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'Spatial computing', 'blended reality', 'the metaverse'. For those of us who still use screens and keyboards to access the digital world, those phrases might not mean very much. But many experts believe the '2D' internet will soon be a thing of the past, and we will all be, one way or another, in a 3D metaverse.
With Apple's Vision Pro headset renewing interest in virtual reality, we speak to two proponents of the metaverse who see both huge opportunities and significant risks.
Yonatan Raz-Fridman, CEO of Supersocial and host of the podcast “Into the Metaverse”
Brittan Heller, lecturer on International Law, Technology, and Human Rights, Stanford University.
Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: https://centres.weforum.org/centre-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/home
Metaverse Identity: Defining the Self in a Blended Reality: https://www.weforum.org/publications/metaverse-identity-defining-the-self-in-a-blended-reality/
Navigating the Industrial Metaverse: A Blueprint for Future Innovations: https://www.weforum.org/publications/navigating-the-industrial-metaverse-a-blueprint-for-future-innovations/
Check out all our podcasts on wef.ch/podcasts:
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Yonatan Raz-Fridman, CEO, Supersocial: For the first time, we now have a generation of 12, 15, 18 year olds who essentially grew up interacting on the internet mostly as 3D avatars.
Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week, as Apple’s Vision Pro rekindles interest in augmented reality and the metaverse, two experts give their view on where this technology might take us, and why we should be both excited, and cautious.
Brittan Heller, Lecturer, Stanford University: The sensory input is what is new and when you combine that with AI processing you'll get highly personalized experiences. People will really enjoy it. It may be even more persuasive and addicting than flat-screen internet.
Robin Pomeroy: Does the rise of so-called ‘spatial computing’ mean that the computer keyboard and mouse and the ‘flat screen internet’ will soon be mere museum pieces, as our eyes and our bodies provide the interface with everything digital?
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: How do we make a 3D internet a reality? First of all, because I believe that this is the best way to improve the way people connect, communicate, and express themselves online.
Robin Pomeroy: But what might be the downsides?
Brittan Heller: These experiences are processed through your hippocampus in the same way that you create memories. So if somebody is abusive to you in a VR environment, it's not like reading a harsh critique on Twitter. You feel it viscerally. You actually feel like you've been physically attacked in your body
Robin Pomeroy: And think on this.
Brittan Heller: Advertising in the metaverse, it's not product placement, it's placement in the product.
Robin Pomeroy: I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and asking how spatial computing could shape our lives...
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: Enough talking, time to build, time to prove, time to show.
Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos
The metaverse is back, it would seem, with the roll-out of Apple’s Vision Pro headset creating a buzz about so-called spatial computing.
Our two guests on this episode are both convinced that the future of computing is 3-D, where we access the digital world with our eyes and bodies, rather than a flat screen and a keyboard. If you are a computer gamer, this might sound like old news, but for the rest of us, it all still seems a bit science fiction. And aside from the cost of the hardware and the computing power needed, what about other concerns, such as privacy or cybercrime?
Later in the show, we hear from Brittan Heller, a legal expert who teaches at Stanford University, who sets out for us the ethical and legal implications.
First, we speak to Yonatan Raz-Fridman. He is CEO of metaverse development company Supersocial and also host of a podcast called “Into the Metaverse” - well worth a listen if you want to learn more about the technology.
Yon has a great overview of the metaverse scene and really sets out where things are going. I started by asking him a questions that he always asks his own podcast guests: so just what is the metaverse?
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: The metaverse really became a bit of a hodgepodge of a mess over the past couple of years, as I'm sure you're well aware. And so before I kind of give you my hypothesis on what I think the metaverse is or what it could become, I think it's important to maybe start by seeing what it's not. As I find it to be no less important than defining what it is, what it could be.
What I am confident that the metaverse is not is that it's not a device. Meaning whatever Meta is building with Quest, whatever Apple is launching with Vision Pro, whatever other device ecosystem emerges, none of them are going to be a metaverse. So it's not a device.
The metaverse is also not a certain location on the internet. There aren't any multiple internets. We have one internet. There aren't going to be multiple metaverses. There's one metaverse, and there's going to be one gateway of what the metaverse is.
Now, where I think we have an opportunity to clarify to people what the metaverse is or what it could become, is really from the standpoint of what is it about, what is it really going to enable us to do as individuals? And I think I believe that the metaverse provides an opportunity to reimagine the way people connect, communicate, shop, and ultimately express themselves online.
And the reason why it's an opportunity to reimagine these things is because the metaverse, in my belief, and based on so many conversations I've had with people, the consensus I've reached today, at least, is that the metaverse is some sort of a real time, 3D-enabled internet.
What does that mean? That means that we are looking at an internet where people experience the internet, experience content, connection, communication, expression, shopping, entertainment, learning, work. They experience it inside a 3D immersive environment that can be accessed from 2D devices like iPhone, and also can be accessed through three dimensional devices like Vision Pro, even though Apple calls it a spatial computer, which is not a bad term, it's actually a really great way to think about it, as a spatial computer that provides an entry point, one of many, into what I believe the internet will evolve into, which is the metaverse.
And then lastly, when we talk about the metaverse, it's not just about what it is. It's also how is it going to touch people's lives. And I think it's not just about consumers. Everyone likes to associate the metaverse with consumers because of Ready Player One, and the fact that I'm going to have these big devices on my head. That is certainly going to be a major evolution of the internet as a 3D enabled internet, but it's already making a huge impact on enterprises and industry.
When you look at some of the use cases around productivity, collaboration of design and work, when you look at what companies like Nvidia is providing with the Omniverse, enabling any company to design and deploy and simulate in real time 3D environment they called digital twin, simulating what the future of factories could look like before they even spend $1 on the building blocks of a factory.
So we're looking at a far reach of changes that I think 3D technologies will enable in general. Is the metaverse going to be the way we call the internet in ten years, 20 years? It doesn't really matter. It may or may not be the case. I think it's really the fundamentals of what happens on the ground floor of what these real time 3D technologies are enabling people to do.
Robin Pomeroy: There was a wow moment in the metaverse last year, with Mark Zuckerberg on the Lex Fridman podcast. This was the one for anyone who's not seen it where despite the fact they're both wearing big headsets on their faces, what they're seeing is the other person's absolute photorealistic image talking to them. Lex Fridman, the podcaster, was astonished by it. He really couldn't believe it. Of course, this is the cutting edge. It takes a massive amount of compute power, apparently. Did that strike you as a wow moment? Because I think for some of these technologies to get into the mainstream, it takes some of those wow moments. I think ChatGPT was one for many people a year and a bit ago.
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: Let me answer that first, and then I'll talk about the Codec Avatar that Zuckerberg introduced as a prototype in the Lex Fridman episode, because it is a profound moment I think that very few people, I think, have paid attention to.
I come from liberal arts, right? I'm not an engineer. I am a technologist. But I come at it, always have, from a liberal arts point of view. And so my moment that I realised the metaverse is a thing actually happened at the beginning of COVID, when I also started my company Supersocial.
And what happened was I have seen the evolution of platforms in environments like Minecraft, Roblox for about a decade, and I've seen how they've evolved from being something that kids play in their free time, into something that becomes more of a next generation social platform in 3D on the internet, which means that for the first time, we now have a generation of 12, 15, 18 year olds who essentially grew up interacting on the internet, mostly as 3D avatars. That is the first generation on the internet that primarily interact in 3D avatars, which, Robin, for you and I is beyond non-intuitive. That's why I like to say I have more in common with my 70 year old mother than between me and a ten year old girl. And I truly believe that because the behaviour is fundamentally different.
So my aha moment was COVID because I believe that, okay, that is now everyone is at home. I saw the number: 2 billion people out of school in their houses. It was abundantly clear that this is going to accelerate the evolution of this human behaviour online. And also knowing that Zoom is not the way young people want to interact. So 3D is.
Fast forward to last year, 2023. As I'm sure some, if not many of folks who are listening to this podcast today, have seen the episode between Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman where Zuckerberg introduced what he called Codec Avatar, this hyper realistic avatar that made it feel for them because no one else was experiencing it aside from viewing it on on a 2D device, but according to them, it was, oh my God, we are almost like we're there with one another. And yes, I agree with you, Robin. I think that was definitely a big, inflection point alongside another one, which we'll talk about in a second. But I do believe that was an inflection point.
That being said, it also showed how far we've come, but also how far we still have to go because those hyper, hyper realistic avatars, which I do believe will completely change human machine experience and human machine interface are not around the corner anytime soon.
Which leads me to the third inflection point, which is the Apple Vision Pro, which they like to dub as a spatial computer. But really, what the Apple Vision Pro is, to an extent, in my opinion, is, it's the first time that there is a device that has the potential to really cross the chasm for many, many more people to feel that when you put a device on your head, you may actually enjoy it. It may not be painful, and you may actually want to do more and more things, consuming, entertainment, playing games, socialising with your friends. And so I think it may help popularise further the notion of a 3D device, but for me, it's yet another step stone in the much broader narrative of an immersive 3D internet.
Robin Pomeroy: Why for you could Vision Pro be quite a breakthrough? What is it maybe about that technology that might draw those people into it?
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: I think fundamentally what Apple is really good at is making technology accessible, right? Apple didn't invent the smartphone, but they made a mass market smartphone. That's what they've done with the iPhone. And the way they've done it is by tightly integrating the hardware and the software and creating it, a user experience that is just compelling to any human being.
Robin Pomeroy: When Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta, everyone was talking about the metaverse, it had maybe a kind of a buzz moment, which has, I would say, faded to some extent. And the new buzz word - or two letters - is AI. And that's certainly been the case for the last year or so. And a cynic would say the metaverse was a couple of years ago. AI is so 2023, you know, we'll all be onto the next thing. But in fact, I think what you're finding is that AI and generative AI is maybe something that is going to boost the whole development of the metaverse. Tell us something about that.
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: You know, when we talk about this large scale 3D enabled internet, we also talk about a massive, massive amount of content, right? When you look at the internet as a real time 3D-enabled, 24/7 365, almost like kind of this Ready Player One or Bladerunner-ish world where it doesn't stop, it's always on and it's always immersive. The amount of content that will need to be created, that will be consumed is going to be in orders of magnitude bigger than what we have today. As big as today is in terms of content, right, with streaming and and gaming and so on, so forth.
So the question then becomes who is going to create all that content? And more importantly, how are you going to run these large scale, persistent, synchronous virtual worlds on all devices all over the world? You're going to need incredible computing to enable that level of consumption and engagement with content.
So when you look at both of those things, who is going to create content and how much content will be available for people to interact with and consume, that is 3D and immersive. And then number two, how do we build computing infrastructure that is going to enable that content to actually be accessible in a split of a second, anyone in the world, any time on any device. It is clear that we are in a transformation of what the internet is going to need to be in order to enable that eventuality.
And so AI is not separate from the future of the internet. Of course, there's many, many, many uses for AI beyond talking about the metaverse, which we don't need to get into anywhere, from drug discovery to, you know, making work more productive. There's a lot of things that I'm sure you're covering.
But in the context of the metaverse or the future of the internet, it is certainly my opinion that AI is a massive enabler of the metaverse. I would go to an extent of saying, without AI or without the explosion of AI capabilities, there's not going to be a metaverse. So they really go hand in hand, and AI is a massive enabler of what the internet could be when it shapes up to be a metaverse.
Robin Pomeroy: What's the next big thing we should be looking out for? Is this year something going to happen in the field you work in that will make us all sit up and pay attention? Or are we talking about a few years time? Are we still, you know, dreaming things that are far from reality?
Yonatan Raz-Fridman: You know, one of my favourite quotes from someone like Bill Gates is: people always overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.
I think that really bodes itself well to where we are now. Everyone thought the metaverse is here, then it's dead. And I think it's not dead because it's not even here. Right?
And then everyone talks about AI. The world is changing. AI is as big a revolution as the internet. That is certainly true, but it's not happening overnight. Actually, if you look at what's happening now, and I'm sure you've heard it from Davos, there's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of scepticism, there's a lot of concern, but there's a lot happening.
So the best way to invent the future is to create it. I don't remember who said that, but I also firmly believe as an entrepreneur that the world that will happen is a world we're actually creating every day.
And so what I'm seeing and what I'm focusing on creating is how do we make a 3D internet a reality? First of all, because I believe that this is the best way to improve the way people connect, communicate, and express themselves online. I truly do. And I also think it's because it's a future worth fighting for and worth building.
And so what I believe we're going to continue to see this year. And I don't want to try and give you, Robin, like another big term, what happens after AI, quite the opposite. I believe that this year is going to be a year when we are starting to see how all these things connect together. When people talk about spatial computing devices, when people talk about the emergence of platforms like Roblox and Fortnite in shaping what consumer experiences could look like. When we're looking at the evolution of generative AI and evolving that into autonomous agents over the next few years. When you look at platforms like Omniverse from Nvidia that continue to, you know, cement its position as the go to platform for industrial companies to build simulated factories, etc. for the future before they even invest.
All of those things are going to start paying dividends this year and showing more use cases, more practical, pragmatic solutions and evidence that what you and I are talking about now is not just the fruit of our imagination. These are actually things that are happening in real life, and there are real use cases to prove.
And so my big thing for this year, enough talking, time to build, time to prove, start to show. And I think through those use cases, we're going to be able to see the progress that all of these technologies are enabling.
Robin Pomeroy: Yonatan Raz-Fridman, CEO of Supersocial. His podcast is called “Into the Metaverse”.
Our next guest is also an enthusiast for the metaverse, but, as a lawyer who has previously investigated and prosecuted human rights abuses including genocide and war crimes, she is very interested in the ethical and legal implications of spatial computing. This is Brittan Heller.
Brittan Heller: So I'm a lecturer at Stanford University. I teach in the political science and the law departments. And I look at the legal implications of emerging technology. So this is AI, blockchain technologies, And, most importantly, spatial computing for about seven years.
Robin Pomeroy: Tell me about this phrase spatial computing for anyone who's never heard of it before. Is it the new term for the metaverse?
Brittan Heller: It's actually not a new term. People who've been in the field for a long time get very contentious about this issue because they feel like Apple is taking it for its own. But spatial computing is when you have digital overlays onto physical space. And so that's been around for at least 35 years. Early forms started in the 1960s.
Robin Pomeroy: You're a lawyer. Why would a lawyer be interested in spatial computing and teaching about it at university?
Brittan Heller: I've always been attracted to frontier issues in the law. And by that, I mean areas that are so new that we aren't really sure how existing law is going to apply to them.
I actually started off my career in international criminal law and worked at the International Criminal Court. I had an internship at the Rwanda Genocide Tribunal and then prosecuted genocide and war crimes for the United States government.
But I had a special role there where I ended up looking at the way that technology interfaced with those very egregious type of crimes.
I started looking at AI and spatial computing about seven years ago after I went to this retreat and somebody had a VR headset and I put it on and I was just convinced that was going to be the future.
What was really striking to me was the magic of it, how it really felt like I was in a different place and with a different body and transported to a redwood forest, which was the demo that I was using, and able to fly through it. And I thought to myself, the way that, it's not just the magic though, it's the way that online harms are going to manifest differently in an online environment that is 3D instead of 2D. That's kind of fascinating to me.
Robin Pomeroy: Interesting your reaction to that because a lot of people put on headsets and they say, yeah, maybe, and they're not convinced that this is the future of the internet or the next big thing.
Do you think we're on a cusp of a new kind of age of spatial computing? You obviously were excited about it seven years ago. Is this the year where the game's going to change and people will actually be using it so much more?
Brittan Heller: I give it about two years to get mass adoption, but what Apple has done is laid the groundwork to get us all used to the fact that we will have digital content overlooking our visual field and our physical space.
The comment that I hear from everyone who's bought one is that after they take it off, they start grabbing at their environment and making the gesture to click even though the computer interface is gone.
It's kind of akin to the way that before you got a smartphone, life was just different. And now it's hard to imagine navigating the world without one.
Robin Pomeroy: You already see children trying to expand pictures in books. That's just from the smartphone thing. You know, they will pinch it and move it around.
Brittan Heller: My daughter is 18 months and so she'll walk up to you and go like this, meaning that she would like to see if you have Mr. Rogers hiding in your phone.
Robin Pomeroy: What are the legal implications then? Already just even what we're doing now I'm looking at you on it's on a Zoom type app.
We're already engaged completely in the internet and a virtual, this is a virtual reality, isn't it? And presumably there are laws and regulations, we're in different countries, but there are certain things governing privacy or dishonesty. If I was trying to sell you something fraudulently, that would be covered by a certain law. I mean, I've done a lot of stuff about artificial intelligence over the last 12 months, about the governance of that, and a lot of people say well a lot of these things can be governed with existing laws.
In what way is spatial computing different from what we're doing right now?
Brittan Heller: The impact of spatial computing on your body and your mind is very different than the impact of the flat screen traditional internet on your body and mind. And that's really the rub.
When you have an experience in virtual reality, the inventor of the first headset, his name is Tom Furness, he explains that it's written on the brain as if in permanent ink. That's from an interview that I did with him for Harvard Kennedy School about three years ago. And he explained that these experiences are processed through your hippocampus in the same way that you create memories. And this is different than your reading and writing centre. So if somebody is abusive to you in a VR environment, it's not like reading a harsh critique on Twitter or even having somebody harass you in a video game. You feel it viscerally. You actually feel like you've been physically attacked in your body, your heart rate goes up, you start to sweat a little more. If somebody reaches out like they grab you in a virtual world in VR, you feel it, actually. To your body, it's real. To your mind, it's real.
The first case was just filed in the UK about a week and a half ago that prosecutors are charging sexual abuse of a minor because the minor claims that she was sexually assaulted in the metaverse. There have been claims of this since 2016 with various people. This is the first time a court has decided to open an investigation and the UK prosecutors are claiming that they were doing this because of the psychological harm to the victim.
Existing laws may not cover an assault that doesn't have a physical element of the crime. It will have to reconsider issues under UK law like you're supposed to be touched with an object that can lead to sexual assault charges. Is your avatar an object?
Touch has not a specific legal meaning because it's a colloquial term. Does it mean actually skin-to-skin contact? Or does it mean that my neurons fired as if I was touched? That I show all of the symptoms of being touched except for a bruise?
It really leads us to consider these fundamentals that make up tort law, criminal law, contract law, brand new.
Robin Pomeroy: You were in Davos at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in January 2024. And you spoke on this session called Next Steps for the Digital World. You had something interesting to say about eye tracking. Could you give us some notion of why eye tracking, which is an important element of some of these new devices, your concerns about that?
Brittan Heller: There's a few things that concern me about eye tracking and how it interfaces with laws around the world. First, we say eye tracking but it's actually several different techniques that companies are using and it's not clear to me if all of those would be covered under eye tracking, if that's what's written into a law.
These devices need to track your pupils, to track the way your eyes move, and to generally track the things that you're looking at in a 'gaze vector' in order to work. And you can't opt out of that or the devices just don't work. That's how you calibrate the device. So it's different than the internet, when many of the privacy related schemes we have are premised on an opt out basis. There's no opting out when you have to calibrate your device based on the way your pupils dilate.
Additionally, the way your pupils dilate, it gives highly intimate information that is just not contemplated by privacy laws, at least in the United States. The GDPR probably covers it under article.
Robin Pomeroy: That's the European directive on privacy.
Brittan Heller: Yes, it is probably covered there because they regulate for use cases, for highly sensitive and sensitive use cases, and this may be covered under that. American laws are more centered on a state by state basis, and there are 50 states. The first state to consider this body-based data is Colorado, and that hasn't passed yet, but they took out language about being 'potentially personally identifying'.
The type of intimate information you can get from eye tracking, it's actually surprising to most people. Eye tracking can tell you whether or not you are sexually attracted to somebody you're looking at because your pupils automatically dilate when you see someone that you think is very sexy. It can tell whether or not you are prone to be telling the truth. It can tell whether or not you show pre-clinical signs of ailments like schizophrenia, autism, Parkinson's, Huntington's, or ADHD. And I say pre-clinical because your doctor wouldn't know to look for them yet because the first sign is a lag in your pupil dilation rate.
I don't really feel like people meaningfully consent to give that quality of information away when they're in a VR headset playing a video game. People just don't understand the type of body-based data and what you can get from that.
There were recently studies done by Berkeley and Stanford. And the Berkeley study showed that using 100 seconds of recorded information from Beat Saber, which is the most popular VR game, you slash blocks to music that are thrown at you in a 3D space, using that kind of motion-based data called telemetry, Berkeley researchers were able to pick out 40 personal identifying characteristics from the users, ranging from their age to their gender to their disability status to their shoe size. The way that you tilt your head and point, researchers from Stanford and Berkeley have found, repeating these studies, the way you tilt your head and point is as physically identifying as your fingerprint.
The Berkeley study that came out mid-2023 was from a data set of 55,000 people. You could uniquely identify one person based on the way they move.
We don't have these problems with flat-stream traditional computing laws. So, my fear is that when you try to apply 2D laws to 3D spaces, you're not going to encompass that type of a risk.
Robin Pomeroy: Is there a way to encompass that type of risk? I mean, is that a law that's easy to draft or is it impossible?
Brittan Heller: It's going to take careful thinking, and I think to be comprehensive and let the market do its magic, you're going to have to take a similar approach in jurisdictions around the world.
I'm a former prosecutor in the United States and I always joke about Bernoulli drives. Are you familiar with a Bernoulli drive? It was a type of hardware used in the 1980s for about a minute and a half. It was a gigantic, dinner plate-sized floppy disk and it held data. And if you look at the way that people request search warrants from courts in the United States, they still put on Bernoulli drives because you have, in the boilerplate, you list all of the hardware that could potentially be applicable.
That type of an approach isn't really comprehensive when the hardware floor for a new industry isn't solidified yet.
We know that the VR industry is going to have headsets. We know that AR glasses are going to look like normal glasses. We know spatial computing is probably going to be mixed reality, so allow you to toggle between the two. But there's still people developing additional hardware. We don't know what the mouse and the keyboard equivalent is going to be when you're navigating 3D space with your computer.
So my fear is that unless we take the GDPR type approach, looking at use cases rather than technology, the regulation is soon going to be outdated.
Robin Pomeroy: So it may well be covered then by the European data protection rules because they're looking, rather than listing technologies that haven't even been invented yet, it takes on the use case.
Brittan Heller: Yes. They're more trying to take it from a user harm centric point of view, rather than looking at the potential harms coming from a particular set of microchips.
Robin Pomeroy: And with your conversations with industry people, bas ed in Palo Alto, I mean, you're in Silicon Valley, what is their approach in your experience? Are they kind of fighting off notions of regulation, or are they saying we need to come together to discuss these issues?
Brittan Heller: I think at this point regulation would be welcome because it would allow them to feel like they're mitigating litigation risk and that they are more able to expand their sales to different markets.
In this tech lash of an environment where you see the heads of companies being called before the American Congress all the time, it would be welcome.
I also see them wanting more national leadership because right now the focus has been on AI and something that is very clear to me having studied this for a long time is that emerging technologies work in ecosystems. So if you try to regulate AI or blockchain or extended reality, spatial computing, singularly, you're going to miss the big picture because all of these things are going to be a part of each other and we're going to use them in concert. So if you are regulating only one part of it, it's not going to function well.
Robin Pomeroy: So there's a lot of conversations about the governance of AI. As you just mentioned, you seem to be suggesting that should be, if it's not already, it should be expanded to include spatial computing and potentially one or two other novel technologies.
Brittan Heller: I think it's very reasonable to suggest that AI is going to be a huge part of how we compute in this new hardware. I've been calling the next iteration of the internet 'the embodied web'.
And when I say the embodied web, you pick up data from your body. It is used to calibrate the new hardware. And then information from that hardware comes back to you. So it's almost this reciprocal relationship.
And I can't see us doing that and still continuing to run AI on our laptops. It just makes no sense.
So the embodied web is, has two new types of data. You know, it has this teletremy-based data that we have in our mobile phones. That makes sense. But it has sensory input as well.
The sensory input is what is new and when you combine that with AI processing you'll get highly personalized experiences. People will really enjoy it. It may be even more persuasive and addicting than flat-screen internet because it will know exactly what you're reacting to and have your being able to trace your reaction to it and cater that to you specifically.
I've actually written about that advertising in the metaverse, it's not product placement, it's placement in the product. It's experiential. And so that's also going to be a major difference between flat screen computing.
Robin Pomeroy: Seven years ago, you were excited to put on those VR glasses. Now you have a lot of misgivings about this technology, but are you still excited about it?
Brittan Heller: Absolutely. The reason I study these things and I push for user safety and privacy awareness around them is because I love them and I want everyone to use them in a way that makes their lives better.
Robin Pomeroy: Brittan Heller of Stanford University. You also heard Yonatan Raz-Fridman of Supersocial and the “Into the Metaverse” podcast.
For more on the subjects discussed in this episode, the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution recently published two papers you might be interested in:
Metaverse Identity: Defining the Self in a Blended Reality and Navigating the Industrial Metaverse: A Blueprint for Future Innovations - links in the show notes.
Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review. And join the conversation on the World Economic Forum Podcast club on Facebook.
This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy with editing by Jere Johansson and studio production by Taz Kelleher.
We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.
Podcast Editor, World Economic Forum
Thomas Crampton
2024年10月21日