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Dangers of Immersive VR

March 2003

A possible danger arises from making VR too lifelike and adding too much real world information. It is possible that after a while in a sufficiently lifelike immersive environment, a user may forget that it is not real and mental response may be similar to real life. If the user is in a violent computer game, then the effects of killing everything in sight may dull the user’s reactions to such acts in a similar way to doing it in reality. The current dangers of this with computer games today are dubious, but when the experience is indistinguishable from reality, real effects are much more feasible. It is worrying that people may become numbed to violence by such means, and may lose some of their natural aversion to it in real life. While this will probably not make every schoolboy into a mugger, it may make the difference for those on the margin. Although experiments are inconclusive as to whether TV achieves such a reaction, VR could be much more real so any effects may be much greater than a small TV screen could achieve. No-one knows for sure, but VR has already been shown to cause some perception problems when the user surfaces, and has even been blamed for a few traffic accidents.

Virtual rape in lifelike computer games may also cause similarly harmful perceptual changes. We may see such crimes increase in real life if these become commonplace activities in cyberspace games, even though no such effects have been noted for today’s screen based games. The effects on real world sexual response must also be considered.

There have already been instances of virtual rape and abuse in cyberspace. Various MUDS have seen expert users taking control of other people’s avatars and forcing them to do things that their owners would not want. Verbal assault in chat rooms is very frequent indeed. This can have a real psychological effect on some users, even though nothing physical has happened to them. If we add to this increased realism, perhaps with real video images of the people concerned, then the damage could be expected to be even worse.

Star Trek has already explored the idea of making a Holodeck replica of a real person to do things that would not be permitted by that person in real life (normally sex, but it could be anything). The required visual and behavioural information is gathered without permission. This is not considered a crime on Star Trek, but certainly a dubious activity. In real life, we already have digital video cameras (some at 1mm size), software to extract simple 3d data from images, and VR to give 3D display, so already have all the components to do this today, albeit in embryonic form. It is only software holding it back. Both of these are short term bottlenecks. Of course, images already gathered on camera or video tape could be used by future applications as they become available. Few people are aware of the danger that they may end up in someone else’s VR fantasy in a few years time, but it is real. Real relationships may of course be damaged by such cyber-abuse.

These are just two possible dangers, there may be more. It is important that we research such interactions between VR and real life perception, or we may find ourselves trying to undo social problems which could have been avoided.