JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The Metaverse- a virtual world accessed via virtual reality technology- has been heralded as the next key digital experience. It is meant to provide the next evolution of human interaction via social media and telework. However, in the context of growing awareness of the risks to mental health posed by current social media technologies, there is a great deal of uncertainty as to the potential effects of this new technology on mental health. This uncertainty is compounded by a lack of clarity regarding what form the Metaverse will ultimately take and how widespread its application will be. Despite this, given the nascent state of the Metaverse, there is an opportunity to plan the research and regulatory approaches needed to understand it and promote its positive effects while protecting vulnerable groups. In this article, we will examine three current technologies whose functions comprise a portion of what the Metaverse seeks to accomplish: teleworking, virtual reality, and social media. We will attempt to understand in what ways the Metaverse may have similar benefits and pitfalls as these technologies, but also how it may fundamentally differ from them. These differences suggest potential research questions to be addressed in future work. We find that current technologies have enabled tools, such as VR assisted therapy, avatar therapy and teletherapy, which have had positive effects on mental healthcare, and that metaverse may provide meaningful improvements to these tools. However, given its similarities with social media and its expansion upon the social media experience, metaverse raises some of the same concerns that we have with social media - the possibility of sexual assault, exacerbation of mental health problems like eating disorders, social anxiety, depression and isolation, the lack of data security and privacy, and unchecked unethical behaviour of the companies behind these technologies. These concerns lead us to consider questions such as - How will the users be protected? What regulatory mechanisms will be put in place to ensure user safety? And who should be responsible for this regulation? While clear answers to these questions are challenging in this early phase of metaverse research, in this paper we do use the context provided by comparator technologies to provide recommendations to maximize the potential benefit and limit the putative harms of the metaverse. We hope that this paper encourages discussions among researchers and policymakers.