Abstract
The commercial VR/AR marketplace is gaining ground and is becoming an ever larger and more significant component of the global economy. While much attention has been paid to the commercial promise of VR/AR, comparatively little attention has been given to the ethical issues that VR/AR technologies introduce. We here examine existing codes of ethics proposed by the ACM and IEEE and apply them to the unique ethical facets that VR/AR introduces. We propose a VR/AR code of ethics for developers and apply this code to several commercial applications.
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Notes
- 1.
Most commercial developers (Oculus, HTC, etc) have their own internal codes for employees and other codes have been proposed (Madary and Metzinger 2016). We aim to incorporate and synthesize these codes into our own proposal here which builds on what we argue are unique psychological aspects of simulation design that are unique to VR/AR.
- 2.
Although different in terms of their “opt-in” vs. “opt-out” structure, both the state of California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPS) enacted in 2020 and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted in 2018 provide consumers with such a right and both serve as good models for ethical data collection.
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Ramirez, E.J., Tan, J., Elliott, M., Gandhi, M., Petronio, L. (2021). An Ethical Code for Commercial VR/AR Applications. In: Shaghaghi, N., Lamberti, F., Beams, B., Shariatmadari, R., Amer, A. (eds) Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. INTETAIN 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 377. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76426-5_2
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