Virtual Reality in Gaming Essay

What is Virtual Reality?

There are red and blue pills in front of your eyes. If you choose the blue pill, you will continue to live in virtual reality as you have believed in reality, and if you take the red pill, you will be able to escape virtual reality and face real life (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999). These scenes from the 1999, SF film 'The Matrix,' directed by the Wachowski brothers, are likely to be realized soon in reality, not in a film, in decades. The rapid technological development of virtual reality is pushing forward the advent of an era where real reality cannot be distinguished from virtual reality.

Virtual Reality (VR) refers to a technology that uses artificial technology to stimulate the human body's five senses by providing the real world with experiences or environments that are hard to obtain or not (Bardi, 2019). With the recent acceleration of participation by many companies, virtual reality technology is evolving into a future computing environment technology that communicates through free behavior and five senses across virtual reality and reality and expects to change people's lives and affect broad industrial development.

When you use virtual reality goggles, you feel like you're in a different world. You can lie down in bed and visit the Himalayas, check out the latest car at a car store, or go to Hogwarts by turning into a Harry Potter wizard. In the not-too-distant future, car buyers can test drive vehicles, doctors practice operations, officers in charge of procuring military supplies assess the capabilities of the defense system, look around facilities without going to the hotel, and look at buildings before construction is completed.

Virtual reality features three-dimensional spatiality, real-time interaction, and immersion, and provides users with information that does not exist through display equipment. Virtual reality was initially used to recreate an environment that was difficult to experience daily, such as scientific experiments and military training, but gradually expanded to various fields such as games and movies. However, as we enter the era of the fourth industrial revolution, various problems are emerging as challenges. This is because it is characterized by changes that are so fast that you don't know when, where, and what technology will emerge.

Benefits

Industry. It has been actively introducing VR technology for smart factorization at industrial sites. It is also possible to prevent downtime by blocking problems before they occur within an industrial site and to develop new opportunities through predictive analysis technology. Data can be monitored in real-time through a virtual display, and users can view necessary manuals or drawings in real-time if they want, as well as basic functions such as a virtual look at the internal state of the machine. These systems allow workers to not only improve their skills but also improve productivity, gain stability, and manage equipment efficiently.

Healthcare. VR-based healthcare technology is emerging that can solve the problem of increasing medical costs and lack of professionals and provide efficient medical services. It is a trend that is actively introduced in mental health areas such as stress management, cognitive improvement, and psychological treatment training through virtual spaces such as forests and seas, and post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD) can be effectively treated by developing VR-sense content and software to prevent crimes caused by alcoholics, and by analyzing individual biometric signals (Senson, 2015).

Military. It is especially useful in the Military. VR provides lower-risk picture quality and situation than physical training in the military. VR games can have the effect of training soldiers, so in each country, the government has deployed VR to military exercises. VR can safely reproduce low-cost and dangerous training scenarios, allowing trainers to repeat and modify them as needed.

Problems

Thanks to recent advances in technology, devices with price and performance that can be used by ordinary people have emerged and various contents can be used and have entered the commercialization phase. The development of various input/output devices and graphic technologies, and the problem of delayed response time, have gradually eliminated technical barriers and made prices popular. This situation inevitably causes ethical problems.

Among the legal and ethical issues caused by virtual reality, hot issues are virtual crimes. If pornography is produced through virtual reality, it can be justified only because sex crimes and other sexual violence are committed in virtual reality, and the possibility of criminal consequences in real life cannot be ruled out. In virtual reality, there may also be a variety of problems, such as whether to punish the person if he or she gives the other person sexual humiliation or disgust through virtual physical contact that the other person does not want.

Legal issues may range from whether legal regulation of virtual reality is possible to whether new laws are necessary to regulate problems arising from the daily use of virtual reality, or through what laws should be regulated. For example, the inability to distinguish between real and fake reality could lead to crimes, and various legal issues such as whether a crime in virtual reality can be punished (Prajapati, 2018).

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Ethical issues related to virtual reality have been continuously raised in academia. For example, Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher at the University of Johannes Gutenberg, warned that humans today do not understand the psychological impact of moving into virtual bodies. 'External immersion into the virtual environment can present a risk associated with human deviations,' he told New Scientist. The physical body can feel impractical,' he said. He added, 'The experience of being completely immersed has a large and lasting impact on behavior and psychology. For example, the hands of rubber, an inanimate human brain, can be considered to belong to the body. In a VR environment, you can think of yourself as an avatar. Consumers should be aware that this could lead to risks, he added (Ananthaswamy, 2016).

Virtual reality could lead to unprotected exposure to violence or pornography, and ethical problems that could lead to the destruction of ethics. Specifically, virtual reality may cause a lack of communication, human alienation, and ineptitude in real life, and unethical behavior through virtual reality may not lead to remorse or guilt.

Social Issue. Risks to virtual reality can be caused in various ways. Companies will be able to manipulate consumers' subconsciousness or use it for torture purposes in the military. Accidents caused by blurred judgment during the use of AR games have become social problems. In 2016, at the height of Pokemon Go's popularity, traffic accidents rose 26.5 percent in areas where Pokemon could be acquired in the United States, according to researchers at Purdue University in Indiana. The researchers estimated that about 140,000 traffic accidents across the U.S. in 2016 were related to Pokemon Go (Mara, McConnell, J., & Faccio, 2017).

These over-immersion side effects can be a bigger problem for children under the age of 13 and adolescents Young adults who are more sensitive to stimuli than adults due to the lack of full sensory organs and judgment can be hampered by emotional development, such as judgment and emotional control, if they are continuously exposed to stimuli given by VR.

Security Aspects. Vulnerabilities are also found in security. The program can access video and audio feeds around the user. A level of access has not been seen in technology or other industries ever. Security-intertwined technologies are always exposed to hacking security issues when they move to and from servers. Due to the everyday use of virtual reality technology, the means of simple payment will also be applied to virtual reality, so that financial companies or fintech companies will broker the transaction of various services or products, and because of the payment method that has become so simple, they can suffer immediate financial losses. More careful consideration should be given to whether the virtual reality service platform can prevent it if it has suffered heavy losses from e-commerce fraud (JL2977, 2019).

These problems can be seen through the animation 'Sword Art Online.' The main character lies in bed wearing the head-mounted interface 'nub-gear' and accesses the virtual reality game 'Sword Art Online.' In this virtual world, you can feel five senses like the real world, form groups with people, defeat monsters, and buy and sell things. Suddenly, a genius scientist who developed 'Sword Art Online' appears as a grim reaper in a cape, removing the game-ending in menu, so no one can return to the real world. The story is about the protagonist returning to the real world after defeating the bad guy's boss. The animation 'Sword Art Online' provides a glimpse into the possibility of hacking (Kawahara, 'Sword Art Online').

Game users soon become perplexed when they find out that there is no way to return to the real world. Some people force users to remove the 'nub-gear' of a user who does not return to reality, a genius scientist with the image of a grim reaper shows several scenes of death to all users and warns that in the real world, if someone tries to force the connection, 'nub-gear,' it can generate a high-powered microwave and destroy the brain. And the death in the game is the death of the real world. The game soon became a reality.

'NubGear' takes control by controlling the game user's brain and blocking communication with the body. This scene represents the fact that even if a game server is hacked now, only the financial part can be damaged, but in the future, it can take away a person's life. Another example, is an incident in which a player who is shot in black with an unidentified avatar dies in the real world. The incident involved hacking into the hologram system used in games and breaking into the house after obtaining personal information.

What can be seen through various examples is the benefits of virtual reality technology. Technology itself has no good or bad. It should develop within human control and be used for legitimate purposes. This is because virtual reality allows us to realize infinite possibilities and, above all, gives us hope. The fourth industrial revolution, which was only considered a distant future, seems to be just around the corner, but advanced countries, including the United States, have already been moving quickly for years to preempt platforms and standardization. In the future, using virtual reality technology, multiple people, regardless of distance, will develop from a three-dimensional virtual environment into a future computing platform that can collaborate and is expected to serve as a driving force for the hardware, network, and software markets that demand a high-performance computing environment to implement VR technology.

The more progress is made, the more social chaos is likely to arise in the future if there are insufficient provisions and regulations for punishment on VR technology, as there were no provisions for punishment when cybercrime first appeared in the past. The government should create the right culture of VR use through the provision of punishment and regulations on the use of VR.

References

1. Ananthaswamy, A. (2016, March 4). Virtual reality could be an ethical minefield – are we ready? Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2079601-virtual-reality-could-be-an-ethical-minefield-are-we-ready/
2. Bardi, J. (2019, July 3). What is Virtual Reality? VR Definition and Examples. Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://www.marxentlabs.com/what-is-virtual-reality/
3. JL2977. (2019, April 12). VR/AR Privacy Concerns Emerging with the Field's Development. Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://campuspress.yale.edu/tribune/vrar-privacy-concerns-emerging-with-the-fields-development/
4. Mara, McConnell, J., J., & Faccio. (2017, November 21). Death by Pokémon GO: The Economic and Human Cost of Using Apps While Driving. Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073723
5. Prajapati, C. (2018, March 22). What are the Legal Issues That Stare at Augmented/Virtual Reality? Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310821
6. Senson, A. (2015, September 16). Virtual Reality In Healthcare: Where's The Innovation? Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/16/virtual-reality-in-healthcare-wheres-the-innovation/
7. Sword Art Online. (2012). Retrieved from https://myanimelist.net/anime/producer/56/A-1_Pictures
8. Tripwire Guest AuthorsDec 22, 2016I. T. S. and D. P. (2016, December 15). The Rise of VR and Its Impending Security Risks. Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/rise-vr-impending-security-risks/
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