David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR

David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR
lithub.com

For a view from the other direction, "How to be a God", by Battle. This is a game dev who became an academic and spent too much time thinking about philosophy.

If you want some good metaverse questions to think about, here are a few, based on experience with mature systems such as Second Life.

* Games, like most forms of entertainment, must be interesting. So they have a much higher frequency of interesting events than people usually experience in real life. Much effort is expended in game design to make that happen. User-built virtual worlds, where the world itself is mostly passive, are more like real life. The frequency and density of interesting events is comparable to real life. That indicates the virtual world is doing a good job of simulating the real one. But it can be boring. It results in the standard Second Life new user question, "What do I do now?". The answer is "What do you want to do", which may lead to them being directed to an area where something that fits their interest is happening. But the world itself is indifferent to the players and does not try to engage them.

* How do we govern this thing? Almost everybody seems to assume the existence of some unchallengable authority. That is not only obnoxious, but has scaling problems. Second Life uses property rights to allow property owners to control much of what visitors can do on an owned parcel. This reduces the need for "moderators", who, in practice, are minimum wage workers in some outsourced call center. It's disappointing that democracy is out of fashion. The crypto people's idea of democracy is "one dollar, one vote". That lacks something.

* How "safe" does the virtual world have to be? Roblox takes a very hard line on this. Facebook claims to but has trouble delivering. Decentraland is too empty for it to matter. Second Life takes the position that they don't get involved with disputes between residents, and "safety", if desired, is the problem of the property owner.

* Are you your avatar, or are you puppeteering your avatar? This is a big issue in game design. If someone annoys your avatar, are they annoying you?

* What are we going to do about identity in virtual worlds? "Real Names"? Cross-system identities? Face recognition? Crypto wallets?

* How much of the user do we want to project into the virtual world? Typing only? Voice? Facial feature tracking? Full body tracking? All of those are available.

One big reason for this is some strange social stigma surrounding VR. Yes, there are many other issues like cost (minimum $2000 investment for a VR ready PC and headset) and complexity if you’re not using Oculus / Meta. Then there’s also Facebook’s toxic brand, which drives away many early tech adopters; but what if we were able to take them out of the equation?

Anyways, I did an experiment last Christmas. I got several family members Oculus Meta Quest 2 headsets. At the same time Meta was offering a $60 referral credit where both you and the new Quest user would get $60 in store credit.

To summarize, I removed the barrier of monetary cost, and Meta removed the barrier of complexity from VR (ie no wires, or PC setup). None of these people had a bad opinion of Facebook either. What was the result?

They tried the free demos once and stopped using it. It wasn’t until I constantly pestered them, that they actually tried apps with free credits and games and started to understand VR and use it more regularly, namely the fitness and social apps. I even recently talked to Meta contractor who mentioned that she wasn’t interested in a free Quest 2 headset even though she held the company in high regard. I feel for VR marketing teams. Until Apple helps make this mainstream, XR will have a very big hill to climb.

I wonder how he squares that with his enthusiasm for zombie arguments, which purport to show that no mere simulation of a conscious human would have all that is necessary for it to be conscious itself?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/opinion/virtual-reality-s...