The metaverse puts its best foot forward

The metaverse industry has come a long way since one of the ten largest companies in the world by market capitalization named itself after the technology.

Although it still has a long way to go before there’s a headset in every home, it often seems like virtual reality technology is speed-running the controversies that have roiled the rest of the tech world. There’s the exhausted hype cycle, the big antitrust battle, the panic over misinformation, and the culture war battles. Now as Apple — the undisputed heavyweight champion of the device rollout — enters the increasingly crowded field, the VR industry is trying to reassure the public and policymakers that it has their best interests in mind as it carves a hopeful path to smartphone-like cultural ubiquity.

A report published this morning by the XR Association, the industry’s leading trade group with members including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm (although notably not Apple), lays out their plan what they hope is the next generational tech revolution. Titled “Charting the Future of Immersive Technology: Transforming Work, Education, Health, and Entertainment,” the report has a heavy focus on the practical applications for virtual reality, such as Meta’s much-touted educational efforts or the industrial-focused “digital twin” industry.

XRA president Liz Hyman’s intro to the report leaves zero ambiguity on what needs to happen for the technology to take off. Citing the advent of the World Wide Web and mobile internet, she calls on the industry to “learn from the lessons of the past” and “take a candid and comprehensive approach” to challenges involved in placing the goggles at the center of our computing lives. A few of the key takeaways the report reveals:

Think of the children. The report features a heavy emphasis on child safety (coincidentally, as the U.S. Senate is poised to pass the first online safety legislation in decades.) Roughly half of the initiatives the XRA report lays out for members have something to do with child safety and VR use, with the authors pointing out that there’s plenty to learn from in the successes and failures of efforts to police existing social media and gaming worlds.

In fact, they point to a recent report from the Atlantic Council that suggests gaming companies could be at the vanguard of establishing content moderation and behavior norms in the metaverse, protecting children from harmful content and cracking down on abuse. That’s no small effort, considering the Meta Quest’s focus on gaming and XRA member Sony’s investment in virtual reality. They note that most research about the effect of virtual spaces on young people is several years old, meaning it’s not very helpful in such a fast-moving technological space, and plan a literature review to capture a more up-to-date understanding.

Work together. The report also emphasizes interoperability, praising the work of the Metaverse Standards Forum, which was launched in 2022 to coordinate metaverse technology development and features many of the same member organizations as the XRA (again, notably sans Apple). The big players in the metaverse are focused on “technical interoperability and data interoperability,” which they define as the overall ability for their competing virtual platforms to work together and to use compatible data formats, respectively.

As wonky as it is, this kind of technical standard-setting is important to get right in the early days of any networked technology. The internet as we know it wouldn’t exist without the Hypertext Transfer Protocol developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. The XRA’s report chides the tech companies over existing disagreements over interoperability, although perhaps in the spirit of collegiality, it doesn’t say what those disagreements are. The implicit message, however: Get on the same page, and fast.

Don’t repeat old mistakes. The report’s authors write that getting ahead of the public’s data privacy concerns is “essential to realizing the full potential of the technology,” no small feat considering the member organizations are essentially asking users to record and map every single detail of the world within their line of sight. They note that existing European Union and United Kingdom data privacy laws already largely apply to virtual reality devices, and that while the U.S. has no federal data privacy law, provisions like HIPAA and COPPA protect sensitive information about health and children.

Considering debates over privacy legislation in the states and on Capital Hill, and the almost daily leaks and security breaches involving consumers’ two-dimensional data already, it’s perhaps not surprising that the XRA calls for a federal data privacy law to tamp down such concerns before there’s a headset in every home. The report resolves to address data privacy at the annual AR/VR Policy Conference hosted in cooperation with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

“Without trust in [metaverse] technology, it cannot succeed,” the authors write in conclusion. “This paper and the process that went into drafting it is a down payment on meeting that trust.” Users might be more worried at this very moment about overcoming nausea or even just charging their devices, but the massive financial investment big tech is making in the metaverse means they’re already thinking about it as a major policy issue.

The world’s militaries are largely exempt from the AI regulations sweeping the globe.

That’s what POLITICO’s Mark Scott observes in today’s Digital Bridge newsletter, writing that while the European Union prepares to pass its AI Act and the Biden White House proceeds to roll out its AI executive order, national security has largely received a regulatory carve-out.

“I can already hear the cries that, in a time of intense geopolitical rivalries, it’s naive to suggest hamstringing Western militaries when those from authoritarian countries exploit AI in ways that could eventually harm us,” Mark writes, especially as companies like Palantir and ClearviewAI offer their services to Ukraine. “But if the recent global AI governance discussions have shown anything, it’s that politicians — and the general public — want greater checks on the technology, and not just because of the existential threat that some believe the technology represents… The hard part is threading the needle between such civilian checks while allowing national security agencies to keep us safe.”

Mark notes a U.N. vote to censure the use of autonomous weapons in November, in which Belarus, India, Mali, Niger, and Russia voted against it, with China, North Korea, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates abstaining, foreshadowing some early divisions about how the world’s nations view the use of AI in war.

Another international collaboration on AI: Mongolia and the United Arab Emirates signed a memo today agreeing to cooperate on AI development and governance.

In a press release announcing the partnership, the two countries said that Mongolia, which was just honored at Dubai’s World Government Summit for its efforts to use digital technology to fight corruption, will work with the UAE on “joint research projects, exchange of policies related to AI, and co-operation on capacity building as well as other means to support the development of AI.”

In a 2023 interview, Mongolia’s Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai said the government was focused on “strengthening a corruption-free public service, effective participation of citizens, the involvement of civil society and media in this work, the independence of state institutions, reducing the risk of corruption in the budgeting and procurement process, and tackling theft, embezzlement, and waste,” as part of an ongoing effort to distance itself from China and Russia and tie itself more closely to the West.

The UAE additionally signed AI agreements with Austria and Colombia.