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A waiter with a Meta Oculus Quest 2 headset takes part in a virtual reality tour during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2022. South Korea is betting that the Metaverse is the next big thing, but there are still questions about the shape of the industry in the coming years.
Joan Cross | Digital Photo | Getty Images
New laws should be introduced to prevent people from committing crimes such as “murder” in virtual worlds, said the United Arab Emirates’ Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence.
The metaverse is the virtual world in which people can live, work and play through avatars. It doesn’t actually exist yet, but tech companies are investing billions to develop the technology. However, there are some security concerns associated with its development.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Omar Sultan Al Olama said the realistic nature of any virtual world that actually materializes could allow people to be intimidated in ways that are currently impossible.
“If I text you on WhatsApp, it’s a text message, right?” Olama said. “It might scare you, but to a certain extent, it doesn’t make you recall that you got PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) because of it.”
“But if I go into the virtual world, which is a real world that we’re talking about in the future, I actually murder you, you see…it actually takes you to an extreme where you need to be active in it the world because everyone agrees that something is unacceptable,” he added.
Al Olama urged the International Telecommunication Union, the UN’s specialized agency for information and communications technology, to have a dialogue on developing international security standards for virtual worlds that people must adhere to, no matter where they live. For example, there are universal standards on the Internet to prevent things like drug trafficking and child pornography.
ITU had no immediate comment when contacted by CNBC.
Al Olama said that going from one metaverse platform to another also needs to be possible. “So if Meta develops something and Magic Leap develops another…there has to be some kind of interoperability between them.”
On the same panel, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox Yuan (Formerly Facebook), indicating that the world needs international standards to handle virtual worlds.
“There could be something like a rating system, we have movies, music and other types of content so parents or young people can understand the rules of the environment they’re in. ‘Go in,'” Cox said.
On the topic of monetizing the Metaverse, Cox stated that he expects Meta to be able to generate revenue in the Metaverse through advertising. “If you want free services at scale, advertising will be its natural business model, as it has been since print,” he said.
But Philip Rosedale, founder of virtual world platform Second Life, said in the same panel that virtual worlds should be ad-free. “If we move those (advertising) models that rely on predicting what you want and suggesting to you, in some cases, I think, manipulating your behavior … I think that’s a scary risk,” he said.
Rosedale added: “In my opinion, the model that has to work in the metaverse is the transaction or fee model, not the advertising model.”
This will involve purchasing digital goods and subscriptions.
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