Life in the Metaverse: How Virtual Reality Can Affect the Perception of the World Around

“We believe that the metaverse will be the successor of the mobile internet,” he declared at the Meta publicity event. The implications in the world, if this prediction comes true, could have considerable repercussions given that more than 4 billion people in the world use cell phones to connect to the web and apps.

New experiences

Currently, the time spent with screens is already quite questioned. Analysis firm App Annie says that, in the last two years, daily use in mobile apps has risen 45%, driven by the pandemic — the leader in the survey is Brazil, with an average of 5.4 hours a day and a 30% increase .

Scientist Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the laboratory that studies virtual reality at Stanford University in the United States, says in his 2018 book Experience on Demand (Experience On Demand) that time spent wearing glasses “is psychologically far more powerful than any medium ever invented and is set to dramatically transform our lives.”

With other forms of representation, we are almost always aware of the artificiality of sensations, says Bailenson. In virtual reality, the boundaries are starting to get a little blurry: today’s devices already provide significant immersion—and the advancement of technology in the coming years promises more powerful experiences.

“Does our brain get confused enough to understand these signals as reality? Wherever you get into the ‘can a medium influence our behavior?’ discussion, I can assure you: virtual reality does. my laboratory and in other parts of the world, which demonstrate these effects”, analyzes the scientist.

“For some people, the illusion is so powerful that the limbic system [região do cérebro envolvida com emoções e memória] them enters a state of intense activity.”

Bailenson recounts a tour given to Mark Zuckerberg in 2014 in which he demonstrated experiments from his laboratory and a conversation in which he “has warned about the current social costs of widespread addiction to seductive fantasy worlds, pornography, and video games and how those costs will be multiplied in a medium powerfully immersive”.

A few weeks after the meeting, Facebook, now Meta, announced the $2 billion purchase of virtual-reality eyewear maker, Oculus VR.

immersed in the metaverse

Should we be worried? Bailenson, who is enthusiastic about the possibilities of virtual reality and sees it as a tool for empathy, tells BBC News Brasil that “the word ‘caution’ is more appropriate than concern.”

“We must be vigilant, read the privacy terms [de um produto como o metaverso], not blindly using virtual reality for all activities and observing some safety rules.”

One of their recommendations is to limit the immersion duration with the glasses to 30 minutes. Excessive use causes nausea and eyestrain. Ophthalmology associations in the UK and US, however, have yet to find evidence of permanent eye damage. But they ask for long-term studies.

In 2014, a psychologist at the University of Hamburg, Germany, spent 24 hours in a virtual reality room under monitored conditions and reported that there was disorientation “about being in a virtual environment or the real world” and confusion about “certain artifacts and events between the two worlds”.

Three years later, a duo set a Guinness record by watching 50 straight hours of virtual reality content. One of the participants, Alejandro Fragoso, reported that he felt “absolutely horrible” and “disconnected from the real world and the passage of time”.

a day in the metaverse

Marathons such as these experiments are an exception, but the plan described by Zuckerberg takes several spheres of life into the metaverse, which would occupy a significant part of the 24 hours a day.

Meta has sent out a statement saying that “the metaverse is still a little way off and will not be built overnight.”

“Meta will engage with policymakers, experts, academics, civil society and industry partners to help bring the metaverse to life, which will function as a hybrid combination of current online social experiences, sometimes expanded in three dimensions or projected into the physical world .It’s not necessarily about spending more time online, but making the time you’re online more meaningful.”

He also declared that “the metaverse is the next evolution in a long journey of social technologies. The Meta will not build, own, and cannot perform the metaverse alone. The construction of the metaverse will be similar to the process that led to the creation of the internet, and not the launch of an individual app”.

Douglas Rushkoff, scholar of digital culture and author of the book Team Human (Time Humano, in free translation), tells BBC News Brasil that “there is an idea that we would like to work, have entertainment, exercise and creative activity in these virtual or augmented reality spaces. This may have been good during the covid pandemic , but there are many disadvantages to this becoming permanent”.

“I think people communicate with each other in subtle ways. How we work and how we make love is more complicated than these simulations can provide,” he says.

Diluted borders

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Alvaro Machado Dias, neuroscientist specializing in new technologies and professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), understands that “we are already coming from a phase of dilution between online and offline”.

“There is a point where there is no longer an intentional capacity to separate these worlds. We live in an environment where digital technology is very much part of our culture”, he says.

He, however, considers that Meta’s business model may represent a barrier to its popularization.

“Glasses are uncomfortable and make you dizzy. I don’t think the strongest future outputs will be with the mass use of glasses.”

He sees more chances for success in Disney’s augmented reality concept, which will involve both the parks and its streaming platform, and Microsoft’s project to create a corporate metaverse.

According to Machado Dias, “Facebook has been looking for ways to dominate the platform on which its software is used for a long time.”

Apple’s decision to limit the tracking of user information by iPhone apps posed problems for the way Facebook earned its revenue — algorithmically defined advertisements. The iPhone is the majority in the North American market and attracts customers with greater purchasing power.

“The ideal solution, then, would be to have a new world as a platform, independent of mobile. Facebook’s metaverse model responds to this market challenge.”

Zuckerberg’s difficulties

There is another hurdle: the company’s reputation.

Douglas Rushkoff considers the criticisms and the accumulation of controversy surrounding Zuckerberg as a limiting factor for the popularization of his metaverse.

“I think people understand that Facebook is disappearing in a lot of ways, particularly when they see downsides and bad intentions. [O nome] ‘Goal’ is a way for the company to reposition itself in a different industry. But there is something desperate about it.”

But for Rushkoff, “People can be stupid, especially when someone shows them something beautiful. No one trusts Zuckerberg, but no one feels they have a lot to lose.”

In recent years, former Facebook employees have gone public with reports that the company does not take action on problems in its social networks, such as the detrimental influence on teenagers’ mental health, the role in the propagation of fake news and the leak of personal data of users.

On several occasions, Zuckerberg apologized for the facts pointed out and said that the company needed to improve.

Bailenson of the virtual reality lab at Stanford University, when asked about Zuckerberg’s presentation of the metaverse and whether the impression of the creator of Facebook has changed since the 2014 meeting, said he “continues to talk to corporate and government leaders at attempt to guide them through the trials and tribulations of virtual reality.”