Summary

There’s growing interest in a set of technologies that allow individuals to immerse themselves, and engage socially, in a digital world. The resulting “metaverse” presents novel opportunities for harm as well as for good. In particular, the way we engage with others in the metaverse could leave us open to new interpretations of existing harms (e.g., identity theft, phishing scams, romance fraud) and may introduce novel (and previously unanticipated) harms.

One specific concern is the preservation of human rights in the metaverse, including our identity and protection against discrimination/harm on the basis of that identity/identity expression. This project aims to develop understanding of future harms and rights in the metaverse. We use a novel combination of methods to explore three distinct areas:

• What is the role of identity presentation in the trust we place in others?

• How have fiction authors imagined harms taking place in metaverse-like future worlds and technologies?

• To what extent could current laws be used to protect us from harms and human rights infringements in the metaverse?

Our team draws on expertise from computer science, psychology and law, and combines controlled experimentation with an analysis of speculative fiction (sci-fi) and of current laws and legal theory.

Objectives

• To contribute to understandings of how aspects of the metaverse, and presentations of identity in the metaverse, relate to our perceptions of others’ and the trust relationships that result from these perceptions.

• To lay the foundations for future explorations of how manipulation of identity presentation in the metaverse may enable social, psychological, emotional and economic harm (and our understandings of what these are).

• To analysing and critique existing law with respect to legal, mistaken and deceptive identity. 

Activities

Completed activities:

• Identification of a speculative fiction reading list relating to the metaverse.

• Eliciting of some initial themes related to technologies, identity presentations and harms in the metaverse. These themes are derived from a subset of the texts included on the speculative fiction reading list.

• Development of an online experiment paradigm and software for conducting studies into how aspects of visual identity contribute to trust and the vulnerability that may come from misplaced trust.

• Development of a VR-based experiment paradigm and software for conducting studies into how aspects of visual identity contribute to trust and the vulnerability that may come from misplaced trust. Piloting of the experiment paradigm.

• Collating relevant legal literature and creating table of resources

• Analysing and critiquing existing law with respect to legal, mistaken and deceptive identity. 

Ongoing activities:

• Continued development of themes to reflect the broader reading list.

• Execution of an online experiment based on the developed paradigm and software.

• Completion of VR-experiment data collection, using  the developed paradigm and software.

• Development of publications reporting findings.

Output

Presentation on the TRIM project from the SPRITE+ Conference, June 2023.

Presentation at the SPRITE+ 2024 Showcase:

Impact

Key Finding #1: Conducting experimental work in this domain will require new paradigms that are challenging to develop. A lack of established paradigms mean that the foundational empirical research is high risk, with no guarantee of success.

Key Finding #2: The legal work sought to set out existing law on aspects of trust and identity to see how this may need to be interpreted or changed for use in the metaverse. It is a vast subject because law is categorised into different fields of expertise, such as property law, contract law, criminal law, human rights law (which often relates to many areas of law in itself), intellectual property law and so on. Most existing literature relates to IP and is being carried out by law firms for tech clients.  It is difficult to accurately categorise XR harms legally. In the period of time and with the resources available, we have sought to lay out some resources and analysis is specific human rights areas.

Further work

We aim to develop/refine and establish the experiment paradigms developed in this project and are open to collaborations that progress empirical studies relating to the aspects of visual identity that contribute to trust/vulnerability.

We’d like to explore the use of speculative fiction as a tool for critical legal review. Collaborators with expertise in criminal law or in literary analysis/studies/criticism (or related fields/methods) would be particularly welcomed, as well as keen sci-fi readers. Jill is currently writing a piece in this field and is contacting other legal academics with relevant expertise.

We’d like to develop longer-term research programmes and funding applications concerning the metaverse/AR/VR in the areas of:

• The role of identity presentation in enabling harms

• Identities that exist outside and beyond normative structures of – inter alia – race and ethnicity, gender and sex, sexuality, and/or ability

• Harms directed at the above identities

• How harmful behaviours might be identified and justice pursued against their perpetrators.

• Human rights

Collaborators welcome, particularly where those collaborators add expertise/perspectives not currently present.