“treat others as you would have them treat you” .. By Virtual and Augmented Reality, it is possible to give people the experience of this golden rule in operation
Responsible Hololens?
There are several ethical challenges with Augmented Reality technologies such as facial recognition and anonymity, privacy, mental and social side effects, and reality distortion. Now it is timely to ask how we can make their design and development more responsible.
Background
Augmented Reality is one of the most exciting technologies today, and is going to be the next generation of compute, for both enterprise and day to day customers. Virtual Presence is one of the applications of such technology, allowing people to connect, collaborate, and communicate without the physical barriers.
Technologists believe there is no limit to what these technologies can unlock. They argue we will wear very small AR, VR, and MR (mixed reality) headsets in the near term, probably not very different from the glasses we wear today.
These new technologies will allow us to use them everywhere, every time, the way we use our phones now. The technology advocates believe that it can improve our lives in many different aspects. For example, visually impaired people can have a detailed sense of the environment in real-time with a pair of AR glasses. Doctors in remote areas can benefit from a seamless collaboration with experts around the world when performing a surgery. We all can fix our cars by ourselves as our AR glass provides us with every information we need when we look at our car.
The Hololens is Microsoft’s take on augmented reality. It’s the most popular version of dedicated to augmented reality to hit the market to date Using multiple sensors, advanced optics, and holographic processing that melds seamlessly with its environment. Holograms can be used to display information, blend with the real world, or even simulate a virtual world.
Our story
Challenge
As useful as products such as Hololens can be for humanity, there are a considerable number of social, legal, and ethical challenges faced by developers, researchers, and marketers in terms of creating, deploying and using these technologies. For example, the main ethical challenges in terms of AR implementation include facial recognition and anonymity, privacy, mental and social side effects, unrealistic expectations, reality distortion, and manipulation. There are nuanced trade-offs around the wearer of AR/VR products and those who find themselves in their field of vision, and that these tradeoffs account for the impact on vulnerable communities.
There are also legal considerations to take into account. Currently, there is no regulatory infrastructure in place to moderate the development and deployment of AR technologies in general and Hololens in particular. And this is mainly because the speed at which AR technology is advancing is too fast for the traditional legislative system to account for.
In this project we try to identify the ways in which we can make the design and development of Hololens more responsible.
