Adrienne Matei is a journalist for publications including the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, The Globe, and The Guardian. She writes about the intersection of online and offline culture from Gen Zer Tik Tok trends to the digital afterlife.

Experience Hunters

The future of tech can seem a little baffling – especially right now, at the dawn of metaverses, with VR beginning to take off in earnest, and headlines proclaiming the ostensible sentience of AI. 

The Guardian

 Should we be excited? Cautious? With so many answerless questions and unpredictable potentialities, how should we be thinking about the future of technology, today?

According to Dr. Robby Ratan, associate professor and AT&T scholar at Michigan State University’s department of media and information, one way to look at emerging tech is as a social-psychological phenomenon. Early in his education, Dr. Ratan chose to focus on an area of research called ‘science technology and society’, or STS. In this field, the lifelong sci-fi fan “learned that people are not just influenced by technology, but that it’s a symbiotic, kind of mutually influential system between three things: science, technology, and society,” says Dr. Ratan. The concept of social-scientific-technological symbiosis underlies Dr. Ratan’s approach to engaging with and understanding any new-to-him technology, from gaming platforms, to metaverses, VR, and TikTok (where his students help him post entertaining, digestible analysis). It also informs the SPARTIE podcast, where he explores the business and finance sides of emerging tech. 

Interview with Dr. Robby Ratan conducted by the author

“People decide what science should be done, what types of science we value through our education and our political systems, the funding for science, et cetera, the kind of marketplace of ideas that is of course, a real marketplace financially speaking, that supports innovation in different areas,” says Dr. Ratan. Discerning “how people interact with technologies in ways that might be unexpected and potentially valuable for society,” is key to developing an informed perspective on emerging tech, he says. For example, if society uses things like video games and avatars to promote prosocial behavior by reducing stereotyping and inequities in society, well, that’s something to feel optimistic about. Technology has great potential to change society, says Dr. Ratan, but “it’s not just a one-way influential technologically deterministic relationship.” Human priorities and behaviors influence technology, too. 

Metaverses received a surge of attention in October 2021, when Facebook Inc. rebranded and restructured itself as Meta, a virtual reality company. In fact, 36% of US adults were interested in metaverses, though at the time Web 3.0 virtual worlds had a total of 50,000 users around the globe in contrast to Facebook’s almost three billion users. 

Statista

And in early 2022, 38% of Americans reported familiarity with the metaverse, but less than 16% could correctly define the term. 

Ipsos

Dr. Ratan says that metaverses are a collection of distinctive interactive virtual worlds that make up a single entity – sort of like how the internet is the sum of various platforms and sites. Importantly, metaverses are “embodied” – you interact with them as an avatar. “It’s most useful to think about it as [something] I can embody with a virtual reality headset or some sort of augmented reality device, though I can also embody them in flat screens and they are interoperable to some extent in the same way that I can jump into a web browser to move throughout the web easily,” Dr. Ratan says. 

But are metaverses different from other hype-cycle products, or will they fizzle out like innumerable tech projects before them? What makes metaverses special, says Dr. Ratan, is their facilitation of vivid “social presence”. “We’ve evolved through millennia to rely on social interactions for survival… people who are able to cooperate and communicate with their team, their in-group, are the ones who succeed,” he says. “The metaverse, this VR on your face thing, really facilitates immersion in a space that also facilitates immersion in that social interaction. And this is where I see VR and augmented reality to an extent – being able to improve upon and replace and displace a lot of our other mediated interaction,” like texting and video chatting, says Dr. Ratan. 

Metaverses promise something Ratan calls “synchrony attunement”, referring to the way embodied technologies allow people to synchronize their verbal and non-verbal gestures in a space – walking together, or hugging, for instance. This allows for more of an intuitive, mutual social understanding than just, say, a Zoom meeting. “The metaverse has this promise of feeling embodied with other people feeling physically and then socially embodied. And that is very powerful,” says Dr. Ratan – particularly in a learning context. “When I teach class in VR, my students, they remembered more of what we talked about based on the context at the end of the semester… ​​for every one of the topics, they would say, ‘Oh, we did that in the Pantheon, on the beach, underneath the ocean, on the oil rig.’ Like, they knew every topic and associated it with the [virtual] location,” says Dr. Ratan. “I think learning in VR, in the metaverse right with other people is very powerful and will clearly be a promising use case for prosocial outcomes of this technology.” 

Yet, metaverse companies still require logistical ironing out before their products become more widely accessible. For one, cost of hardware is a barrier to adoption, with half of US residents saying they want less expensive VR technology before entering the metaverse. 

Morning Consult

 Then, there is the importance of interoperability, which is currently limited by the formatting used by competing metaverse platforms. “I should be able to take an avatar file between spaces,” says Dr. Ratan. “I think a largely coincidental element of the metaverse that will help facilitate this interoperability, is the Web 3.0 crypto-blockchain-NFT side, which facilitates ownership of digital goods, or at least proof of ownership of some goods that then allows you to say, OK, well, if this is my avatar, I own it. That means I can take it with me out of that website or virtual world, into another one.” Decreasing costs of VR hardware and innovation in proof of ownership will be key in facilitating the next era of information technologies. 

VR could become an instrumental part of workplace meetings

Addressing social ills in an embodied internet

The internet as we currently know it has its share of problems. It’s a receptacle and conduit for disinformation and bigotry, a place where people are doxxed, sexually harassed, and even raped in cyberspace (as illustrated by Julian Dibbel’s 1993 

 A Rape in Cyberspace, published by the Village Voice). Metaverses are already suffering the same abundance of antisocial behaviors that plague Web 2.0, but are enabling people to harass and assault others in arguably new ways. In May, a researcher’s avatar was raped on Meta’s social networking platform, Horizon World. 

Insider

 In the course of his research, Ratan has spoken to a woman who was nonconsensually touched in the metaverse while wearing a haptic bodysuit that simulated the experience on her physical body. “It’s going to be quite difficult, I imagine, technologically speaking, as well as culturally speaking to wrap our minds around what toxicity and hate speech and antisocial behavior,” we’ll see in metaverses, “and how we can combat it when communication is largely embodied, synchronous, and difficult to track,” says Dr. Ratan. “There’s huge amounts of data being passed everywhere,” making it extremely difficult to monitor who’s saying or doing something inappropriate. 

Yet rather than abdicate responsibility for personal safety onto individual users themselves – such as by expecting everyone to navigate complex privacy settings or face harassment – Dr. Ratan believes metaverse companies must learn about and respond to issues quickly, and use reputation monitoring as a mechanism of encouraging prosocial conduct. “It behooves the technology industry to build in persistent reputation systems that are easily rateable, you know, you can easily just respond and rate in a social interaction with someone, and it’s not punitive. It’s more like one to five stars. How was this person? And if you want to mention negative behavior, you can, and then because of the interoperability of these spaces that reputation system kind of serves as a key card for access to different places,” he says. “So if you wanna go to the premier whatever party, you have to have an avatar with this amount of ratings and scores and this amount of reputation.” 

“On the other hand, there are ways to trick the system,” Dr. Ratan says. “Like, ‘Oh, I can have my antisocial avatar, crypto wallet here, and that I use to be a troll. And then when I want to be nice, I can use this other one.’ There are ways to fight back against that, such as real identity verification.” Some companies are already focusing on creating metaverse identity verification solutions to increase user safety on the platforms. For instance, Estonian start-up 

 has a multi-account prevention system built into its ID verification software, which also uses face matching and crosslinking services to improve accountability. UK company 

 uses document-based and biometric verification to bolster digital trust. It’s clear that safety concerns need to be broadly addressed before metaverses become truly mainstream.

Exercise in the metaverse allows for social engagement and connection

In the US, about a third of Amerians were more scared of metaverses than excited for them, with 58% expressing indifference towards the technology. 

Axios

 Among the general public, it appears disinterest and discomfort with the concept of metaverses is still quite ingrained – especially in older cohorts. Dr. Ratan is neither a Web 3.0 skeptic or evangelist, rather, he identifies with a sort of pragmatic optimism and recognizes the inevitability of change.“The only thing that doesn’t change is the fact that everything changes,” he says. “Haters gonna hate, skeptics are gonna naysay. And that’s fine. But, I think skepticism about this [metaverse] technology should be redirected towards the potential negative consequences that then we can anticipate better. At the same time, another trend we see with mass media consistently is moral panic.” 

Once society reaches an inflection point where enough people own and use VR headsets, and “the educated masses” see what’s happening in the metaverse, “they’ll start to freak out and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I thought video games were bad, but now video games in VR, oh, you’re more immersed, that’s gonna turn us all into killers and aggressive. Oh man, pornography used to just be on a flat screen, now people feel like they’re with the porn actress. Oh, the replacement of physical social interaction by this thing, which seems like physical social interaction, is destroying our brain’s ability to empathize with humans,’” says Dr. Ratan. “All of that’s gonna come out. And it’s going to be ridiculous.” Dr. Ratan believes these concerns are mainly an instinctual knee-jerk reaction, a sort of resistance to change. 

“We should have a healthy acceptance that [the metaverse] is coming and we should try to promote the most pro-social uses,” Dr. Ratan says, as well as the economic opportunities it presents. “At the end of the day, the reason this technology is gonna work is because it improves productivity and social interactions and engagement. And we often lose in our discussions of the downsides of these technologies, we lose the whole picture – the cost benefit analysis.” 

 Many brands, from Heineken, to Coca-Cola, to Pokemon, have been eager to participate in metaverses, seeing the platforms as a way to reach Gen Z and stay abreast of new technologies. These partnerships are mutually beneficial, as familiar brand names can make metaverses feel more relatable to tentative users, widening the appeal of the platforms to include pre-existing brand audiences interested in seeing why, for instance, a beer would be appealing in cyberspace. They also drive investment in the platforms, and in turn have a hand in shaping the way these worlds evolve.

VR facilitates immersion in a space as well as immersion in social interaction

When adopting a new technology personally or for company use, Dr. Ratan suggests thinking about what you already do, and finding a way tech can help you progress more efficiently. At a certain level, it’s just about making the leap – saying, “I’m gonna buy three VR headsets for under $1000. I’m gonna give them to everyone in the C-suite and we’re gonna hold a weekly meeting in VR,” says Dr. Ratan. Getting comfortable with tech integration appears to be of growing importance in the workplace, as the global augmented reality market size is estimated to exceed $340 billion by 2028. 

Grand View Research

Some research suggests that by 2025, 8% of all US workers will use smart glasses in their jobs, while 70% of consumers and IT workers believe that using AR-enhanced devices on a daily basis can help them acquire new skills. 

Komanndo Tech

Just over half (55%) of US adults say the tracking and misuse of their personal data in the metaverse is a major concern. 

Trust in Facebook/Meta itself is low, with 72% of internet users trusting Facebook ‘not much’ or ‘not at all’. 

The Washington Post

 “With every major jump in technology the amount of privacy that we relinquish to these companies increases,” says Dr. Ratan. “Yet we learn to adapt in ways that don’t actually infringe on our ability to feel comfortable and secure.” One such adaptation is to seek lesser-known companies entering the metaverse market who are forefronting privacy, such as business-oriented, Irish VR firm Engage, and Pico all-in-one headsets, he says. 

In metaverses, avatars reflect our conception of self, and we can change them to reflect different characteristics. Interestingly, these characteristics embodied by our avatars have an effect on how we relate to the world IRL – a phenomenon known as the ‘Proteus effect’, says Dr.Ratan. Consider the impact of the Proteus effect this way: “The effect size of an ad might be around 0.1, 0.15. That’s about what we find the effect size of violent video games on aggression. And it only lasts for about 15 minutes. These are relatively small effect sizes. Maybe if you have a really well designed ad you can hit it up to the 0.2 range,” says Dr. Ratan. “But we found with VR-based studies of the Proteus effect a 0.3 effect size, which is verifiably a medium, according to the rules of thumb of statistics.” In short, an avatar may be able to convince us we are a certain way, resulting in us spending more time embodying particular characteristics – perhaps studying more, working out, purchasing certain products, or being more aggressive or antisocial. This effect is “a major element of this metaverse thing, which we will need media literacy to anticipate,” says Dr. Ratan. 

of US adults said the tracking and misuse of their personal data in the metaverse is a major concern

of Americans believe that using AR-enhanced devices on a daily basis can help them acquire new skills

 of Americans report familiarity with the metaverse, but less than 

Metaverses facilitate traits that make them effective places for people to learn and retain information

Decreasing costs of VR hardware and innovation in proof of ownership and interoperability will be key to facilitating the next era of information technologies

The characteristics embodied by our avatars have an effect on how we see ourselves and relate to the world IRL – a phenomenon known as the ‘Proteus effect’

Dr. Robby Ratan is an associate professor and AT&T scholar at Michigan State University’s department of media and information as well as director of the Social and Psychological Approaches to Research on Technology-Interaction Effects (SPARTIE) Lab.

North America

Technology

Interview with Dr. Robby Ratan conducted by the author 

The dawn of Web 3.0 is bringing technologies into the mainstream that many will find unfamiliar, but while metaverses have their pros and cons, they are the future. Canvas8 spoke to Dr. Robby Ratan about their power and what we’re really getting into when we pop on a headset.

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