Enlarge / Ahhh! I’m being attacked by an avatar who is REALLY, REALLY FRIENDLY. (credit: Rec Room)
The future of VR systems may be uncertain, but as consumer-grade devices come down in price, we’re probably going to see a lot of apps that go beyond gaming. Companies are betting that VR (and, one day, AR) will become the new interface for what we’re already doing on Web and mobile: shopping, working, and socializing. Imagine Twitter in VR: thousands of trolls and idiots, screaming into your face forever. Sounds like the apocalypse, right? Maybe. Developers are already thinking about how to prevent abuse from ruining their VR spaces. But first, they have to grapple with the changing face of trolling in VR.
People troll each other online for a million reasons, but one of the most obvious is that it’s simply much easier to say cruel things to someone who isn’t physically in front of you. Countless psychological studies have shown that people in real life have a difficult time saying negative things to each other’s faces. And this could actually be good news in the fight against online abuse in VR. Once VR social spaces are good enough to create decent facsimiles of our faces, engaging in mass mobbing or trolling may become harder. There’s a huge difference between sending a nasty tweet and speaking the same words to somebody’s face.
The question is, will our psychological blocks against insulting people to their faces actually kick in when we’re in a virtual space? Preliminary evidence from early social VR spaces suggests the answer is complicated.
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Welcome to the world of trolling in virtual reality