It seems as though the advent of any radically new technology is inevitably accompanied by a mad scramble to legislate its proper and improper uses. Whether it’s nuclear fission and the IAEA’s Convention on Nuclear Safety, or modern medicine and the Hippocratic Oath, these new technologies are seldom allowed to remain morally ambiguous for long.
As such it should come as no surprise that a first stab has already been made at establishing a code of ethics for the burgeoning virtual reality (VR) industry, which will see companies such as Oculus, HTC, and Sony all releasing virtual reality headsets in the coming months. Published last month in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, the goal of this pioneering paper was “to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks.”
