From: Evonne Cheung Subject: Re: SOC: Virtual Reality and ethics Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 13:51:28 +1200 Message-ID: <34247D9E.3F028D19@design.wnp.ac.nz> Organization: School of Design, Wellington Polytechnic Thank you to all those people that emailed me with their opinion on this subject, it's all been very helpful. I'm only just beginning to realise what a broad topic I've chosen to write a 3000 words essay on. I need to form a question/statement to base my essay on, obviously now, my original questions are far too broad and would definitely require more than 3000 words to cover the topics. So does anyone have any suggestions as to what my question/s could be? It seems like that everything involved in this VR topic is so uncertain that writing about it could only throw me in the deep end, I guess everything does come back down to us people that design this world and our own ethics. I personally think that VR could really revolutionize this world similar to what television has done. There's so much we don't know, but when it does reveal itself to us, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal anymore. We adapt to new ideas very easily, it's only a matter of time before this whole VR thing becomes just another part of our daily lives that we wouldn't even think about the dangers involved. I did a presentation on this subject last week and there was a pretty heated debate on it. Someone brought up a question, why are we so uptight about this whole topic? People create this VR because they want to experience different situations that wouldn't be possible in reality, there's no harm in it because it's like a game, people know the difference between VR and RL, they're just using it as a way to escape this reality. An example was giving also, that if a man had the urge to physically harm someone, they could go into the virtual world and let out their frustrations there, afterall, there's no consequences in that world, in doing so, they wouldn't be harming anyone in this world. So does that mean all crimes are okay in VR? Aren't we just promoting people to go against the law by giving them a world where there's no limits? If there is a limit enforced in this virtual world, what's the difference from RL? Why would we bother with VR? Hoping to get more feedback on this matter. Thanks! Evonne Cheung