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MasterpieceFit6715 t1_ix0389i wrote

Reply to comment by EzekielNOR in I am a Game Designer / Project lead who spent the last 2 years building brain trauma rehabilitation software for Norway's largest specialist hospital. AMA :> by EzekielNOR

interesting how everyone jumps to a dystopian conclusion in these sorts of situations. I imagine there would be a time when people will be skeptical of this new tech that some huge monopoly of a company is offering for obvious personal gains but depending on marketing and government action and regulations they will start to be widely accepted like the internet when it first came online. This would result in a situation where sort of like today, big companies will get us to doomscroll their services and keep us glued to their products so we evolve a natural dependency on them and slowly humanity dissolves into the puddle of stupidity all because of corporate greed :(

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EzekielNOR OP t1_ix049lu wrote

Hah,
I think my generation (born in the 80s) grew up with all these tech horror movies - Terminator and Skynet, Matrix and so on. We might be a bit environmentally challenged :>

I think that in order to sell a virtual reality, it has to be better than our own. And I don't know how the future will be in 50 years - it might be amazing, but also not so amazing.

We know that loneliness is on the rise - perhaps 8 hours of relaxing on a virtual beach that you perceive to be completely real isn't the worst idea after logging of your work computer then :) Or who knows - bring you entire family to Disney World after dinner!

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MasterpieceFit6715 t1_ix0504r wrote

Well, the future 50 years from now is just as uncertain as it was 50 years in the past when no one could have predicted technology.

I appreciate your answer as a professional on this topic. Thank you

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EzekielNOR OP t1_ix05phv wrote

Exciting question - feel free to poke about more topics :)

Thanks for being here!

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overreflectingmuch t1_ix3b7jy wrote

This is super interesting!!! Thank you for sharing and a your hard work and time on this project.

I'm curious about how/if vr could assist nueral rewiring for ppl w relational trauma or cptsd where in some cases being able to rewire their brain relieve their triggers/stress and others w their pain of addiction...?

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EzekielNOR OP t1_ix3bixb wrote

It is outside my field but I do know research is being done on similar things. I think visual and audio stimulation can be powerful tools in combination with traditional therapeutic methods. It is important to note that we aim to supplement and not replace anyone.

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Thelango99 t1_ix3c5q8 wrote

50 years ago, the first video game console released (1972). The Magnavox odyssey.

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Thelango99 t1_ix3cinp wrote

Had they been more persistent, Magnavox could have been a major player in the industry.

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sabouleux t1_ix2d0r6 wrote

You don’t need to jump to brain-machine interfaces to get dystopia. We can get to ugly places with what we already have in high-end hardware.

Meta is intending to place itself as the leader in VR technology — it has by far the most capital, talent, and intellectual property invested in the domain, of all players in the industry. Meta is an advertisement company — it makes its income by selling targeted advertisements, and by knowing its audience eerily well. Meta will certainly want to (and already is starting to) include eye-tracking hardware in its headsets. We already know they quantify the time spent on individual posts while scrolling through timelines to measure interest and engagement — but eye tracking data is the ultimate measurement of attention. Imagine having advertising clients automatically bet in real-time for milliseconds of your gaze time. Imagine how disgustingly exploitative and overbearing an advertisement system that optimizes gaze heat maps would get. Meta absolutely wants this — and they want the monopoly on VR because this means complete dominance in the advertising word, if VR becomes a significant part of our lives in our future — which us Meta’s bet. They will want to enforce a closed ecosystem that strips us of our ability to watch unwatched. Their ability to sell our attention will be unmatched.

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