Faces and Places: Exploring Portability in Immersive Technologies

Abstract

When Mark Zuckerberg christened Meta in October 2021, his founder’s letter highlighted that the future metaverse would need to be built upon open standards and interoperability. This was an optimistic vision with many hurdles to overcome, though the World Economic Forum expanded on the theme of interoperability in the metaverse to argue that interoperability would present enormous opportunities for “frictionless experiences, development, and economies.” The idea was that immersive technologies by their very nature would resist walled gardens; visions for the future of the web, web3.0, would be decentralized, user-centric, and less dependent on siloed platforms and hardware. Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, provided some further detail in a 2022 essay that described interoperability in the context of allowing technologies like virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) glasses to interact together.

We are a long way from an open and interoperable metaverse, let alone having mixed reality experiences that seamlessly cross competing headsets. However, the development of immersive technologies like AR/VR provides a new opportunity for platform providers, creators, and other policy stakeholders to think about where to build data portability into these technologies before the metaverse is more fully baked. This policy brief provides (1) an overview of immersive technologies and (2) existing data portability law and policy and looks at (3) two use cases involving or adjacent to immersive technologies – spatial maps and avatars – as areas where data portability should be explored and enabled.

Keywords: metaverse, augmented reality, spatial computing, interoperability, data portability, portability, avatars