Meta has just announced the deployment of a new feature called Personal Boundary in its virtual reality platforms Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. Objective: To protect avatars from unsolicited closeness in the metaverse.
An invisible bubble of protection
” Personal Boundary prevents avatars from approaching within a certain distance of each other, creating more personal space for people and making it easier to avoid unwanted interactions “, explains the company in a blog post. The feature comes as an invisible bubble that surrounds avatars walking through virtual reality (VR) spaces, creating a 1.2 meter gap between each of them.
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Thus, a person will not be able to get too close (virtually) to another because the bubble will prevent it. Meta nevertheless specifies that no haptic feedback has been put in place to make the functionality felt. Personal Boundary” builds on the anti-harassment hands measures already in place, where an avatar’s hands disappear if they encroach on a person’s personal space », continues the company.
The feature was introduced by default to set behavioral standards for other VR spaces. Meta is now thinking about changes to allow, for example, users to customize their bubble.
Here, the bubbles are visible but they are actually invisible within the platform. Image: Meta
Security in the metaverse poses a huge challenge
This decision on Meta’s part follows several testimonies from women who have had disturbing experiences within Horizon Worlds. Each time, avatars of men behaved inappropriately with the latter, who were shocked by what happened to them.
Moreover, security and moderation within the metaverse, considered as the future of the Internet, raise questions. “ When it comes to finding hate speech in text, it’s hard but doable – you can use machine learning algorithms. To process visual information about an avatar or how close an avatar is to another, it’s going to be so computationally expensive, it’s going to take so much computing power, I don’t know what technology can do that “, explains the specialized journalist Parmy Olson.
Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta, also assured in an interview with the BBC that the metaverse would pose ” greater opportunities and greater threats”. “It might feel a lot more real to me if you were violent towards me, because it feels a lot more like a physical space “, he explained.
The task therefore promises to be very complex for Meta, and the firm has no interest in missing out because, in addition to betting its entire future on the metaverse, it does not enjoy a very good reputation in terms of data protection. users. People’s safety in the next iteration of the internet has already piqued the interest of a UK watchdog. The latter therefore asked Meta for an in-depth review of its child safety policy.