Technology often draws legal and regulatory scrutiny—consider autonomous vehicles, for example. Now, Eugene Volokh, who teaches at the UCLA School of Law and blogs at The Volokh Conspiracy, is taking a look at augmented reality and virtual reality with post titled “Crime on the virtual street: Haptics, algics, and assault.” The post includes excerpts from a paper he coauthored.
“Algics,” by his description, goes beyond simple haptics to induce actual pain in an AR or VR environment. “Playing poker for matchsticks, it is often said, isn’t the same as real poker,” he writes. Similarly, gamers might think that being speared through the neck in a virtual swordfight isn’t sufficiently realistic if the only consequence is “Game Over.”
“Imagine, then, that a VR setup can have an optional hardware feature: a device that produces an electric shock that is not dangerous but is painful,” Volokh writes. “People who want to play ‘Extreme Swordfighting’ (let’s call it) must have the device attached, and when they are hit with the virtual sword, they get a real shock.”
The shock you receive wouldn’t constitute battery, he writes, because battery generally requires nonconsensual touching. Consequently, real-world football players aren’t arrested for their on-field actions. But consent in the virtual world, he adds, may have nuances we might not expect.
In the paper, Volokh and coauthor Mark A. Lemley write, “Say, for instance, that one of the rules of Extreme Swordfighting is that you don’t hit someone who is already labeled as dead or disabled, or someone who has surrendered. But say that you keep hitting me after I’m down…. I’m very upset by your deliberately sadistic behavior, and I try to have you prosecuted.
They continue, “But another possible reaction is that I’ve consented to a broader range of behavior: By playing the game with my shocker enabled, I have consented to anything that you can do (at least short of serious physical injury) with that shocker….”
The authors note that they don’t have definitive answers to the questions they raise in their paper. “But the very existence of VR and AR poses the questions in new ways, ways that can illumine the assumptions the law makes about freedom and harm in the physical world as well as the virtual world,” they conclude. “For that reason alone, it is worth paying attention to the developing law of virtual and augmented reality.”
