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Meta Discuss Children's VR Saftey

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59937610

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959
55 REPLIES 55


@cmat100 wrote:

https://forums.oculusvr.com/t5/Support/Facebook-Messenger/m-p/935813

 


Yeah when crossing over to VR, the platform should be updated to require permission before showing the message. It would also be nice if Oculus Messenger was disabled by default instead of requiring parents to disable it after-the-fact.

 

This seems a disconnect between Facebook Messenger and Oculus Messenger.

Two things are happeing with the Quest HMD, it has become the underage childs online VR HMD of choice, hence why you will always find underage children in all online VR games, but more worringly in apps like VRchat and Rec room and now spreading to all social apps like cinema app, adults are beeing chased away as anyone who sounds remotly like a adult is then called everying from a pedo to a molester followed by a unending litany of profanity that would make a docker blush,  but unlike say Sony's Psplus or MS xbox live, both of which are moderated through a pay to access online features, FB VR HMDs has no such moderation, but instead relies on each apps own ability to moderate, and so far judging by the nightmare fuel that are both VRchat and RR, this method has failed, and you only need to log into the two i mentioned to see just how big a issue this is going to be for FB, it will take just one story of a child being groomed or a parent hearing what is going on in these apps for the oncoming trainwreck to reach its FB station.

 

Hell when Ninty launched the Switch they know it was going to be aimed mostly at kids, and they knew not to offer voice chat over their switch online service by default, meaning they don't have any issues with this kind of behavior, as they placed VC onto the back of a seperate mobile phone app, so a smart move by Ninty as they 100% solved the issues of dealing with online moderation.

CV1/Vive-knuckles)/Dell Vr Visor/Go/Quest II/ PSVR.

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

CNN is joining in about VR and kids:

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/10/tech/virtual-reality-parents/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2nvicRZUjHkKWk...

 

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Luckily I don't play multiplayer games - so I'm not bothered by small kids running around unsupervised in VR 😄

 

Quote:

 

"Last summer, Allen Roach saw something that really disturbed him: His then-11-year-old son, Peyton, used a sword to slice off the arms and legs of characters in a virtual reality medieval fantasy game, Blade & Sorcery, then threw the dismembered digital bodies off a bridge.

Sure, it all happened in VR. But for Roach — who spotted this gory scene while monitoring his son's VR gaming on a computer screen that mirrored what Peyton was doing with an Oculus Quest 2 headset — it felt uncomfortably real.
Roach knew when Peyton looked down in VR he was seeing a weapon held in virtual hands, not just a plastic game controller. It didn't matter that it was a single-player game, which meant that the characters weren't represented by other human players.
"It bothered me in a way it doesn't on flat screens even, because they're doing it with their hands in physical presence," he said."
 
Here it was in fact an adult, who is in charge of his son, letting  his son play games made for adults. Not really different than letting your 5-year-old play GTA5 on an xbox. Parents have the full responsibility of monitoring what content their kids are exposed to. When my 9-year-old son uses VR, I constantly monitor what he's playing - VR with access to mature content is not a babysitter, and parents have the full responsibility for allowing such content to be experienced by kids. 2c. 
 
The main problem may be all the bad or negligent parents not monitoring what their kids are doing in VR - or providing no restrictions. And with Quest 2s priced as cheap toys for kids, it may create many challenges.  

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

Lawgdes
Honored Guest

VR chat seems to be a predator hotspot.  After hearing dialogue between adults and little boys concerning sex etc I was out of there.  Is there away to click on avatar and report them? 

VRChat was flagged in the BBC report.

They have a post on how to report and ask to include evidence here:

I want to report someone – VRChat

If you see something like what you describe, definitely report the user, even if you didn't get screenshots or recordings. I don't think VRChat displays someone's Oculus username (or whatever platform they're using it on), just their VRChat name so probably not possible to report the person to Oculus.

 

Horizon is a little different as it doesn't require recording software or screenshots, the report function does that and reports will relate to the headset's account holder rather than an app's user, so has the potential to be more effective, provided they're acted on which is the other half of the equation.

 

There are 4 parts to this I think, tools to avoid harassment (safe space), reporting and actioning reports and restricting or closely monitoring the use of a headset if you chose to let a child use it.

 

The price of the headset that Rune mentions is a bit of a red herring, that shouldn't be a factor in what a parent buys and who they buy it for. The use that it's put to is the important thing, there are a lot of things that are relatively cheap and unsuitable for children.

 

(£300 isn't something that I'd consider toy pricing and my parents definitely weren't able to spend that kind of money on my gifts as a kid but as I say, red herring).


@DaftnDirect wrote:

The price of the headset that Rune mentions is a bit of a red herring, that shouldn't be a factor in what a parent buys and who they buy it for. The use that it's put to is the important thing, there are a lot of things that are relatively cheap and unsuitable for children.

 


 

Agreed, Price has nothing to do with any of this. Roblox is 100% free and can be played on multiple platforms, and it is geared 100% towards children. Yet everyone is allowed to chat both in-game and out-game. Not to mention that Roblox allows adults to create open maps full of "adult content." Which kids have full and free access to.

 

Steam is also free, and has the same issues. Plenty of harassment allowed between the Steam Chat and Steam Forums.

 

There were plenty of kids running around using the HTC Vive at release, and plenty of under-aged kids using the Index. The price point of $1,000 isn't out of the range of "children's toy." Index is just as much a kid's toy as the Quest 2.

 

This is a challenge every competitors across all gaming platforms have faced for years, so I really don't see anything new being revealed. From what I can tell, Horizons has the MOST effective means of protecting ones privacy and engagement than any other gaming platform on the market today.


@RuneSR2 wrote:
with Quest 2s priced as cheap toys for kids, it may create many challenges.  

Cheap toys don't typically cost $200+ dollars. Cheap toys are usually under $10. I am not sure you are using the term "cheap" correctly here 😂

 

A 1 Liter bottle of Jack Daniels Whiskey costs around $30... does that mean Jack Daniels is priced as a cheap drink for kids? 

 

Quest 2 has a bigger reputation as being "VR for Adults" than most other VR HMD's on the market. Remember that Quest 2 is being used by large global organizations for VR for Business. In contrast, the higher priced Index is 100% tied to a video game platform, and video games are in fact... for children.

 

The problem at hand has nothing to do with price, or the perception of toys. The problem relates to parents following guidelines; in addition to VR Software Developers making sure that the applications they release do in fact have proper controls to protect young children.

 

 


@RuneSR2 wrote:
Luckily I don't play multiplayer games - so I'm not bothered by small kids running around unsupervised in VR

 

I think that heavy forum activity counts as a form of multiplayer gaming. There's interaction with others and competition (in the form of making one product look better than another).

 

And there's plenty of kids - of all ages - running around forums unsupervised!

 

I love Multiplayer gaming moreso that the forum counterpart, because at least with multiplayer gaming you can hone and develop some quality skills. 😀

Most of these apps have report features but it is almost impossible for the small teams who run these apps to moderate them with any success, hence why VR Chat and Rec room have become this bad, and at this point with millions of Quest II sold and what seems like a unending supply of them in underage childrens hands, the problem for these small app makers has snowballed way beyond the point were they can deal with them, but at some point FB are going to have to do something about it or it will continue to spread from social app to social app and the Quest 2 is one course for one groomed child over the Quest 2 HMD away from a publicity nightmare at this point, and the irony here is FB set themselves up to be responsible for what goes on in their QII HMDs because FB require a mandatory FB account to use the QII, and that means FB MUST moderate what is going on via these accounts inside the QII and these app, so well done FB, i bet they never thought how that mandatry FB account to use the QII was going to put them in the middle of what is coming. lol

CV1/Vive-knuckles)/Dell Vr Visor/Go/Quest II/ PSVR.


@OmegaM4N wrote:

 Quest 2 is one course for one groomed child over the Quest 2 HMD away from a publicity nightmare at this point, and the irony here is FB set themselves up to be responsible for what goes on in their QII HMDs because FB require a mandatory FB account to use the QII, and that means FB MUST moderate what is going on via these accounts inside the QII and these app, so well done FB, i bet they never thought how that mandatry FB account to use the QII was going to put them in the middle of what is coming. lol


Kinda hard to take all that in since it is one giant sentence, but I can say that it is incorrect to imply that FB never thought about any of this. They have already dealt with this prior to purchasing Oculus. Facebook has been dealing with privacy issues for years. They most certainly have thought about it, and they have been quite open about their progress and future plans.

 

If anyone has been involved in Facebook and Oculus VR over recent years, then there is no reason to assume that FB had no idea about what is coming when it comes to people - including children - using their products and services.