As American VR researcher Jeremy Bailenson has written:
…commercial VR systems typically track body movements 90 times per second to display the scene appropriately, and high-end systems bulgaria cell phone database record 18 types of movements across the head and hands. Consequently, spending 20 minutes in a VR simulation leaves just under 2 million unique recordings of body language.
The way you move your body can be used to identify you, like a fingerprint, so everything you do in VR could be traced back to your individual identity.
Facebook’s Oculus Quest headsets also use outward-facing cameras to track and map their surroundings.
Facebook VR headsets use Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) to track the movements of the headset in 3D space. This is also another opportunity for collecting data about the world.
In late 2019 Facebook said they “don’t collect and store images or 3D maps of your environment on our servers today”. Note the word today, which tech journalist Ben Lang notes makes clear the company is not ruling out anything in the future.
Virtual reality leads to augmented reality
Facebook wants to collect this data to facilitate its plans for augmented reality (AR).
Where VR takes a user to a fully virtual environment, AR combines virtual elements with our real surroundings.
Last year Facebook unveiled the Live Maps application, a vision of an expansive surveillance apparatus presumably powered by AR glasses and data collected from Oculus Insight. Live Maps will provide many minor conveniences for Facebook users, like letting you know you’ve left your keys on the coffee table.
Facebook’s Live Maps application is a vision of a Facebook owned AR platform.
Now Facebook have announced their first steps towards making this a reality: Project Aria. This will involve people wearing glasses-like sensors around Seattle and the San Francisco Bay area, to collect the data to build what Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly calls “the mirrorworld”, the next big tech platform.
Pok?�mon Go wants to make 3D scans of the whole world for ‘planet-scale augmented reality experiences’. Is that good?
People are rightly concerned about the ethical implications of this kind of data extraction. Alongside Project Aria, Facebook launched its Responsible Innovation Principles page, and they’re already quick to emphasise that faces and license plates will be blurred in this data collection.
As we have argued elsew
her framing questions about VR and AR surveillance in terms of individual privacy suits companies like Facebook very well. That’s because their previous failings are actually in the (un)ethical use of data (as in the case of Cambridge Analytica) and their asymmetric platform power.
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Why the business model of social media giants like Facebook is incompatible with human rights