“The comprehensive character of VR plus the potential for the global control of experiential content introduces opportunities for new and especially powerful forms of both mental and behavioral manipulation, especially when commercial, political, religious, or governmental interests are behind the creation and maintenance of the virtual worlds.” — Madary and Metzinger, 2016

When I read the quote and look at the image above, I immediately think about the genre of Cyberpunk. Characterized by abundance of technology over progress, and deep seeded in the anxiety of technological dependence and government control, Cyberpunk is a very dystopian high-tech look at a future where technology can be used to control, persuade, or manipulate people. The closest thing we have today in digital design are a series of patterns known as “dark patterns”. Found in many modern applications, dark patterns ignore human-centered philosophy and are rooted in deception and coercion- typically done for things like capturing unnecessary data or pushing people to purchase something or take a political stance.

Jeremy Bailenson mentioned in Experience on Demand five major risks for Virtual Reality including: Distraction, addiction, simulator sickness, medium modeling, and effects of VR on Children. The rest of this paper will merge Bailenson’s risks with Madary and Metzinger’s four major risks associated with virtual reality:

Long-term immersion- addiction, dissociation, fatigue

Neglect of embodied interaction and the physical environment — allowing people to neglect themselves, others, or their physical environment

Risky content — Content that is violent, extreme, or overwhelming, for example, training someone how to program a nuclear missile

Privacy- the loss of identity or disrespect of privacy, for example, placing someone inside of an experiment without their consent.

Madary and Metzinger’s risks align well with Bailenson’s. The rest of this section will go into more detail about these four risks and some of the research that has been done to support them.

Long-Term Immersion

Jeremy Bailenson mentioned three main issues that arise from the overuse of VR: Physical sickness, eyestrain and reality blurring. We have already touched on the first two, but the third one raises a major ethical dilemma. In his book Experience on Demand, Bailenson recounts a 2014 study by a team of German scientists from the University of Hamburg. One of the scientists spent 24 hours in VR and was then tasked with separating artifacts from the real and virtual world. He told the scientific VR community that “Several times during the experiment, the participant was confused about being in the VE (virtual environment) or the real world.” This finding alone is troubling when considering the implications of VR addiction.

The biggest issue is that we simply do not know the psychological impact of long-term immersion. So far, most scientific research using VR has involved only brief periods of immersion, typically on the order of minutes rather than hours. Once the technology is adopted for personal use, there will be no limits on the time immersants choose to spend. This is especially troubling when considering recent research by Ketaki Shriram which suggest that people inside of VR are less likely to recognize stimuli outside of VR, for example, something touching their hands. Translate this to neglect and VR could stop people from eating or sleeping.

A major problem discussed by Madary and Metzinger is that VR technology could be used to manipulate an immersant’s sense of agency. That is, their perception of how much control they have over a situation. Within the general context of mental health, long-term immersion could cause low-level, initially unnoticeable psychological disturbances involving a loss of the sense of agency for one’s physical body- or to be more specific, VR dependency.

“Cyber Suicide” by Konstantin Bratishko

“With little exposure to “higher” culture, to great works of art and literature; and without the skills (and maybe the attention spans) to enjoy them; people would be less able to engage with the world at a deep level. People without exposure to great works and ideas might find that [their] inner lives are shaped to a large degree by market-led cultural products rather than works of depth and profundity. — Fiachra O’Brolcha (2015)

I think that two of the biggest anxieties surrounding VR are addiction and dependence. The medium is an experience generator with limitless capabilities. It can be used to do the impossible, but can also be used to addict for commercial gain. Think if the way freemium applications work today, where users can engage with them as much as they would like at the price of their time- subjecting them to a barrage of advertisements- essentially brainwashing them.

The book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley painted a picture of immersive media that was completely based on sensory stimulation. Called the “feelies”, the films would provide a sensory stimulus across all of the immersants senses to the point of complete dissociation with reality. Immersant could feel the sensation of a kiss, touch, or just about anything else. Thus, media producers focused on pushing out the most addicting content that would keep people coming back for more. Another novel, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace dives into this type of reality even further by suggesting a media so addicting that it is not only banned, but completely lethal due to it’s addictive content.

If VR is built to be addicting, and to demand the attention of it’s immersant (such as how mobile apps are developed now), chronic dependency and addiction could very well become a reality. Long-term immersion in VR might also be unedifying, making people more shallow as they retreat from society in favor of an artificial social world in which their decisions are made for them. This was a major theme in Janet H. Murray’s book “Hamlet on the Holodeck” which challenges the nature of virtual narratives and how people engage with virtual experiences.

Neglect of Embodied Interaction and the Physical Environment

“Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”

― William Gibson, Neuromancer

It doesn’t take much looking to find the consequences of addiction and neglect especially when it comes to one’s physical bodies, interpersonal relationships, or physical environment. In Neuromancer, the protagonist Case’s addiction to speed can only be paralleled with his addiction to cyberspace. Throughout the book, he even refers to his body as simply “meat” and all of the human limitations that come with it.

Within the past year, we have already seen the first documented VR-related death where a 44-year-old Moscow resident died after falling through a glass table while inside of VR. It goes without saying that as immersant’s spend increasing time in virtual environments, they are at risk of their neglecting their own bodies and physical environments — just as for many people today posing and engaging in disembodied social interactions via their Facebook account has become more important than what was called “real life” in the past. In extreme cases, individuals refuse to leave their homes for extended periods of time, behavior categorized as “Hikikomori” by the Japanese Ministry of Health.

When entertainment numbs people from taking care of themselves and their environment and is used as an escape or a distraction from real life, it can cause humans to not only be lonely, but numb to human interaction. A recent finding from Teo et al. (2015) suggests that depression is more likely in older adults who have less social contact in person regardless of their amount of telephone, written and email contact. Perhaps more importantly, there is a concern that mediating technologies will not allow us to pick up on all of the subtle bodily cues that appear to play a major role in social communication through unconscious entrainment (Frith and Frith, 2007), cues that involve ongoing embodied interaction (Gallagher, 2008; de Jaegher et al., 2010). To put it simply, people could forget body cues that exist in the real world after spending too much time socializing in VR- impacting ones ability to engage in real-life, human-to-human, communication.

Disclaimer: This is not to suggest that social interaction in VR is bad. Social interaction and friendships in videogames, for example, have been shown to reduce social anxiety and produce strong relationships akin to real life friendships. It’s just that balance between interaction in virtual and real environments is necessary. In Peter Rubin’s book “Future Presence” he recalls the story of a group of friends in the game Rec Room, two of which got married in real life.

A group of friends in Rec Room

Madary and Metzinger suggest designers consider how well social interactions VE’s will translate into real world behavior. Shallow or even meaningless interactions (think of today’s Facebook-“friendships” and “likes”) are experienced as substantial by users. The issue is that a shallow form of social interaction could become culturally assimilated and thereby “normalized” in society (Metzinger and Hildt, 2011, p. 247) which could lead to happiness inside the virtual world, depression in the real world, and most of all- addiction and dependence on virtual environments.

Risky Content

“Will the stories brought to us by the new representational technologies ‘mean anything’ in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays mean something, or will they be ‘told by an idiot’?” — Aldous Huxley (sourced from Hamlet on the Holodeck)

There’s a pattern that has been emerging from the dawn of broadcasting media to modern technology. That is, the plasticity of the human mind. To be more specific, I am referring to the ability for media to alter our behavior or thoughts. As Jeremy Bailenson and his colleagues like to put it “media experiences are like a diet: you are what you eat”. This phenomenon is referred to as media modelling and it has to do with the way media experiences impact human behavior in the real world. This is especially troubling when considering the brains of children which are in such rapid development.

So what happens when people are learning how to put together a bomb in VR, hurting people, or damaging property inside of VR? During his trial, the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik described hours of practice using a holographic sight in the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as “training” for his horrific rampage on the island of Utoya on July 22nd, 2011. (sourced from “Experience on Demand”, 2018). With VR being generally more capable as an educational tool than control conditions (to be discussed later), what are the implications for risky content?

Yes, there’s a VR mod for GTA

There’s a big rule in the virtual reality community that VR is for things that you couldn’t do in the real world, not what you shouldn’t do. The problem however is that people are naturally curious and want to use technology as a means to experiment with doing the impossible or crossing the lines without consequence. In many respects, that’s one of the capabilities of VR that makes it awesome. A second possible problem is that this rule of thumb would make VR even more subjectively real. That is, limiting opportunities could constrain the amount of magic and potential that VR can provide.

I think it goes without saying that some types of content (which are already banned in video games) should not be allowed in virtual environments. Some obvious candidates that Madary and Metzinger suggest are sex (virtual pedophilia, virtual rape) and violence. I would push it further to say that human torture, animal abuse, and self-harm should be included in this as well. However there is also a sect of content known as the “dark triad” (Paulus and Williams, 2002) that should be considered. The dark triad refers to narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Individuals may find it appealing to spend time in virtual worlds designed to reward characters that exhibit traits associated with the dark triad. For example, the MMORPG EVE Online is known for fostering a style of play that involves manipulating and deceiving other players. The issue being that engaging in these behaviors could condition someone to become more comfortable with doing them in real life- a hypothesis supported by findings in behavior modification through VR (to be discussed).

“Today, one of the biggest problems for virtual reality is that the immediately obvious customer base willing to spend money is gamers, and gaming culture has been going through misogynist convulsions.”

- Jaron Lanier

More recently, an experiment reproducing the famous Milgram obedience experiments in VR found that subjects reacted as if the shocks they administered were real, despite believing that they were merely virtual (Slater et al., 2006). These findings suggest that even in virtual environments, people will obey an authority figure even if it means committing an atrocity.

Privacy (Skinner Boxing)

Thirteenth VR DefinitionL The perfect tool for the perfect, perfectly evil Skinner box. -Jaron Lanier

A Skinner box is a controlled environment where scientists can take accurate measurements from a subject as they participate in an experiment. In VR, this can very much be done without the participant even knowing, if you think about how much data is being tracked about a person at a time.

Perhaps the most ugly side of virtual reality is associated with control. One movie I like to think of that captures this anxiety is the Matrix trilogy. Based around Simulation Theory, the film follows protagonist Neo as he uncovers the truth behind humanity’s existence. The truth is that all humans are stuck in an AI-controlled simulation designed to keep them numb, distracted, and satisfied to the point that they are completely unaware that what they are in is a virtual construct.

The Matrix trilogy has perhaps the most dystopian view of cyberspace

Don’t let a technology manipulate people on the behalf a third party- that’s the bottom line from one of Jaron Lanier’s recent talks in the metaverse Sinespace. He goes on to say:

“if you think about what VR is, it’s measuring a lot about a person. You have to have accurate motion tracking, facial expressions, and all kinds of things. Then you have the feedback that the machine captures. So you can theoretically build a Skinner Box. VR is good for anything, not just connecting people, but could also be used for behavior modification. To what degree is it about making a connection, and another about manipulation and trickery? The technology is good at both. The components of a Skinner box and those of a cybernetic computer are essentially the same.” — Jaron Lanier

One of the problems and issues that Madary and Metzinger address is- what happens when commercial advertising is prioritized over human privacy? Jaron mentioned in his previously mentioned talk how disturbing it was for him that Facebook purchased Oculus. The reason being that Facebook has already allowed corporations to push their ads to the masses in a really irresponsible and uncontrollable way, which ultimately lead to coercion and deception which are the hallmarks of unethical persuasive technology.

As we’ve spoken about in this article already, VR allows people to experience and do things like never before which can lead to behavior modification. This is because our brain treats VR in a similar way that it does reality. Commercial applications of virtual environments introduce new possibilities for targeted advertising or “neuromarketing,” thus attacking the individual’s mental autonomy. By tracking the details of one’s movements in VR, including eye movements, involuntary facial gestures, and other indicators of what researchers call low-level intentions or “motor intentions” (Riva et al., 2011), private agencies will be able to acquire details about one’s interests and preferences in completely new ways (Coyle and Thorson, 2001).

“Thirty-eighth VR Definition: The ultimate way to capture someone inside of an advertisement. Let’s hope it’s done as little as possible.” -Jaron Lanier

Disclaimer: This is not to suggest that this is what Virtual Reality WILL become. It is just saying that it is what it COULD become if the end user is not prioritized over commercial giants.

Commercials in VR could even feature images of the target audience himself or herself using the product. The use of big data to “nudge” users (“Big Nudging”) combined with VR could have long-lasting effects, perhaps producing changes in users’ mental mechanisms themselves. Immersant’s ought to be made aware that there is evidence that advertising tactics using embodiment technology such as VR can have a powerful unconscious influence on behavior. For example, VR has had influence on behavior in controlled settings, making subjects willing to save more for their retirement (Hershfield et al., 2011), perform better on tests for implicit racial bias (Peck et al., 2013), and behave in a more environmentally conscious manner (Ahn et al., 2014). If individuals do not seek to alter their psychological profile in the ways intended by the beneficent VR interventions, then such interventions may be considered a violation of their autonomy.

Changes in behavior while in the virtual environment are of ethical concern, since such behavior can have serious implications for our non-virtual physical lives — for example, as financial transactions take place in a non-physical environment (Madary, 2014).

Academic Case Study — Emotions inside of Virtual Reality

What is historically new, and what creates not only novel psychological risks but also entirely new ethical and legal dimensions, is that once VR gets ever more deeply embedded into another VR: the conscious mind of human beings, which has evolved under very specific conditions and over millions of years, now gets causally coupled and informationally woven into technical systems for representing possible realities. — Madary and Metzinger

This short section is going to weigh a little heavy on the academic side.

If one theme has resonated through this paper I hope it’s that VR is for things that we couldn’t do in reality, not what we shouldn’t do. VR has the ability to make us feel, it’s this emotion that it provides that provides the illusion of presence. It can be something that makes us feel fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, trust, anticipation among any other emotion the medium allows us to provoke.

Virtual Pit studies show that people are prone to real and perceived physical and social dangers inside of Virtual Reality including strong feelings of stress and fear. In addition to a strong emotional response from immersion, there is evidence that experiences in VR can also influence behavioral responses. One example of a behavioral influence from VR has been named the Proteus Effect by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson. This effect occurs when subjects “conform to the behavior that they believe others would expect them to have” based on the appearance of their avatar (Yee and Bailenson, 2007, p. 274; Kilteni et al., 2013). They found, for example, that subjects embodied in a taller avatar negotiated more aggressively than subjects in a shorter avatar.

When experiencing anxiety, people report heightened physiological arousal (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure). Research from Levin et al. (1993) showed that social anxiety reveals itself in ineffective self-presentation behaviors. These include behaviors such as trembling, fidgeting, stammering, or stumbling over words. Leary et al. (1995) found these behaviors create negative impressions on others. Research from Gregg et al. (2007) and Opris et al. (2012) showed the effectiveness of VR as a treatment for anxiety disorders.

Participant in a VR Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) inside of a VR CAVE environment. Annerstedt et al (2013)

Research from Matilda Annerstedt (2013) suggested that social anxiety stimulated inside of VR via Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) can be attenuated with visual imagery and sound (specifically, a virtual forest). Annerstedt also noted heightened indicators of anxiety even up to 40 minutes after anxiety onset in a condition with a virtual forest without sound. It was suggested that this was due to anticipatory anxiety inside of VR. The viability of anxiety treatment in VR is based on the observation that virtual environments can elicit similar subjective and physiological reactions as real situations (Cornwell, Johnson, Berardi, & Grillon, 2006; Diemer, Mühlberger, Pauli, & Zwanzger, 2014; Mühlberger, Bülthoff, Wiedemann, & Pauli, 2007; Mühlberger, Petrusek, Herrmann, & Pauli, 2005; Villani, Repetto, Cipresso, & Riva, 2012).

Allcoat, Greville, Newton and Dymond (2015) ran a classical conditioning study examining the physiological effects of an anxiety-provoking stimulus (a 90db female shriek) in virtual reality. They found reliable suppression of operant behavior by a Pavlovian threat cue embedded within a VR task which mimicked the freezing-like responses that often occur in the presence of aversively learned cues in individuals with anxiety. Thus, it can be deduced that VR can trigger real stress and physical reactions in immersants.

Due to the isolating nature of virtual reality, social interactions in virtual settings, and the best way to moderate them, is a well-known issue in the VR community. Kipling Williams (2000) famously created the game Cyberball to demonstrate ostracization, prejudice and discrimination with statistical significance.

Participants who were ostricized in the VR experience Cyberball experienced anxiety. From ResearchGate

Williams and Jonathan Gerber (2005) have shown in an fMRI that ostracism in VR causes areas associated with pain and sadness to light up. Beatrice Hasler, Benhard Spangland and Mel Slater (2017) extended these experiments into virtual reality and found data that suggest people may behave negatively toward an outgroup when an intergroup threat is indirect. Research from Anderson-Hanley, Snyder, Nimon and Arciero (2011), Nunes, Nedel and Rosler (2014) and Snyder, Anderson-Hanley, and Arciero (2012) suggests that the effect of a competitor in VR has been examined to produce performance enhancement, particularly for those who report being more competitive. This body of research on social VR suggests that the phenomena of competitive drive, discrimination, prejudice and ostracization may take place in VR and thus, induce excitement, stress, or even depression on it’s immersants.

To put it simply- experiencing intense emotions inside of VR may have lasting, or even traumatic, effects outside of VR.

The Beautiful

The Benefits of Virtual Reality

“VR is an amazing technology, the brain treats it in a similar way to being real, it’s something that can take us to different places, it’s powerful. We should save it. Save it for things in the real world that meet one of four standards: Impossible, Counterproductive, Rare/Expensive, or Dangerous” — Jeremy Bailenson, Talks at Google

Major Takeaways

Virtual reality provides a vessel for human-to-human connection and interaction beyond any technology we have seen before, allowing us to battle the human-centered issues surrounding isolation.

Virtual reality can be harnessed for behavior modification and rehabilitation for both good and evil. It affords the opportunity to provide cognitive-behavioral therapy for any addiction, trauma, or phobia.

Virtual reality can be harnessed for distraction from the outside world, especially for distraction from chronic pain, or unpleasant stimuli (e.g. ER)

Virtual reality can be harnessed as a tool for empathy building, allowing immersants to embody something other than themselves and experience the world from a different perspective.

Virtual reality can create any experience, allowing us to experience things that are impossible, counterproductive, rare, expensive, or dangerous in the real world.

Virtual reality can be harnessed for education and training both in schools and industrial sessions. It allows companies to save on expensive resources or scenarios that are dangerous for their employees.

Virtual reality affords the opportunity to make the boring more exciting by allowing immersants to experience things (such as exercise) in new or exciting ways.

VR has changed the way I look at people and the world. I truly believe that it’s something everyone on this planet should try at least once. It’s predicted that mass adoption will take place once the hardware and software reach a certain level. Companies like Valve, Sony, Facebook, Microsoft, Magic Leap, Snap, Google, Pimax, (and potentially Apple and Nintendo based on recent rumors) are investing billions of dollars into the future of virtual, augmented and mixed reality… for better or worse.

The final piece of the paper will focus on the beautiful sides of VR, and will address just a few of many major findings that suggest VR as a transformative tool. Things that could provide good for humanity. I will focus on three subjects at a high level: Human Connection, Rehabilitation, and Empathy Building.

Human Connection

While the technology can seem cool or surprising in lots of different applications, interpersonal VR experiences often feel deeper, truer, than conventional social media platforms or multiplayer games. — Peter Rubin, Wired

There’s a popular belief related to VR that has resonated throughout the past decade or so: Instead of treating VR and related technologies as a replacement for in-the-flesh interaction, we should think of them as providing opportunities for new and perhaps enhanced modes of human interaction. A place where two people can interact with each other, see anything, and do anything they can imagine together. VR gives us the ability to take normal interactions in the world and provide superpowers for them, making something as simple as a high-five feel like a powerful splash of human connection. This social phenomenon is something that was recently referred to by Mark Zuckerberg as co-presence, the overwhelming sense in VR not just of being somewhere real, but being there with another person.

If you’re interested in learning more about co-presence in VR Chat, check out my article above.

Wired editor Peter Rubin goes into great detail about social VR in his book Future Presence and how VR is able to provide social connection in a way unlike we’ve ever experienced. It allows us to socialize under the veil of anonymity, to create social groups, or to build lasting friendships in the virtual world. He goes to say:

“Many argue that mobile smartphones and social media have made us less connected to our fellow human beings. VR has the potential to course-correct the isolating nature of much of today’s technology and the opportunity to make us more connected and even more human.” — Peter Rubin

In a recent interview with the University of Pennsylvania, Rubin answered a question related to the concept of intimacy in VR.

Knowledge@Wharton: “Intimacy is part of your book title. Can you talk about that?”

Rubin: “A chief ingredient of the intimacy [fostered] in virtual reality begins with the fact that you can have eye contact. As eye tracking gets into headsets in the next year or so, we will have the ability to have our gaze mirrored in virtual reality, everything from blinks to winks to where we are actually looking. We can already make eye contact with people, but when you bring in even more naturalistic cues, that creates the ability to turn what happens in VR into something that’s much more like real life.

It’s not like looking at a photo. It’s not like anything we’ve ever experienced before. If you have a real-life memory of something you’ve done in VR in a fantastic environment — whether it’s something as pedestrian as being under a starry sky, or you’re on the surface of Mars, or you’re floating over Central Park — your memory is still spending quality time with this other person or these other people in this magical place.”

Rehabilitation

“Thirty-sixth VR Definition: A way to try out proposed changes to the real world before you commit.” -Jaron Lanier

My sister is studying to be an Occupational Therapist. That is, someone who works to help people learn how to use their motor skills so that they can participate in society. She and I were talking about how they use VR to reinforce voluntary repetition, which is a key ingredient for motor recovery based on principles of neuroplasticity.

Earlier this year I wrote a proposal and literature review for a Master’s thesis surrounding the topic of social anxiety and virtual reality. Some of it is featured in the above section “Academic Case Study — Emotions inside of VR” . My hypothesis was that the physiological response to social anxiety could be attenuated with repeated exposure to social support in VR. I came up with this idea after learning about a lot of research being done to help people who struggle with a number of disorders. Tyler Rose, Chang Nam, and Karen Chen’s 2018 literature review “Immersion of virtual reality for rehabilitation” covers a lot of these disorders. Their findings suggest that VR can be used to help treat PTSD, arachnophobia, strokes (Jack et al., 2001), cerebral palsy (Reid, 2002), severe burns (Haik et al., 2006), Parkinson’s disease (Mirelman et al., 2010), Guillain-Barré syndrome (Albiol-Pérez et al., 2015), and multiple sclerosis (Fulk, 2005), among others. VR also offers the ability to customize treatment needs while delivering increased adjustment of assessment and training procedures (Sveistrup, 2004).

The following section is going to outline some case studies about how the power of VR is being used to assist those who struggle with overcoming isolation, fear, and pain in the real world.

-Isolation-

NASA has funded scientist Peggy Wu of the research company SIFT to study how VR could provide psychological support for astronauts on deep space missions. SIFT’s program — which is called ANSIBLE — contains virtual worlds on which astronauts could visit art galleries, nature preserves, and environments similar to home, or interact with avatars of their friends. The purpose of this is to rehabilitate them to human connection, to prevent loneliness, and to provide contact with their loved ones in a virtual space.

NASA also plans to use VR as a vehicle for training astronauts for space, as well as life on Mars. Replacing the expensive equipment usually required for training with digital holograms that can help trainees move through the motions of maintaining a space shuttle among other various exercises.