Virtual Reality Headsets, Gaining Scrutiny at E3 This Week, Raise Very Real Concerns
“When all of a sudden 10 avatars turn around and look at you, you know you should be quiet,” said Eric Romo, the chief executive of AltspaceVR, a Silicon Valley start-up that organizes the virtual movie gatherings and other virtual reality events.
Etiquette around social forms of virtual reality is already taking shape since this technology has the potential to turn some of the more noxious forms of online behavior into something far more menacing.
“We’re kind of at the Pong level of working with this,” said Chet Faliszek, who works on virtual reality at Valve, a game developer in Bellevue, Wash., referring to one of the earliest arcade video games to help popularize video gaming. “There’s so much more we’re discovering.”
At Valve, developers plan to minimize unwanted collisions with a feature that it calls a “chaperone” system.
The technology maps the terrain of a room: furniture, walls and all. When someone wearing a headset gets close to an object, a wireframe model of the room materializes in the virtual space in front of their eyes, fading as they move away.
But wearing a virtual reality headset in public could make someone a target for derision and, more seriously, theft.
A trickier challenge could be policing virtual reality games that are social in nature. Developers are buzzing over the possibilities of immersive virtual worlds in which people connect with each other. The potential for harassment, though, which is bad enough in conventional online video games, and other forms of abuse — especially in online settings that permit anonymity — are very real for virtual reality.
Mr. Bolas believes social virtual reality games will come up with “bounding boxes” — essentially, force fields that players can place around their avatars to keep others away.
See the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/business/virtual-reality-headsets-raise-very-real-concerns.html?_r=0