Ethical concerns for virtual reality are very new as is the technology so the ethical concerns may be based on assumption for the most part. Technology has evolved faster than ever and as such our ethical approach needs to catch up. This section will provide some of the current ethical concerns that are established with virtual reality. The article written by Wall (2019) says that the V.R headsets being used were produced by an independent company meaning that this market is not yet dominated by other corporations meaning that the education system could have a dedicated provider, meaning it can set its own protocol, standards and price. This also means they would have more control over how the V.R would meet ethical guidelines by restricting certain features or its access to non-private networks.
Many ethical concerns raised by Johansson (2018) was mainly in the relation to violent video games, protectionist discourse encourages the censorship of such media, when realistically the software can be regulated. In fact, if they look at children’s media today it can be just as violent as a virtual game such as Tom and Jerry the show with the most violent acts per second in history. This is not to say the immersion of V.R cannot be overlooked as some may lose themselves to the virtual world, one person did an experiment to play Minecraft V.R for 24 hours on a live stream and he started to lose his perception of reality for a while. According to UKAT (2015) gaming addiction can lead to other addictions and the most addictive types of games are those that include additional payments after the initial purchase or install should the game be “free”. These games can be a gateway to gambling addictions and further gambling within the games with hundreds of in game items reaching ludicrous amounts of money, leading to a child and parents being unaware of their digital footprint (Childnet 2018), losing their account and valued items. Such scams such as CS:GO lotto (Frank 2017) have been exposed for exploiting young audiences into gambling said expensive items which can be damaging in later life. Children must be made aware of such shameful acts and be educated to know the signs and methods of scammers behind the mask of a social media influencer this statement was supported by the FTC press release on the issue.
McEvoy (2018) raises problems that ethically concerns can spread to more serious areas to the desensitisation of people experiencing deaths, war and other tragedy’s from inside the eyes of people who fought them, but don’t we do those things for entertainment? Films made of topics such as the second world war, terrorism, mass crime and so forth have already been in production for years. However it’s the context that children learn that makes these mediums powerful and more complex then just entertainment. If there was a V.R experience of Auschwitz, would it be suitable for young minds? Would it make it seem to much like fantasy that now anyone with a headset can feel like they are setting foot in such a place? There is also the danger of adult content with more realistic videos of fantasies, porn hub had a 225% increase in its V.R section since its incarnation which at first doesn’t seem utterly terrifying but we need to consider when it may become to immersive for the wrong reasons. As children experience virtual reality at a young age some may become confused or fixated on the change in environments if they have periods of long exposure to the virtual reality,(Kenwright 2019) as it takes over key sensory organs such as touch, sight and sound and could cause mental damage to the child if left unchecked. This means that programmes need to be evaluated similar to the ESRB (2019) rating on games to recommend an age range for the product and provide an indication of the content it contains for ethical and moral reasons so that the consumers and the institution that use the programmes are aware of which are suitable for the age range. Social networking also has a presence in the Virtual Reality world with applications such as V.R chat enabling users to go into public rooms and talk over microphone and use the motion tracking systems to interact with other players. This software however can be used on a desktop computer with the mouse taking the place of the headset and the visuals being displayed on the monitor like any other game. This therefore must be under consideration in terms of child protection from cyber bullying and sexual predators (Rudiger 2017). The application does have a mute feature, and this does remove the avatar of the muted person from the user screen, however with full body tracking young children might not be aware of sexual acts taking place in the game or have the knowledge to block someone. The main reason for this is because the game is widely played by youtubers and influencers meaning the meme culture has spread into the game creating a silly air of innocence that could potentially be exploited without parents being aware (Adler & Adler 2002).
