AI can stimulate senses to affect consciousness

MUCH to the dismay of sci-fi enthusiasts, answers to questions surrounding death in the virtual world of the Metaverse are the simplest they will ever be today, but could this become a more complex conversation?

Earlier this year, the annual SA Social Media Landscape Report 2022 was released by media firms, Ornico and World Wide Worx. It emphasised the future of the Metaverse and how it would be adopted.

The report revealed that up to 48.8% of adult South Africans accessed a social network. In comparison, 16.1% of them dipped their feet in some version of the Metaverse, with most users accessing the digital world for gaming.

While in its infancy, SA users’ experimentation in the Metaverse could be a positive indication for future adoption by locals.

Despite this, further development may raise concerns among sceptics, in anticipation of what the evolution of the virtual world could lead to. Three Phases of the Metaverse Another report, “A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy”, by the Chinese Xidian University's School of Cyber Engineering, revealed that the upcoming development of the Metaverse would consist of three phases. Global users are scratching the surface of the first phase.

The study states: “The first phase produces a mirror world consisting of large-scale and high-fidelity digital twins of humans and things in virtual environments, aimed for a vivid digital representation of the physical reality.”

In the first phase, the report states that virtual activities and properties, such as user emotion and movement, are imitations of physical counterparts, where reality and virtuality are two parallel spaces.

This describes more social use of the Metaverse through gaming and other platforms, while the real world and VR work simultaneously, linking the physical space to the Metaverse.

The study says the second phase would focus mainly on native content creation, where digital natives represented by avatars can produce innovations and insights into the digital world.

Much like today’s social network influencers, such digital content by creators may exist only in virtual spaces.

“In this phase, the massively created contents in the digital world become equal with their physical counterparts, and the digital world can transform and innovate the production process of the physical world, thereby creating more intersections between these two worlds,” the study says, indicating more immersion by users, with content creation, for example, taking place, solely within the Metaverse. The final phase of the Metaverse is believed to grow into maturity. The report says it would become an autonomous surreality world that assimilates reality into itself.

“The seamless integration and mutual symbiosis of physical and virtual worlds will be realised in this phase, where the scope of the virtual world will be larger than that of the real world, and more scenes and lives that do not exist in reality can exist in virtual realms,” the study adds.

With advances being made to provide further immersion in the Metaverse, despite the enhancement in technologies such as AR, VR and haptic tech to allow users to “feel” and “grasp” objects in the Metaverse, artificial intelligence has been thrown in the metaverse spotlight as it could further stimulate human senses, affecting the consumer’s consciousness, while possessing the potential to recreate human consciousness virtually. Concerns

South African futurist and author Charlotte Kemp told IOL that questions around a user’s death in the Metaverse were “plausible” rather than “possible”.

“It is possible that someone immersed in an immersive VR game or any artificial reality believes it’s true if they are expecting certain experiences,” Kemp said. “They could, in a way, feel pain and exhaustion if there is some strenuous activity in the game even though they’re sitting there with their bodies doing nothing.”

VR alone has been reported by scores of users globally to cause disorientation and nausea, leading to producers issuing warnings on their products. Kemp said stiff muscles, headaches or anything else that was not a result of sitting back from actual activities in a game could also cause vertigo and other health issues.

“As games get better at immersing us when going into a virtual reality world, users should know that this is virtual and not real. We need to remind ourselves and keep that distance that the designers of these games or activities are designed so that we will lose that sense of touch with the rest of the world," Kemp said.