When we construct experiences for others, we need to think about whether we would want to have this experience—without prior warning, education, training, and assured compliance with a generally agreed and debated code of conduct. The challenge now is for researchers, content creators, and distributors of XR systems to determine what should be within this code of conduct.

Author Contributions

MS wrote the first draft of the paper. PH and CV provided further first-hand writing. CG-L systematically contributed to, edited, and organized the paper. All other authors contributed to and reviewed the paper. The ideas of the paper were formulated through a series of meetings to which all authors contributed.

This work was initiated and funded by Digital Catapult, London, UK. Individual members of Digital Catapult took part in the research and writing. MS was Immersive Fellow at Digital Catapult, and CG-L was employed by Digital Catapult for this purpose. Digital Catapult has no financial interest in the publication of this paper.

Conflict of Interest

MS was a consultant for the company Digital Catapult as Immersive Fellow in the carrying out of this work. CG-L was a consultant for Digital Catapult in the carrying out of this work. CV was employed by the company Magic Leap. RG-C and JS were employed by the company Digital Catapult. SJ was employed by the company Dimension – Hammerhead VR. ZW was employed by the BBC. GB was employed by the company HTC Vive. RS, WS, and SH were employed by the company Facebook. DS was employed by the company Jigsaw. DF was employed by the foundation Nesta.

The remaining author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This paper was produced as a result of meetings of the Digital Catapult Working Group on Ethics of Realism in XR. In addition we thank Andrew Fitzgibbon of Microsoft Cambridge UK for valuable input, and Naima Camara, Paul Childs, Mandy Mazliah, Cordelia O'Connell, and Philip Young of Digital Catapult for editing. MS led this work while Digital Catapult Immersive Fellow. MS is also supported by the ERC Advanced Grant MoTIVE (#742989).

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4. ^ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-oculus-codec-avatars-vr/

5. ^ https://www.dimensionstudio.co/work

6. ^ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/23/faking-it-how-selfie-dysmorphia-is-driving-people-to-seek-surgery

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Keywords: virtual reality, augmented reality, ethics, realism, VR, AR, XR

Citation: Slater M, Gonzalez-Liencres C, Haggard P, Vinkers C, Gregory-Clarke R, Jelley S, Watson Z, Breen G, Schwarz R, Steptoe W, Szostak D, Halan S, Fox D and Silver J (2020) The Ethics of Realism in Virtual and Augmented Reality. Front. Virtual Real. 1:1. doi: 10.3389/frvir.2020.00001

Received: 19 November 2019; Accepted: 11 February 2020; Published: 03 March 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Slater, Gonzalez-Liencres, Haggard, Vinkers, Gregory-Clarke, Jelley, Watson, Breen, Schwarz, Steptoe, Szostak, Halan, Fox and Silver. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Mel Slater, melslater@ub.edu

† Present address: Rebecca Gregory-Clarke, StoryFutures Academy: The National Centre for Immersive Storytelling, London, United Kingdom

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