Dr. Louis Rosenberg of Unanimous AI

Ready or not, the metaverse is coming. It will bring a future society in which we spend a significant portion of our lives in virtual and augmented worlds. For many, this sounds like science fiction and yet a recent study by McKinsey found that most consumers expect to spend 4 hours a day in the metaverse by the end of this decade. As a technologist who has been involved in virtual and augmented reality for over thirty years, I find this both exciting and terrifying.

It's exciting because the metaverse could be a wildly creative medium that expands what it means to be human. It’s terrifying because without proper safeguards, it could become a deeply oppressive technology that gives corporations and state actors unprecedented control over society. That's because unregulated metaverse platforms could easily track, profile, and manipulate users at levels beyond anything we’ve experienced to date. In fact, the metaverse could become the most powerful tool of persuasion ever created.

In this session, I’ll talk about what the metaverse is and how it is likely to take shape over the next ten years. I will address the human benefits and market conditions that make the shift to immersive computing inevitable in the coming years. I will then discuss potential risks to society, which are numerous and significant. Finally, I will address the policy solutions that could help avoid dystopian scenarios.

Biography:

Dr. Louis Rosenberg is an early pioneer in the fields of virtual and augmented reality. His work began over thirty years ago in labs at Stanford and NASA where he worked on early VR vision systems.

• In 1992 he developed the first functional Mixed Reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Called the Virtual Fixtures platform, the system enabled users to interact simultaneously with real and virtual objects.
• In 1993 he founded the early VR company Immersion Corporation (public on Nasdaq).
• In 2004 he founded the early AR company Outland Research. He’s been awarded over 300 patents for VR, AR, and AI technologies and published over 100 academic papers.

He received his PhD from Stanford University, was a tenured professor at California State University, and is currently CEO of Unanimous AI. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Responsible Metaverse Alliance and the Global Technology Advisor to the XR Safety Initiative (XRSI).