A female Meta (formerly Facebook) Meta universe game Horizon Worlds B test user claimed that she encountered sexual harassment during the game, and other people acquiesced to this behavior. Meta revealed the incident on December 1, stating that it happened on November 6. The woman once reported that she had been attacked in a Facebook group.
According to the Verge report, she wrote: On the ordinary Internet, sexual harassment is not a joke, but in virtual reality, sexual harassment has taken a step further and made the incident even tenser. I was not only touched last night but also There are other people who support this behavior, which makes me feel isolated in the square.
Horizon Worlds is operated by the VR company Oculus (owned by Meta), which is advertised as a pleasant and efficient digital platform, a place to create extraordinary ways and find important experiences. In the statement about the incident, Meta pointed out its safe zone function, which allows users to set functions that prevent interaction with other users. However, Vivek Sharma, vice president of Horizon Worlds, said in a statement to Verge that the company acknowledges that it needs to work hard to make the feature very easy to find.
Experts say that sexual harassment in virtual reality is sexual harassment in real life. Dr. Katherine Cross, an online harassment researcher at the University of Washington, said: In the final analysis, the essence of virtual reality space is that it is designed to induce users to believe that they are in a certain space and that every movement of their body takes place in a 3D environment. This is also true. Part of the reason why emotional responses are stronger in this area is also part of the reason why VR triggers the same internal nervous system and psychological responses.