Especially as haptic tech becomes a reality.
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Nina Jane Patel designed her avatar, a cartoonlike version of herself with blonde hair and freckles, and entered Meta’s Horizon Venues, a 3D digital world, using a virtual reality (VR) headset. She was there for less than a minute before a group of men avatars touched and groped her avatar without consent, taking photos as they harassed her. Patel detailed the “horrible experience” in a December 2021 Medium post. It “happened so fast and before I could even think about putting the safety barrier in place,” she wrote. “I froze.”
Patel isn’t the only woman to report digital sexual harassment on Meta’s virtual reality platforms or in other digital worlds in the metaverses. When Facebook rebranded itself to Meta last fall, it mainstreamed the concept of living a digital life in 3D metaverses, or virtual worlds where people can meet and play. But the early presence of digital sexual harassment, which can include nonconsensual touching, verbal harassment, and simulation of sexual assault on avatars, raises questions about whether this new immersive tech can shed old tech’s problems.
It’s not that the metaverse creates new opportunities for digital sexual harassment—social media has always been rife with gender-based harassment—but virtual reality technology dissolves the gap between the physical and digital selves, creating immersive experiences that heighten both realism and emotional connection. Users watch as digitally rendered hands grope a representation of their own body, and it all feels increasingly real, just as metaverse designers intended. “All of these innovations and technology that can make a digital life seem like a real one with real feelings, that has exacerbated the impact of sexual misconduct in a metaverse,” Michael Bugeja, a professor at Iowa State University who teaches media ethics and technology, said.
For those like Patel who experience digital sexual harassment, it can be degrading and emotionally devastating. It’s “surreal,” it’s “a nightmare,” Patel wrote. Despite this, and despite Big Tech’s history of ignoring the concerns of groups particularly vulnerable to online harassment, sexual harassment and its aftermath are often glossed over or ignored by developers. It’s a problem that needs a solution, especially as haptic technology–tech that mimics the effects of touch–evolves.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently developed a VR attachment for a headset that sends ultrasound waves to the mouth, allowing people to feel sensations on the lips and teeth (fingertips are the other haptic hotspot, where it’s easiest for developers to send signals of feeling). With the mouth attachment, players can feel spiders, raindrops, and even a stream from a water fountain on their lips. They can simulate brushing their teeth. But headlines ran away with the advances by declaring that users would soon be able to kiss, and subsequently feel the kiss on their physical bodies, in the metaverse. For now, that’s not true. Another set up of lips would be too large of a haptic signal for this type of tech, said Vivian Shen, one of the researchers behind the attachment. Her research is an example of how developers are looking for ways to mimic touch that feels intimate and real. Another company, Teslasuit, introduced a full-body haptic suit that resembles a wetsuit. It can capture the feeling of bullets, for example, or a hug. Then there’s Meta: Last year it developed a prototype for a haptic glove far more sophisticated than its current hand controls that would allow people to feel an object’s weight and texture when they lift it in a digital world.
Better, more realistic haptic technology is coming to the metaverse even as harassment is persistent. Women on nearly every social media and gaming platform have told stories about grotesque harassment, stories so common that their narrative arc is now familiar. According to a recent Pew survey, 33% of women under 35 report having been sexually harassed online, compared to 11% of men. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are more likely to be harassed, too. It’s unsurprising then that digital sexual harassment was routine in early virtual worlds. In 1993, reporter Julian Dibbell wrote in the Village Voice about a “rape in cyberspace” in LambdaMOO, an early text-based online world. One player known as Mr. Bungle used a “voodoo doll” gaming feature that let him attribute actions to other people in the community rather than his own character, even though he was behind the keyboard. He created a narrative in which some players performed nonconsensual sex acts on others. Dibbell’s reporting asks the same questions about the boundaries between the digital self and a physical being raised in the metaverse. This debate has simmered for nearly 30 years, and the tech community is no closer to a consensus on what digital sexual assault means or how to prevent it.
Bugeja has studied what he calls “avatar rape” for more than a decade, and witnessed it in 2007 on a virtual beach in Second Life, where he watched one male avatar “violently rape” another who had been sitting at a boardwalk bar, drinking a martini. That made him a fierce critic of the platform’s use for education. Some saw Second Life as the future of gathering to work and learn (a familiar refrain used to market the metaverse). He worried experiencing digital harassment could trigger a trauma response in someone who had been sexually assaulted in real life. “I’m saying not to get rid of the metaverses,” Bugeja said. “I’m saying, let’s put more controls in the metaverses. Let’s de-emphasize the profit margin.”
