Mr. Harsh Suresh Bharwani is the CEO and MD of Jetking Infotrain. He spearheads the International Business, Dedicated Services and Employability initiatives at Jetking. In the past decade, Harsh has trained over 40,000 students on success, confidence, social skills, leadership, business, health, and finance.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, announced plans to pivot to the metaverse — a fully digital environment accessible through virtual reality technology like VR headsets – in late 2021. Faced with a rising list of existential risks, including a $200 billion decrease in value in a single day and a long-term growth dilemma, Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on his metaverse project. However, as more information and research about Meta’s virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, becomes available, it’s becoming clear that Zuckerberg’s strategy may exacerbate the online harms and abuses of human rights that the company is failing to acknowledge on its existing platforms – harming not only communities but also the company.
Ways that Metaverse affects technology:
- We employ technologies like augmented and virtual reality to immerse ourselves in the digital world in the metaverse, which is the next version of the internet. With all of this digitization comes the issue of privacy.
- When we browse the internet, we already have privacy issues. The same technology that tracks our online behavior will be used in the metaverse, and the tracking will likely become much more intrusive and intense.
- VR headsets, for example, will feature eye-tracking technology, allowing marketers and advertising to monitor where we are looking in our immersive experience and for how long based on our headgear data. Of course, this is a marketer’s dream, but it’s a significant worry for anyone concerned about their privacy.
- As we connect wearable and haptic gadgets that record our emotions and bodily reactions, companies will be able to track our physical reactions. Companies could collect massive amounts of data and utilize it for marketing or other purposes.
Issues within the system:
It’s already tough for parents to keep track of what their children are doing online, and the metaverse will make it even more difficult. Understanding what our children are doing in the metaverse will be even more difficult because we won’t be able to see what they’re seeing through their VR headsets, and there will be no system in place to monitor their screens using tablets or phones.
- Need for the newest smartphone and handset technology to use augmented reality, and VR experiences necessitate high-tech, pricey headgear as well as robust and reliable connectivity.
- How can we ensure that everyone in the globe, not only the wealthy and those who reside in sophisticated countries, gets equitable access to the metaverse? As these immersive experiences become more essential, there should be a need to devise strategies to extend access to the metaverse.
- To prevent VR-related cybercrime, there must be a focus on security in the metaverse and create mechanisms to validate identities and eliminate fakes.
Clearly, there are numerous potential challenges with the metaverse, as well as numerous ones that we must consider (and even control) as this technology develops.