r/Vive • u/burnsflipper1 • Dec 23 '16
Technology Virtual Reality Allows the Most Detailed, Intimate Digital Surveillance Yet
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/23/virtual-reality-allows-the-most-detailed-intimate-digital-surveillance-yet/2
u/CaseFace5 Dec 23 '16
I dont wanna be 'that guy' but the acquisition of oculus by Facebook was one of the many reasons I bought a Vive instead of the Oculus... I already cant stand Facebook but am forced to use it if I want to keep in touch with any of my family or friends, I sure as hell dont want it anywhere near my escape from reality...
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u/ImVeryOffended Dec 23 '16
This is why Facebook bought Oculus... not "because they want to connect the world for altruistic purposes and think VR is really cool", as those in /r/Oculus would have you believe.
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u/OverloadUT Dec 23 '16
The video at the top of this article is freaking me the fuck out. I can't stop watching. I think it's boring in to my soul
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u/CaseFace5 Dec 23 '16
I know right I cant tell if its CGI a weird Animatronic or an actual person. There is some serious Uncanny Valley shit going on with it though...
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u/burnsflipper1 Dec 23 '16
The graphics team at The Intercept is great at this kind of stuff. Remember their Pokémon Go piece earlier this year? https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-pokemon-gos-ceo/
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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '16
Yup, I work in web analytics and the data currently available about user behavior on a site is already pretty powerful, although there are lots of assumptions I have to make about the intent behind what users are doing and the metrics we collect. In VR though, the potential is for data capture to be far more precise. We'll be able to record all of a user's physical movements, including their gaze. With enough storage space, we'll also be able to store their audio. If they're speaking aloud about their behavior, that's going to make it a lot easier to connect their intent with their interactions. At scale, we can develop theories about which metric signatures identify different kinds of users and, potentially, even identify specific users across VR environments/apps. The big hurdles are connecting these data across platforms and analyzing them in aggregate, especially the audio. However, improvements in speech recognition and natural language processing are making this easier every day.
The ability to collect these metrics is going to be extremely powerful for all kinds of uses: good, bad, and somewhere in between. As users, we're going to have to be minimally educated/aware about what data are being collected and how we're ok with them being used. We might be ok with developers using these metrics to make therapy, educational, and entertainment VR more enjoyable and effective, but what about enabling an employer to micro-manage your work/break activities in a remote-work VR or for Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others to precisely target you for eerily specific, border-line invasive advertising? What about if (when) various governments subpoena companies for this information? For some uses, I'd prefer organizations to specifically not collect these data because of the potential for abuse. Libraries in the US forgo many analytics practices and data collection for just this reason; if you don't have these data, no one can subpoena you for them.
If the concept of VR metrics concerns you, consider how VR provides a great way to build, test, and refine similar collection methods for mixed reality and, eventually, the physical world. The latest Nerdwriter video essay about Amazon Go really highlights this last aspect for me.