Addressing the Need to Govern New XR Technologies

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Joanne Gray, whose focus is on trends in Big Tech, with a particular focus on virtual reality (including Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and Apple’s Vision Pro, but also many more mature projects in augmented reality and immersive technology). Much of this has been described as extended reality, or XR, and policy to govern this is gradually emerging.

Such policy – in Japan, Europe, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, China – largely treats XR as an economic opportunity; but what do we actually know about the technologies underlying such XR developments? First, many such technologies are also surveillance devices, as they rely on collecting voluminous data on users and their environments; such data may be anonymised but are also used well beyond the needs of the actual end-user. Second, there are considerable gender disparities, with technologies shaped predominantly to suit male, able bodies. Third, the moderation of content as well as conduct in using these technologies requires considerably greater attention than has been afforded to them so far, especially as they have inherited various toxic gamer culture aspects.

Overall, then, there is a need for policy-makers to be considerably more critical, and reject the techno-utopian rhetoric that technology developers attach to these products and services; this cannot just become another battlefield in technology development between the US and China.