Fight sexual harassment in the Metaverse
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My firm MetaSafe fights sexual Predators in the Metaverse. We have patents pending. Here’s the problem. A Predator avatar walks up to a hapless female avatar. (Usually it’s female, but the victim might be a male avatar.) The Predator gropes her. I’ll skip the details. Often the human owner of the female avatar feels as though she (the huma) was sexually accosted. Raped, even. The Predator blithely walks away, or just leaves the site that he and she were in.
What is to be done? Facebook/Meta came up with a safety bubble. A transparent cylinder around the female avatar. No other avatar can touch her. Problem solved!?
Not quite. This is problem deferred. The Predator walks away and finds another victim. And for the first female avatar, eventually she will want or need to lower her shield, so she can more closely interact with other avatars. Even just to shake another avatar’s hand. Or to near dance with that avatar. But this leaves her vulnerable, if she has misjudged the motives of those avatars near her.
Even so, what Meta has is a good first answer.
MetaSafe has 3 patents pending on better answers.
First. We use a human Guardian. The user of an avatar shares her avatar with the Guardian. She shares the visual feed from her avatar’s eyes with the Guardian. Both the user and Guardian see the same images in the VR site. But only the user can move her avatar’s arms and legs. Now suppose a Predator-type approaches the avatar. The owner changes places with the Guardian. Now she can only see thru the avatar’s eyes. But the Guardian controls the avatar’’s arms and legs. The Guardian is a person who can be trained in unarmed combat. She uses her skills to fight off the Predator. The user then re-asserts control of the avatar. See Figure 2.
Our Guardian is fundamentally different from a virtual bodyguard. If you search online for the latter, you get many results. All use a second avatar, usually controlled by another person. The second avatar is often depicted as a beefy guy avatar, who walks alongside the first (female) avatar. This is really unimaginative. It is indistinguishable from the real world, where a famous actress might be accompanied by a big guy bodyguard.
