If you still haven’t quite wrapped your head around what the metaverse is, that’s completely understandable. It’s a mildly confusing affair, but one that we’re likely going to have to get used to hearing about.
Broadly speaking, the metaverse typically refers to the usage of virtual reality and augmented reality but on the whole, it’s a vague concept. Games like Fortnite have branded themselves as belonging to the metaverse and they require neither AR or VR. Speaking of Fortnite, one politician now believes that metaverse murders should be treated as actual real-world crimes, so you may want to think twice before entering your next battle royale.
This gamer pranked their dad with a VR horror game and the result is hilarious. Take a look below.
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As spotted by TweakTown, the United Arab Emirates’ minister of artificial intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama recently expressed his wishes to treat criminal acts committed in the metaverse as equal to real world crimes.
During this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the minister said, “If I send you a text on WhatsApp, it's text right? It might terrorise you but to a certain degree it will not create the memories that you will have PTSD from it, but if I come into the metaverse and it's a realistic world that we're talking about in the future and I actually murder you, you see it.”
He went on to add, “It actually takes you to a certain extreme, [so] you need to enforce aggressively across the world because everyone agrees that certain things are unacceptable.”
Given the how vague the metaverse already is, it’s hard to imagine how such a thing would be policed. Chief product officer of Meta Chris Cox recently said, “There will probably be something like a rating system which we have for film, we have for music, we have for other types of content so that a parent or a young person can have some sense of what the rules are in the environment they're going to walk into.”
I think we can all agree that we’re pro online safety, but treating virtual ‘murders’ as equal to real world murders seems a little extreme, right?