"No man is an island"
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As it stands, our democratically promised internet has collectively and systematically reinforced existing wealth distributions and opportunities for social mobility.
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The autonomous and intelligent infrastructure that supports spatial computing brings deeply unexamined avenues for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of user generated data; as well as raising ethical and responsibility questions around the ownership of biometric data.
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As scientists, engineers, and creators; we are, ultimately, not just handling a technology; but people. And as such, it is important to contextualize, and to move from an understanding of human-computer interaction, to a humane one.
Below is an excerpt from my senior thesis at Cal. Titled "What Is Real": Tracking Implicit Memory Acquisition and the Implications of Virtual Reality.
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This excerpt captures much of how I started research in this space, and why I feel that we ought not be complacent with the state of our understanding and the current policies that such understandings inform.
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"While academic theses should remain impartial and critical in order to contribute to their respective academic fields, we have a greater moral imperative. I come from Christchurch New Zealand where on February 21st, 2011 a 6.3 magnitude earthquake decimated the city, and left its people to form a population with medical refractory PTSD. I started this thesis to find a baseline rate of memory acquisition in VR, as this had not been done previously, and is a vital part in the development of an effective treatment protocol for PTSD (Rizzo, 2011).
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On March 15th, 2019, three blocks from where I went to school, a shooter armed with a live video stream and high powered assault rifles opened fire on two Mosques while they were in session.
We have a moral imperative as members of humanity to leave the world a better place than when we found it, and I cannot present a limitations and implications section which details how we learn in a VR environment, without noting that VR environments are being used to train fighter pilots (Biggs et al., 2018; Judy, 2018) and soldiers (Bhagat, Liou, & Chang, 2016), into being better at their jobs. I cannot present an implications section without mentioning how there is a game titled “Six Days in Fallujah” that recreated Operation Vigilant Resolve: The Battle for Fallujah. A conflict which the Department of Defence called “some of the heaviest urban combat Marines have been involved in since Hue City in Vietnam in 1968” (Garamone, 2005).
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VR has the potential to help my city. Or train its next assailant."