PRESS: Speaking to The telegraph newspaper about Virtual Humans and ethics
The Telegraphs newspapers highly prognostic and affable Harry De Quetteville interviewed me about virtual Humans and their development, uses and ethics. He approached the subject originally from the view of VHs being used to capture nefarious abusers online, and moved through to the development process and coming ubiquity.
Ket points discussed as follows;
Those under 24 don’t find anything weird about talking to Virtual humans
Older people, the moment after they’ve had their first engagement with a virtual human, their squeamishness is gone
U.S military studies show that people can be more willing to interact with virtual humans than the real thing
There is scant regulation - this needs to be addressed
I call for transparency: “There has to be disclosure. You need to know who the people are behind the avatars, how old they are; to label brands’ characters so it’s clear their motivation is to sell a product; or if there’s a created character, who is the creator?”
Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s is obsessed with synthetic media
His goal is to remove the phone as the device that connects you and replace it with glasses, which overlay the virtual world on to the real world
Eyewear becomes the operating system and these worlds are populated by Virtual characters, Avatars and Humans