Patent Applications Hint That Facebook's VR World Might Just Be Web Mutton Dressed Up As Metaverse Lamb

from the all-gussied-up,-and-nowhere-to-go dept

The unexpected rebranding of Facebook's holding company as "Meta" has prompted a good deal of head scratching. Was it because Mark Zuckerberg is now a true believer in the metaverse religion, as the rather cringe-worthy video released at the time of the name change is meant to suggest? Was it perhaps an attempt to change the conversation in the wake of the damning testimony and leaks of Frances Haugen? Or maybe it was just a desperate bid to find a way of attracting younger users now that Facebook is increasingly an old person's social network, as the New York Times pointed out recently:

The truth is that Facebook's thirst for young users is less about dominating a new market and more about staving off irrelevance. Facebook use among teenagers in the United States has been declining for years, and is expected to plummet even further soon -- internal researchers predicted that daily use would decline 45 percent by 2023. The researchers also revealed that Instagram, whose growth offset declining interest in Facebook's core app for years, is losing market share to faster-growing rivals like TikTok, and younger users aren't posting as much content as they used to.

Whatever the reason, there is no doubting the seriousness of Facebook's corporate swerve to virtual reality (VR). The company has said that it is spending at least $10 billion on its new VR division this year, and that it will create 10,000 new jobs at Facebook across the EU to "help build the metaverse". The new strategy may not be in doubt, but one thing is: how will Meta make money in this brave, new virtual world?

At the heart of Facebook's current business model and profitability are two things: surveillance and advertising. Everything that a Facebook user does on the site -- and on thousands of other major sites around the Internet -- is tracked and analyzed in the minutest detail. The personal profile that results is then sold online -- algorithmically, in real-time -- to the highest bidder, who buys the opportunity to display online advertising targeted at the person in question, as they visit a Web site.

At the moment, the surveillance takes the form of recording which pages people visit on which sites, and where they click. It's not hard to extrapolate that to a virtual world, where Facebook/Meta records everything a user looks at, talks to, touches or interacts with in any way. In addition to using eye gaze direction and pupil activity monitored within the virtual reality headsets to gauge user interest, there may be other biometric inputs -- things like heartbeat, blood pressure and skin conductivity. In-world advertising is also easy to visualize. These could be in the form of virtual ad hoardings in the metaverse, or the more subtle use of product placement.

None of these are particularly novel suggestions -- they've been around for years. But it is fascinating to see precisely these ideas mentioned in a Financial Times article (paywall alert) looking at "dozens of patents recently granted to Facebook's parent company". Among the patents reviewed by the FT there are several that concern mapping users and their movements onto avatars in the metaverse as realistically as possible:

There is a "wearable magnetic sensor system" to be placed around a torso for "body pose tracking". The patent includes sketches of a user wearing the device but appearing in virtual reality as a soldier complete with a sword and armour.

Another patent proposes an "avatar personalisation engine" that can create three dimensional avatars based on a user's photos, using tools including a so-called skin replicator.

To do that requires even closer surveillance of what users do, both online and offline, which potentially allows even more information to be sold to advertisers:

One patent explores how to present users with personalised advertising in augmented reality, based on age, gender, interest and "how the users interact with a social media platform", including their likes and comments.

Another seeks to allow third parties to "sponsor the appearance of an object" in a virtual store that mirrors the layout of a retail store, through a bidding process similar to the company's existing advertising auction process.

As the FT notes, these kind of approaches would allow Meta to offer an immersive virtual world that is even more personalized than the existing Web-based system.

It's important to note that these are just patents. Nowadays, companies apply for as many of them as they can, just in case. Most are never used. But the similarity between today's Facebook and the one that the approaches detailed in the patents might produce is striking, as is the absence of anything truly radical or innovative. And that could be a problem for Meta. If young people aren't interested in what today's Web-based Facebook has to offer, are they really going to want to spend time as an avatar moving through the same thing gussied up into a virtual world?

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Filed Under: business models, data, metaverse, patents, surveillance, vr
Companies: facebook, meta

A Grope In Meta's Space

from the the-value-of-user-tools-in-moderation dept

Horizon Worlds is a VR (virtual reality) social space and world building game created by Facebook. In early December, a beta tester wrote about being virtually groped by another Horizon Worlds user. A few weeks later, The Verge and other outlets published stories about the incident. However, their coverage omits key details from the victim’s account. As a result, it presents the assault as a failure of user operated moderation tools rather than the limits of top-down moderation. Nevertheless, this VR groping illustrates the difficulty of moderating VR, and the enduring value of tools that let users solve problems for themselves.

The user explains that they reported and blocked the groper, and a Facebook “guide”, an experienced user trained and certified by Facebook, failed to intervene. They write, “I think what made it worse, was even after I reported, and eventually blocked the assaulter, the guide in the plaza did and said nothing.” In the interest of transparency, I have republished the beta user’s post in full, sans identifying information, here;

**Trigger Warning** Sexual Harassment. My apologies for the long post: Feel free to move on.

Good morning,

I rarely wake up with a heavy heart and a feeling of anger to start a fresh new day, but that is how I feel this morning. I want to be seen and heard. I reach out to my fellow community members in hopes of understanding and reassurance that they will be proactive in supporting victims and eliminating certain types of behavior in horizon worlds. My expectations as a creator in horizon worlds aren't unreasonable and I'm sure many will agree.

You see this isn't the first time, I'm sure it won't be the last time that someone has sexually harassed me in virtual reality. Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular Internet but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense. Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behavior which made me feel isolated in the Plaza. I think what made it worse, was even after I reported, and eventually blocked the assaulter, the guide in the plaza did and said nothing. He moved himself far across the map as if to say, you're on your now.

Even though my physical body was far removed from the event, my brain is tricked into thinking it's real, because.....you know......Virtual REALITY. We can't tout VR's realness and then lay claim that it is not a real assault. Mind you, this all happened within one minute of arriving in the plaza, I hadn't spoken a word yet and could have possibly been a 12-year-old girl.

MY ASK:

I would like a personal bubble that will force people away from my avatar and I would like to be able to upload my own recording with my harassment ticket. I would also like that all guides are given sensitivity training on this specific subject, so they will understand what is expected. If META won't give guides tools that will allow them to remove a player immediately from a situation, at least train them to deal with it and not run away.

Rant over, I'm still mad, but I will sort through and process. I love this community and the thought of leaving it makes me deeply sad. So I am hopeful we can evolve as a community and foster behaviors that support collaboration, understand, and a willingness to speak out against gross behaviors.

Initial coverage in The Verge did not mention the victim’s use of the block feature, even as the user describes using it in the post above. Instead, reporter Alex Heath relayed Facebook’s account of the incident, saying “the company determined that the beta tester didn’t utilize the safety features built into Horizon Worlds, including the ability to block someone from interacting with you.”

These details are important because subsequent writing about the incident builds on the false, but purported non-use of the blocking feature to make the case that offering users tools to control their virtual experience is “unfair and doesn’t work.” In Technology Review, Tanya Basu makes hay of the user’s failure to use the “safe zone” feature, which temporarily removes users from their surroundings. Yet this is a red herring. The user might not have immediately disappeared into her safe zone, but she used the block feature to do away with her assailant.

In reality, contra Basu or Facebook’s description of events, it seems that user-directed blocking put a stop to the harm while the platform provided community guide failed to intervene. VR groping is a serious issue, but it is not one that will be solved from the top-down. Inaccurate reporting that casts user-operated moderation tools as ineffective may spur platforms to pursue less effective solutions to sexual harassment in VR.

Implications of the incident’s misreporting aside, it provides a useful case study in the difficulties of moderating VR. One suggestion put forward by the user and backed by University of Washington Professor Katherine Cross warrants discussion. Closer inspection of their proposals illustrates the careful tradeoffs that inform the current safe zone and blocking tools offered to Horizon users.

They request a “personal bubble that will force people away from my avatar” or “automatic personal distance unless two people mutually agreed to be closer.” This might make some groping harder, but it creates other opportunities for abuse.

If players’ avatars can take up physical space and block movement, keeping others at bay, then they can block doorways and trap other players in corners or against other parts of world. Player collision could render abuse inescapable or allow players to hold others’ avatars prisoner.

MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games) have long struggled with this problem – “holding the door” is only a contextually heroic action. Player collision makes gameplay more realistic, but allows some players to limit everyone else’s access to important buildings by loitering in the doorway.

Currently, players’ avatars in Horizon may pass through one another. They can retreat into a safe zone, disappearing from the world. They can also “block” other users – preventing both the blocked and blocking users from seeing one another. Even through a block, they can still see one each other’s nametags – total invisibility created problems I covered here. As such, the current suite of user moderation tools strikes a good balance between empowering users and minimizing new opportunities for misuse.

Finally, given the similarity of the transgression, it is worth recalling Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace”, one of the first serious accounts of community governance online. In this Village Voice article, Dibbell relates how users of role-playing chatroom LambdaMOO (the best virtual reality to be had in 1993) responded to a string of virtual sexual assaults. After fruitless deliberation, a LambdaMOO coder banned the offending user. After the incident, LambdaMOO established democratic procedures for banning abusive users, and created a “boot” command allowing users to temporarily remove troublemakers.

As the internet has developed content moderation has centralized. Today, users are usually expected to let platforms moderate for them. However, just as in the web’s early days, empowering users remains the best solution to interpersonal abuse. The tools they need to keep themselves safe may be different, but in virtual reality as in role-playing chat, those closest to abuse are best positioned to address it. Users being harassed should not be expected to wait for the mods.

Will Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute

Filed Under: blocking, content moderation, horizon worlds, sexual harassment, user tools, vr
Companies: facebook, meta

Tone Deaf Facebook Did Cripple VR Headsets When Borked BGP Routing Took Down All Of Facebook

from the who-could-have-predicted? dept

For over a year now, we have discussed Facebook's decision to require users of Oculus VR headsets to have active Facebook accounts linked to the devices in order for them to work properly. This decision came to be despite all the noise made by Oculus in 2014, when Facebook acquired the VR company, insisting that this very specific thing would not occur. Karl Bode, at the time, pointed out a number of potential issues this plan could cause, noting specifically that users could find their Oculus hardware broken for reasons not of their own making.

The changes will also impact the functionality of Oculus Quest's "Link," which lets users connect the standalone VR headset to a PC to expand its functionality. It also begs the question: what happens if you get banned by Facebook due to its incoherent and inconsistent moderation strategies? You suddenly can't use your VR headset because Facebook's algorithms stupidly ban you for posting photos of yourself breastfeeding?

And then, to the surprise of nobody here at Techdirt, a version of that very thing happened. Facebook users that had their accounts locked, typically due to having those accounts compromised by outside bad actors, found themselves unable to use their gear as normal and unable to get support through Facebook, especially if the issues were on legacy Oculus hardware for which the end user had not paid Facebook a penny. But a wonderful workaround was discovered! If those users went out and bought a brand new Oculus VR headset, suddenly Facebook support returned their messages.

None of this changed the core problem: what happens to owned hardware when suddenly a user's Facebook account wasn't accessible. Well, we all learned the answer to that question this week when Facebook accidentally decided to play a game of internet hide-and-seek by borking its BGP routing.

Facebook owns VR headset maker Oculus, and controversially requires Oculus Quest users to log in with a Facebook account. In numerous Reddit threads, many Quest owners say they have been able to use their headsets during the outage—to play VR games on Steam, for instance—but some say they can't load their Oculus libraries, and those who just took a Quest 2 out of the box have reported that they're unable to complete the initial setup.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Oculus wrote in one thread. "The teams are hard at work getting things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

It should be noted that these are problems of Facebook's making, not end users. The decision to require linked Facebook accounts to use the features on the Oculus created this problem. And, frankly, it was a decision that rendered no true benefit to the customer. Facebook made this move specifically so that it could track user behavior for advertising purposes, all under the guise of just how great and easy it is for Oculus users to be able to login with just a Facebook account. Yawn.

But, when Facebook found all of its platforms unreachable on October 4th, Oculus owners got the tangential screw-job.

Facebook says that today's extended outage did not compromise user data—it was actually a pretty boring networking error.

"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication, the company posted on its blog. "This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

Services like a properly running and fully functional Oculus VR headset... for no reason other than Facebook greed. When you're very busy trying to make the claim that you aren't too big that you should be broken up, that you don't have too much control over the everyday lives of the public, or that you don't have too many tie-ins to daily life, well, this was not a good look.

Although, as I will never stop taking this victory lap on behalf of Karl Bode, it certainly was predictable.

Filed Under: bgp, downtime, oculus, vr
Companies: facebook

Hacked Facebook Users Forced To Buy $300 Oculus VR Headset Just To Talk To Customer Support

from the too-big-to-function dept

Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who has since moved on to selling border surveillance tech to the Trump administration, made oodles of promises to that effect after selling the company to Facebook for $2 billion. Facebook itself also promised that users would never be forced to use a Facebook login account just to use your VR headset and its games, and that the company wouldn't track your behavior for advertising.

Like every major merger, those promises didn't mean much. Just about a year ago, Facebook and Oculus announced that users will soon be forced to... use a Facebook account if they want to be able to keep using Oculus hardware, so the company can track its users for advertising purposes.

Fast forward a year and things have been flipped a bit on their heads.

Facebook users who have their accounts hacked and subsequently locked say it's impossible to get anybody at Facebook support to even listen to them. There's no real customer support helpline, and like many places COVID has made customer service staffing harder than ever. There is apparently an online form you can use that requires you provide your driver's license and other data to unlock your account, but Facebook users say it's apparently less than useless:

"Instead, Facebook tells users to report hacked accounts through its website. The site instructs them to upload a copy of a driver's license or passport to prove their identities. But the people NPR spoke with said they had trouble with every step of this automated process and wish Facebook would offer a way to reach a real person. "I sent these forms in morning, noon and night, multiple times a day," Marsala said. "Nobody got back to me, not once."

But if you actually buy something from Facebook they actually at least try to care. So, following in the footsteps of some Reddit users, hacked Facebook users have been buying $300 VR headsets (then often returning them unopened) just to get help:

"I ultimately broke down and bought a $300 Oculus Quest 2," he said...Sherman contacted Oculus with his headset's serial number and heard back right away. He plans to return the unopened device, and while he's glad the strategy worked, he doesn't think it's fair.

"The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said."

Granted this probably won't work for long. And Facebook recently announced it was halting sales of the Oculus Quest 2 for now because the device's foam face plate was causing skin irritation for some people. Still, it shows that at the scale Facebook operates at, semi-consistent content moderation isn't the only thing the company finds impossible. Basic customer support for people locked out of their accounts at no fault of their own is also too much to ask. Which then again raises the question: if you can't function as a business at the scale Facebook operates, maybe you shouldn't exist at that scale.

Filed Under: customer service, oculus, vr
Companies: facebook

Learning About Content Moderation From Ghosts In Virtual Reality

from the ghosts-in-the-machine dept

Content moderation in virtual reality comes with its own unique challenges. What works for the moderation of text and video doesn’t neatly translate into VR. In late June, Facebook’s Horizon, a VR social space still in beta testing, released an update to prevent its blocking feature from creating ghosts. That might sound hyperbolic, but it is a perfectly apt description of the feature’s effect in Horizon prior to the update. In the earlier build, both the blocker and the blocked were made invisible to one another, but allowed to continue interacting with the same virtual world. While they couldn’t see one another, they could see each other’s effects on their shared environment. If someone blocked you, your obscene gestures might be invisible to them, but you could still move the furniture about and rattle chains – practically becoming a poltergeist.

Improvements to Blocking in Horizon

We’re beginning to roll out changes to how blocking works in Horizon. These changes are based on people’s feedback, and are designed to improve people’s experience and make Horizon a safer and more welcoming place.

Previously, when you blocked someone in Horizon, both you and the person you blocked became invisible to each other. We heard feedback from people that this was confusing, for example when the other person continued interacting with objects in the same space.

Now, both the person who has been blocked and the person who blocked them will be able to see each other’s username tag, while keeping their avatars invisible to each other. This update allows both people to know they’re present, but blocked and muted.

You’ll also be able to see the people you’ve blocked in your menu (such as in the People Nearby list) instead of them being completely hidden. This means you can see who you’ve blocked without having to interact with them. You can also visit the settings page and see a block list, where you can see people you’ve blocked and choose to unblock them if you want.

As the patch notes explain, when used in VR, the traditional approach to blocking caused unintended problems. Unlike static social media profiles, users embody their avatars. The user’s digital representation mimics their motions and gestures as it moves through a shared virtual world. On traditional social media, blocking another user hides your speech from their view and limits their ability to reply. Hiding your avatar from their view is a logical translation of this policy to virtual reality. However, because the invisible-to-one-another blocker and blocked still shared the same virtual world, a malicious user could potentially block someone to haunt them or spy unobserved. Tagging speech from blocked users would be unnecessary on traditional social media, as their speech is already excluded from the blocker’s conversations. However, in a shared virtual environment, it becomes a necessary component of a useful blocking feature.

While these are far from life-threatening abuses, they illustrate why best practices for traditional content moderation can’t always be easily applied to VR. In many ways, Facebook Horizon’s moderation challenges look more like those of a video game, especially a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), than those of a traditional social network. In both cases, players interact through avatars, and can simultaneously affect the same virtual world. In either a game or a shared VR world, the properties of the digital environment govern player interactions as much, if not more than, rules about players’ speech. This often introduces tradeoffs between antiharassment measures and realism or interactivity. If a game models fire realistically, a malicious player might kick a campfire into another’s tent and set it ablaze. This can be avoided by either limiting players’ ability to interact with fire (stopping them from kicking it), or the properties of the fire itself (preventing it from burning the tent). Environmental design choices in games or VR somewhat resemble architectural choices faced by traditional platforms - whether to create retweet or quote tweet functions, or to allow users to control who can reply to their tweets. However, creating an interactive virtual world requires making many more of these decisions.

MMOs are typified as either “theme park” or “sandbox” games. In the former, designers set fixed goals for players to compete or cooperate towards, justifying referee-like governance. The latter offers players a set of tools, and expects them to make their own fun, limiting the need for intercession by designers. Conflict between players with different goals is an expected part of the fun.

While platforms for knitting patterns or neighborhood conversation have purposes that recommend some rules over others, more open-ended platforms have struggled to justify their rules. YouTube is a home for video content. Which video content? Who’s to say? VR is, for the time-being, mostly used for gaming. However, as social and commercial applications of the technology become more popular, this question of purpose will become politically relevant, as it has for YouTube.

Horizon’s chief product is a framework for users to create their own virtual worlds. Horizon exists not to provide a Facebook designed environment, but to offer users the ability to create their own environments. This gives Horizon some guiding purpose, and relieves its designers of pressure to make one-size-fits-all decisions. Because most worlds within Horizon are created by users, these users can set the rules of interactivity. Facebook has neither the time nor the resources to govern the behavior and use of every virtual tennis racket across myriad virtual spaces. However, the creators of these little worlds know whether they’re creating a virtual tennis club or a garden party fighting game, and can set the rules of the environment accordingly. This will not be the first time Facebook finds that a rule that works for text and video publishing platforms falls flat in virtual reality. However, its response to the unintended effects of the block feature shows a willingness to appreciate the new demands of the medium.

Will Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute

Filed Under: blocks, content moderation, ghosts, oculus, virtual reality, vr
Companies: facebook

It Took Just 5 Minutes Of Movement Data To Identify 'Anonymous' VR Users

from the no-such-thing-as-anonymous dept

As companies and governments increasingly hoover up our personal data, a common refrain to keep people from worrying is the claim that nothing can go wrong because the data itself is "anonymized" -- or stripped of personal identifiers like social security numbers. But time and time again, studies have shown how this really is cold comfort, given it takes only a little effort to pretty quickly identify a person based on access to other data sets. Yet most companies, many privacy policy folk, and even government officials still like to act as if "anonymizing" your data means something.

The latest case in point: new research out of Stanford (first spotted by the German website Mixed), found that it took researchers just five minutes of examining the movement data of VR users to identify them in the real world. The paper says participants using an HTC Vive headset and controllers watched five 20-second clips from a randomized set of 360-degree videos, then answered a set of questions in VR that were tracked in a separate research paper.

The movement data (including height, posture, head movement speed and what participants looked at and for how long) was then plugged into three machine learning algorithms, which, from a pool of 511 participants, was able to correctly identify 95% of users accurately "when trained on less than 5 min of tracking data per person." The researchers went on to note that while VR headset makers (like every other company) assures users that "de-identified" or "anonymized" data would protect their identities, that's really not the case:

"In both the privacy policy of Oculus and HTC, makers of two of the most popular VR headsets in 2020, the companies are permitted to share any de-identified data,” the paper notes. “If the tracking data is shared according to rules for de-identified data, then regardless of what is promised in principle, in practice taking one’s name off a dataset accomplishes very little."

If you don't like this study, there's just an absolute ocean of research over the last decade making the same point: "anonymized" or "de-identified" doesn't actually mean "anonymous." Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, for example, found that they could identify drivers based on just 15 minutes’ worth of data collected from brake pedal usage alone. Researchers from Stanford and Princeton universities found that they could correctly identify an "anonymized" user 70% of the time just by comparing their browsing data to their social media activity.

The more data that's available to researchers (or corporations or governments), the easier it is to identify you. And with hacks, data leaks, and breaches dumping an endless ocean of existing datasets into the public domain, and no serious rules of the road governing things like the collection of location and other sensitive data, it shouldn't be too hard to see how the idea of "privacy" is a myth. Especially if the company is, say, Facebook, which is now tying your entire online Facebook experience to VR whether you like it or not.

It's all something to keep in mind for whenever the U.S. gets off its ass and finally crafts a meaningful privacy law for the internet era. Especially given that "don't worry, your data is anonymized!" will be an endless refrain by industry as they try to ensure any rules are as feeble as possible.

Filed Under: anonymity, anonymized data, data, de-anonymized, vr

Tone Deaf Facebook To Cripple VR Headsets Unless You Link It To Your Facebook Account

from the what's-the-opposite-of-advertising dept

Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change, or that Facebook wouldn't erode everything folks liked about the independent kickstarted product. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who has since moved on to selling border surveillance tech to the Trump administration, made oodles of promises to that effect before taking his money and running toward the sunset. Among those promises was the promise users would never be forced to use a Facebook login account just to use your VR headset and its games, and that the company wouldn't track your behavior for advertising.

Like every major merger, those promises didn't mean much. This week, Facebook and Oculus announced that users will soon be forced to -- use a Facebook account if they want to be able to keep using Oculus hardware, so the company can track its users for advertising purposes. The official Oculus announcement tries to pretend that this is some innate gift to the end user, instead of just an obvious way for Facebook to expand its behavioral advertising empire:

"Giving people a single way to log into Oculus—using their Facebook account and password— will make it easier to find, connect, and play with friends in VR. We know that social VR has so much more to offer, and this change will make it possible to integrate many of the features people know and love on Facebook."

And while users won't be forced to fully use Facebook to login until 2023, those that don't want Facebook tracking their every online waking movement will be out of luck. Meaning that you may not be able to use your pricey hardware -- or the software you've been accumulating -- unless you agree to join the Facebook universe:

"After January 1, 2023, we will end support for Oculus accounts. If you choose not to merge your accounts at that time, you can continue using your device, but full functionality will require a Facebook account. We will take steps to allow you to keep using content you have purchased, though we expect some games and apps may no longer work. This could be because they include features that require a Facebook account or because a developer has chosen to no longer support the app or game you purchased. All future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook account, even if you already have an Oculus account."

The changes will also impact the functionality of Oculus Quest's "Link," which lets users connect the standalone VR headset to a PC to expand its functionality. It also begs the question: what happens if you get banned by Facebook due to its incoherent and inconsistent moderation strategies? You suddenly can't use your VR headset because Facebook's algorithms stupidly ban you for posting photos of yourself breastfeeding?

This being Facebook, there's not a mention of any ability to prevent Facebook from being able to track the entirety of your behavior while using a VR headset. Given all the justified criticism of Facebook, the consumer response (especially among those that liked Oculus but have tried to avoid Facebook) is about what you'd expect over at forums like the Oculus subreddit:

The whole thing is very tone deaf, and very... Facebook. Facebook's need to track and monetize Oculus user behavior bulldozed over any concerns the company may have had about interoperability, or any valid concerns that this could simply drive customers to more open competitors. It's yet another example of users buying a product and features they believe they own, only to have functionality eroded or the terms of use dramatically modified down the road. It's also yet another example of how, more often than not, the promises made ahead of major U.S. mergers mean absolutely nothing.

Filed Under: accounts, facebook account, logins, oculus, vr, vr headsets
Companies: facebook, oculus

Evil Video Games Great At Detecting Early Dementia In People

from the not-all-bad dept

We cover a fair amount of video game news here, with much of it revolving around either intellectual property concerns or the common claims that video games are responsible for all the world's ills. The latter posts can be separated into two categories: one in which the violence in games is blamed for violence in the real world and one in which those who do not enjoy the medium blaming games for producing young people who those same people decide are deficient in some way.

It's enough to make you think there are really only two camps. One camp thinks video games are evil in all of the possible ways. The other camp thinks video games are great in all of the possible ways. But this isn't how the real world works. Like any other artistic medium, some products are good, some are not. Some are wholesome or thought-provoking, while others are empty calories. Even the notion that video games are solely an artistic or entertainment medium is a false premise, as demonstrated by a recent use of gaming to help identify Alzheimer's Disease before serious symptoms show up.

Sea Hero Quest was built as a way to identify people who might be at risk of Alzheimer’s but who aren’t yet suffering any major symptoms of the disease and according to a study recently published in the journal PNAS, it seems the game is effective. In Sea Hero Quest, which is a VR game, players have to navigate and control a virtual boat. They are given a map and shown checkpoints, then the map is taken away and players must navigate to these checkpoints in the game world without the map.

According to researchers, every two minutes spent playing the game is equal to five hours of lab-based research. Because Sea Hero Quest has been out for a few years and downloaded and played by over three million players they’ve collected the equivalent of 1,700 years of research data on Alzheimer’s.

As the technology grows, perhaps particularly VR technology, applications like this will likely only grow along with it. And, while the equivalence figures sure sound like marketing material, it's also likely true that there is indeed an efficiency in using the game in this way versus traditional research methods. That kind of boon in gathering statistical information, not to mention the ability to use it to alert those who would potentially suffer from the disease en masse, is the kind of thing digital technology is built for.

The question becomes where those who decry the gaming industry would come down on this. I'm certain they would argue that these types of games used for these types of things are just fine. Except that we would never have gotten here if not for the gaming industry existing as a whole. That is the very reason that generalizing an entire medium, or an entire technology, as inherently bad is never a smart look. There will always be examples such as this, in which that "bad" tech is used for a noble purpose.

And the validity of the output in using this games appears to be fairly strong.

“We found that people with a high genetic risk, the APOE4 carriers, performed worse on spatial navigation tasks. They took less efficient routes to checkpoint goals,” said Professor Michael Hornberger, a member of the team.

Using data gathered from thousands of players who downloaded and played Sea Hero Quest, researchers were able to create a baseline that their test results could be compared to. In the future, the team hopes this data and the game will help identify people who need treatment for dementia before they begin suffering from some of the worse later stage symptoms.

At the very least, this should be an indicator to the "get off my lawn" crowd that it might be time to take a breath.

Filed Under: alzheimers, dementia, health, sea hero quest, video games, vr

How Is 'Non-Literally Copying' Code Still Copyright Infringement?

from the form-and-function dept

Back in 2014, when ZeniMax first claimed that Oculus and its CTO John Carmack had copied the company's VR technology, we pointed out the obvious: since ZeniMax hadn't made a peep until the announcement that Facebook was buying Oculus for a cool $2-billion, it was a pretty blatant cash-grab. Now ZeniMax has scored a partial win in its lawsuit against Oculus and its executives, with the jury rejecting claims of trade secret misappropriation but awarding $500 million for copyright and trademark infringement and violation of non-disclosure agreements.

The trade secrets were the most important claim, but Oculus has already vowed to appeal the rest — so the case isn't over. But the most interesting thing to come out of this verdict is a statement from John Carmack about the expert testimony on "non-literal copying" that was central to some of the copyright claims:

For the most part, the process went as I expected.

The exception was the plaintiff’s expert that said Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were “non-literally copied” from the source code I wrote while at Id Software.

This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo. I was genuinely interested in hearing how the paid expert would spin a web of code DNA between completely unrelated codebases.

Early on in his testimony, I wanted to stand up say “Sir! As a man of (computer) science, I challenge you to defend the efficacy of your methodology with data, including false positive and negative rates.” After he had said he was “Absolutely certain there was non-literal copying” in several cases, I just wanted to shout “You lie!”. By the end, after seven cases of “absolutely certain”, I was wondering if gangsters had kidnapped his grandchildren and were holding them for ransom.

If he had said “this supports a determination of”, or dozens of other possible phrases, then it would have fit in with everything else, but I am offended that a distinguished academic would say that his ad-hoc textual analysis makes him “absolutely certain” of anything. That isn’t the language of scientific inquiry.

Now, ZeniMax was quick to hit back with its own statement pointing out that some of the code at issue was literally copied (though the jury seems to have found that little or none of that code was actually used), but this question of "non-literal copying" is far more important. This whole notion of experts doing textual analysis to find recurring patterns is a worrying one: for all the real science behind such methods, it's not at all hard to see how easily they could be manipulated to support a chosen result, or how difficult it would be to ensure a jury properly understands the arguments and affords them the appropriate weight. Indeed, Carmack goes on to explain how the expert's presentation was... lacking:

There are objective measures of code similarity that can be quoted, like the edit distance between abstract syntax trees, but here the expert hand identified the abstract steps that the code fragments were performing, made slides that nobody in the courtroom could actually read, filled with colored boxes outlining the purportedly analogous code in each case. In some cases, the abstractions he came up with were longer than the actual code they were supposed to be abstracting.

It was ridiculous. Even without being able to read the code on the slides, you could tell the steps varied widely in operation count, were often split up and in different order, and just looked different.

The following week, our side’s code expert basically just took the same slides their expert produced (the judge had to order them to be turned over) and blew each of them up across several slides so you could actually read them. I had hoped that would have demolished the credibility of the testimony, but I guess I overestimated the impact.

The notion of "non-literal copying" as applied to code is a weird one, and casts a light on how weird code copyright is to begin with. If copyright isn't supposed to cover functional choices, how can it be infringing to create new code that accomplishes the same function in a slightly different way? Are juries supposed to determine which "non-literally copied" aspects of the code were aesthetic, and which were purely functional? This sort of idea-expression divide question is muddy in the worlds of art and literature, but it should be simple in the world of code: what a program does is not covered by copyright, nor are any purely functional elements of how it achieves that.

But instead, we've got experts applying what more or less amounts to literary analysis to computer code, and even using that analogy (to which Carmack has an excellent response):

The notion of non-literal copying is probably delicious to many lawyers, since a sufficient application of abstraction and filtering can show that just about everything is related. There are certainly some cases where it is true, such as when you translate a book into another language, but copyright explicitly does not apply to concepts or algorithms, so you can’t abstract very far from literal copying before comparing. As with many legal questions, there isn’t a bright clear line where you need to stop.

The analogy that the expert gave to the jury was that if someone wrote a book that was basically Harry Potter with the names changed, it would still be copyright infringement. I agree; that is the literary equivalent of changing the variable names when you copy source code. However, if you abstract Harry Potter up a notch or two, you get Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which also maps well onto Star Wars and hundreds of other stories. These are not copyright infringement.

(Not that plenty of people haven't tried to sue over books, including Harry Potter, being vaguely similar to their ideas.)

After all this, you might be thinking that you want to go find out more about just what that expert had to say, and get more detail on how he reached his conclusion about copying. Too bad! Even the defendants didn't get to see the full report, and we get even less:

Notably, I wasn’t allowed to read the full expert report, only listen to him in trial, and even his expert testimony in trial is under seal, rather than in the public record. This is surely intentional -- if the code examples were released publicly, the internet would have viciously mocked the analysis. I still have a level of morbid curiosity about the several hundred-page report.

Several hundred pages to "prove" that software was "non-literally copied" because it does the same thing in similar ways, all by abstracting chunks of code into their platonic forms and comparing them? Well, I guess those experts have to earn their paycheques somehow.

Filed Under: copyright, john carmack, non-literal copyright, software, source code, vr
Companies: facebook, oculus, zenimax

Oculus Reverses DRM Course After Public Backlash

from the power-to-the-vr-people dept

Weeks back, Karl Bode wrote about the curious position Oculus Rift had taken in updating its software to include system-checking DRM. VR headset technology and game development, experiencing the first serious attempt at maturity in years, needs an open ecosystem in which to develop. What this DRM essentially did was remove the ability for games designed to run on the Rift from running on any other VR headset, with a specific targeting of community-built workarounds like Revive, which allowed HTC Vive owners to get Rift games running on that headset. Oculus, it should be noted, didn't announce the DRM aspect of the update; it just spit out the update and the public suddenly learned that programs like Revive no longer worked.

The backlash, to put it mildly, was swift and severe. Oculus having been acquired by Facebook likely didn't help what were already negative perceptions, supercharging the outcry with allegations of the kind of protectionism and the lack of care for the public that Facebook has enjoyed for roughly ever. Still, many saw the whole thing as peons screaming at a feudal lord: Oculus would simply ignore the whole thing. Just weeks ago, in fact, Oculus was working journalists at E3 in defense of the DRM.

The problem, [Oculus Head of Content Jason] Rubin said, comes with the wholesale distribution of a hack like Revive to the whole community, rather than to a few individuals. "[A personal hack] is a far cry difference from an institutional tool made and distributed to a mass number of people to [support other headsets], strip out DRM, strip out platform features and the like. For an individual to do that for themselves, that would be all right. Mass distribution is an entirely different situation."

No explanation on why the level of access to the workaround makes all the difference appears to have been offered, but it seems likely that the company didn't want to appear to be going after gamers and tinkerers, only larger development outfits. If so, the attempt didn't work, because software like Revive was in high demand. This is to be expected, as VR is just now starting to sprout from the seeds laid long ago, with impressive but limited options for both hardware and games to run on that hardware. Those limitations mean that any attempt at exclusivity being tied to hardware that is relatively expensive walls off each of the gardens and limits access and interest. For a technology still in its early stages, this would only stifle growth. Hence, the anger from the public.

Anger which appears to have worked, contrary to what some had thought. As silently as Oculus rolled out the DRM, it has now spit out an update which rolls it back. The world found out about it not from Oculus itself, which curiously didn't want to capitalize on some good press for once, but from Revive's development team.

The Oculus team has reversed course on one of its most unpopular decisions since launching the Rift VR headset in April: headset-specific DRM. After weeks of playing cat-and-mouse to block the "Revive" workaround, which translated the VR calls of Oculus games to work smoothly and seamlessly inside of the rival HTC Vive, Oculus quietly updated its hardware-specific runtime on Friday and removed all traces of that controversial DRM.

What's more, Oculus didn't mention the change in its runtime update notes, which are curiously future-dated one day forward on Saturday, June 25. The news instead broke when Revive's head developer posted a note on the project's Github download page. "I've only just tested this and I'm still in disbelief," the unnamed LibreVR developer wrote. Accordingly, the Revive team has since removed the patch's DRM-disabling feature, which had later been implemented as an extreme measure to make Oculus games play on the HTC Vive.

It appears that even when Oculus chooses to listen to its fans and potential customers, it can't be bothered to do so publicly. This strips its ability to claim credit for the move, credit which it desperately needs after several negative news cycles. Still, the company's PR ineptitude aside, it's a nice lesson in what public backlash and shaming can do to pressure a company to be a little more open.

Filed Under: drm, interoperability, oculus rift, revive, vr
Companies: facebook, oculus