Does Mixed Reality Have a Cassandra Complex?

Abstract

Recent years have seen a boom in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality technologies which have been widely adopted both by the consumer market and the research community. These technologies have provided researchers the ability to generate and gather data in new ways, through world building and scenario creation in every environment imagined. Although this growing interest is exciting, there is also a mounting concern about best practises and ethical dilemmas. In the literature one can already find a large quantity of papers providing guidelines and raising ethical concerns. However, ethical pitfalls continue to be overlooked. In this opinion paper, prompted by the ethics developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), another area with rapid growth and adoption which has been overwhelmed by a huge number of guidelines and is still nowhere close to universal acceptance of standards, we propose that the virtual, augmented, and mixed reality research and development areas need to come together as whole; involving government, industry and science in order to define, develop and decide guidelines and strategies before we replicate the devastating consequences such as decaying trust in technology witnessed in other areas like social media.