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Virtual Perceptions Newsletter

Hello everyone, Over the last four days, the audience of Virtual Perceptions has almost doubled in size! So, hello to all the new subscribers; I hope you will find the insights of the newsletter helpful. Chilly Christmas is around the corner, and a much-needed break is coming soon. As you sit in a warm room on a comfortable chair, I hope these long reads would bring some joy. I want to profile two articles this week. One is on Beat Saber winning multiple awards in 2019, despite entering Early Access in 2018. While it deserves the attention, it does not sit well that it wins game of the year awards this year. Especially if it dwarfs other great titles that actually arrived in 2019. The other is on ethics in VR and AR. The topic deserves more attention, but I hope you find the insights useful. And we must confront the challenges as we head into 2020. Have a click through - and as always, please email me if you have any questions!Happy holidays, Tom FfiskeEditor, Virtual Perceptions-

Beat Saber wins Game of the Year 2019 awards, despite releasing in 2018

Now hold your horses. I am not saying that Beat Saber is a bad game; in fact, I cannot overstate how critical the success of the game has been for the adoption of VR. Ever since it entered Early Access in 2018, Beat Saber has captured the imagination of over a million gamers worldwide, and is the first VR game to receive a Platinum for the achievement. And yes, it’s why it deserves the accolades it received this year. No wonder that Facebook acquired the company; it recognises the talent of the team and how they managed to capture an entire market. What’s strange is that Beat Saber has been receiving Game of the Year accolades in VR for two years in a row. That shouldn’t happen.So what tickles me is that it released in 2018. Entering Early Access that year, it built a cult following after several viral YouTube videos and positive word-of-mouth. Over the twelve months, it slowly and steadily grew an audience of passionate people who treated it as a full game – because, effectively, it was. That’s twelve months of hype that backed a game released ‘officially’ a year later. 

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  Ethics in virtual and augmented reality in the 2020s 

Like veins in rocks, ethics runs through everything we do in technology. It depends on how we use it, but it can still be used for evil as much as good. Sometimes it is a hard impact. Facebook allows microtargeting which could radicalise people, spurring them towards violence and terrorism. Or it is a more soft, like Instagram giving a generation of young people image problems as they compare themselves to unattainable standards. A fundamental ethical framework on how we use tools can save and improve lives. The same goes for immersive technologies like AR and VR, where communicating in virtual worlds could have drastic effects on people and societies. Take mobile phones. Just a few decades ago, people planned to meet friends, relying on being prompt without ways to communicate. Then friends invest time in each other without distractions, with a lot of meaning as it was rarer to speak. And news came mainly from the well-funded print houses of Fleet Street, with the personnel and time to pursue investigative news stories to inform their readers. That has changed. Friends became laxer with timings, flinging a message if they are late. Once together, friends stick to their phones in fear of missing something important. And journalism? Struggling, as online platforms enabled a deluge of free ways to read the news of varying quality, hitting larger companies hard who can’t pursue the projects they want. None of this is necessarily bad. It is beautiful to connect with friends thousands of miles away or be able to access the world’s knowledge in your hand (if you can read through the torrent of noise). But these changes happened, and their impact changed the way we communicate around the world. Predicting these changes, and planning accordingly, is essential. Many people think this is underexplored, a desert of information compared to the bounty of experiences already available on platforms. In reality, a fair few professors stepped forward to investigate ethics in immersive media. Their conclusions could reveal a very different society in the future, changed as much as when the mobile phone entered the mainstream. Click here to read more.