philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Stanford study: Misinformation in Virtual Reality

Authors James G. Brown, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Jeffrey Hancock

Abstract. Virtual Reality (VR) use is growing, with approximately 20 million headsets sold in the US between 2021 and 2023. At the same time, the medium is becoming more immersive, creating perceptual experiences that come closer to the fidelity of reality with each new technological iteration. Misinformation, a long-time societal issue, has been exacerbated by the rise of the internet and social media platforms. Some of those same social media companies are also primarily driving VR: ninety percent of all VR headsets were sold by either Meta or ByteDance in 2022. It is reasonable to assume that VR will amplify misinformation since by definition the medium is designed to experientially simulate “reality”. However, there is little empirical or conceptual research in this area. The current paper reviews research on VR and misinformation and proposes an affordance-based framework for examining how VR features may foster false beliefs. We categorize VR features into two categories, immersive features (e.g., stereoscopic vision, head tracking, etc.) and content features (e.g., self- embodiment, consistency, and persistence), and for each, we review previous research on its relationship with influencing beliefs and provide informed predictions as to if and how that feature will contribute to the effectiveness of misinformation. We argue that VR can produce “mis- experiences” and will require new mitigation strategies in the Trust and Security space.

...with recent technological advances in virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence, there is a growing concern about the need to address these technologies in the context of misinformation given the potential they have to exacerbate the problem. Yet to date, there has been little research on the topic, let alone guidelines for trust and safety stakeholders. ...

... “Real-time misinformation spread in VR is enhanced by an arsenal consisting of nonverbal cues, spatial audio, haptic touch, social conformity, and other affordances that all enable a more persuasive user-to-user message, as opposed to simple text, video, or images alone. …the ephemeral (at the individual level) and multimodal nature of the medium presents identification and observation challenges that current automated trust and safety mitigation techniques may struggle with.” ...

See the full paper here: https://stanfordvr.com/mm/2023/03/Misinformation-in-Virtual-Reality.pdf