Beware of the Avatar: TARTLE's Mission to Make the Metaverse Humane

TCAST

How do you understand the metaverse?

It’s on its way and it’s going to change the world. One day, you will have the power to load all of your senses into the online space. You’ll see, hear, and touch a digital landscape. And at the pace that this technology is developing right now, we may even be smelling and tasting things online as well.

The pace of innovation we are experiencing today was first made possible with Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), especially World of Warcraft (WoW). The opportunity to charge into battle as a worgen hunter or draeneian priest captured everyone’s imagination. This was your chance to train a highly customized character in an open world with its own economic system, political controversies, and social structure.

A few years later, the next big step is taken: virtual reality headsets. You’ve effectively gone from a third-party perspective of another world to a first-person point of view.

Preserving Humanity in the Metaverse

Before the metaverse can happen, Alexander and Jason discuss the benefits of developing augmented reality even further. It’s the next natural step in the evolution of technology; the chance to “overlay our eyeballs.” We can swap out the physical world for a full immersion into a digital landscape.

While this would be a massive step forward for humanity, a lack of people-centered foresight could mean that augmented reality (and subsequently, the metaverse) may become a place that brings out the worst in people.

Imagine how emboldened trolls are on social media platforms, and then take it up a notch. Those trolls will have the same access to avatars and the metaverse that you do. They’ll hide behind the same tools that you use to connect with other people—and the scary part is that they might not have to face any penalties for their behavior.

Closing Thoughts

The TARTLE metaverse exists so that people have the opportunity to understand their self-worth. It’s a platform that treats people as empowered individuals instead of animals on a data farm.

Eventually, we will be exploring a world without physical boundaries. Amidst all these changes, we need to ensure that the technologies we develop continue to put humans first. Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.