Wandering through the metaverse is like being in a computer game, but it will soon feel like real life. Unlike some dystopian visions of the metaverse, I don’t think we abandon reality and stop participating in the physical world.. Instead, advances in content generation by artificial intelligence will likely lead to a photorealistic metaverse with exact replicas of ourselves, propelling us toward a hyperreality that blends our real and digital lives.
Everything we do today on the Internet will happen in the metaverse, only with a more attractive visual interface. The virtual content we interact with today is low-res and cartoonish, which makes sense because creating realistic content is expensive, and games make up the majority of what’s currently available in the metaverse. Instead, the physical world around us is vivid and rich with 24/7 personalized high-definition content experiences, also known as reality.
As technology advances, the photorealistic contents of the metaverse will be indistinguishable from physical reality. Driving this change will be powerful AI content generation algorithms that use real-world data to seamlessly recreate versions of ourselves within digital environments. The question is, as the real world expands into virtual space: How will you keep bad actors from controlling your photorealistic virtual version of yourself?
Will our digital selves be slaves to large corporations?
The growth of the Internet and countless amazing digital products and services has created a torrent of personal data that has been collected by large corporations. Every search engine query, every comment, every like, every profile picture, every email and every purchase is one more note in the symphony of our digital identity that only certain corporations and their algorithms can hear.. The metaverse takes data collection to a new level and will be filled with immersive content and ever richer data streams. While we may be willing to trade our cookie data or information about what we buy for Internet products and services that make our lives easier, it’s not clear that we’re comfortable giving corporations that same power over biometric data. unique voice and face needed to create virtual versions of ourselves in the hyperreal metaverse.
The way many Internet services collect data has made more and more people reluctant to share their personal data with online platforms, especially among Generation Z. As we move into a hyper-realistic metaverse, what’s at stake is the incredibly intimate nature of the data required to represent realistic versions of people, including digital copies of our faces, bodies, and voices. This is a major roadblock to developing an inclusive and user-friendly metaverse, especially when it comes to hyper-real content.
If we are going to bring billions of people into virtual worlds, content creators will need to use AI content generation algorithms trained on real-world data to create personalized and immersive experiences at scale. But people must be willing to share their intimate and private biometric data with content creators; otherwise, the metaverse may end up being nothing more than an endless Zoom call with a bunch of legless torsos floating around.
How to secure your hyperreal identity in the metaverse
The arrival of a “hyperreal” metaverse is both an exciting and worrying prospect. On the one hand, the metaverse will create immersive new avenues for human expression and interaction. For example, the move from analog phone calls to video conferencing began just 15 years ago, and has rapidly transformed the quality of our interactions with family and friends around the world. Imagine how much more rewarding real-time, immersive, and photorealistic virtual “encounters” will be, when you truly feel like you’re there in person with your friends and loved ones.
On the other hand, there is the potential for platform owners to collect new and increasingly personal information and biometric data from users. Additionally, bad actors can create harmful content and use it to exploit people and communities. Some recent examples of these risks are political disinformation and the abuse of sexually explicit images directed at women. As we collectively explore how the metaverse will unfold, we must all be diligent when it comes to user education, policy making, and careful development of hyper-realistic technologies and artificial intelligence. Ultimately, our biggest challenge as we approach an AI-powered hyperreal metaverse will come down to who controls user data and the safeguards we put in place to protect people.
The first principle in securing your hyperreal identity in the metaverse is to positively assert ownership of your private biometric data. While it is up to governments to stop criminals from stealing your data and identity, you can at least use blockchain technologies to claim your hyper-real identity and track its use by legitimate content creators. Imagine that you secure your biometric data behind non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that represent your hyper-real identity and that only you control.. As you move between virtual worlds in the metaverse, you could use this NFT as an authenticated login service and control which platforms have access to your biometric data.
Think of virtual reality headsets, which are already capable of tracking users’ eyes, mapping their surroundings and recording their voices. If participation in the metaverse is based on the collection of these biometric data formats, we need to design systems that allow individuals to control when and how their data is used. In this regard, Web3 tools, including blockchain and other permissionless technologies, are essential to ensuring data sovereignty in the metaverse, as they are capable of crawling personalized content at scale without requiring users to blindly trust their data. biometric data to third parties.
Web3 will put people in control of their metaverse of identity and biometrics
Attacking an individual’s personal identity in the real world is costly in terms of time, resources, and potential consequences. In the context of today’s Internet, the barrier to identity theft at scale has been dramatically lowered, with millions of people falling victim to these attacks each year. The use of Web3 tools, including NFTs and blockchains, to ensure the data sovereignty of individuals in the metaverse is critically important, as the deeply personal details inherent in this data create new opportunities for malicious actors. pose as individuals and exploit our identities.
These risks are magnified in the metaverse. If an attacker can make your photorealistic digital avatar say or do anything and other users can’t tell if it’s really you, it makes it that much harder to combat fraud and build networks of trust that are essential for healthy communities.. The hyper-realistic metaverse will open up new opportunities to work and play in virtual spaces, but this can only happen if there is a profound change in the way data is exchanged and protected online.
Although malicious actors will always be present in the metaverse, Web3 technologies can provide a set of barriers to a positive economy in which individuals can securely share their biometric data and appear as themselves in metaverse content experiences. It is essential that we create systems that allow individuals to control how they are represented in the metaverse and who has access to their biometric data. These systems will make the creation of personalized content a consensual and collaborative process between the companies that create content and the individuals that participate in it. This is a profound change from the incentive structures at the heart of the modern Internet and Web2, where the price of entry to the major platforms and the best products is to relinquish control over your personal information. For the first time, NFTs, blockchains, and Web3 tools will allow users to participate in digital economies without relinquishing control of their data.
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Tom Graham is a lawyer turned Internet and society researcher. In the seven years prior to co-founding Metaphysic, Tom, a serial entrepreneur, built tech companies in San Francisco and London. He has always been obsessed with computational photography and computer vision and is now working alongside the best developers in the business on the next evolution of how to build and perceive reality, pixel by pixel.
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