How VR/AR may fundamentally change the concept of identity
"Art is first internalizing what you see and feel, and then it's thought-to-pen-to-canvas for an artist—VR is my canvas," she proudly explained.
"You get this feeling of spatial awareness and embodiment, which is where VR excels," she said. "You can't have that with a 2D avatar, as we've seen in World of Warcraft, for example."
But it wasn't all charming. Taking pre-screened questions from social media, Hoerth raised concerns about the troubling issues the virtual world would carry into the physical realm. Specifically, as virtual reality advances and sophisticated digital identities are created, the way we identify one another and establish interpersonal trust may become deprecated.
For example, physical identification—such as passports, driver's licenses and simple visual recognition—primarily drives the way humans identify each other. Yet, as virtual reality develops more use cases beyond entertainment and penetrates deeper into society, it will become critical to know who is behind an avatar and which virtual identity actually corresponds to real-life flesh and bone.