🩺The Metaverse Needs Ethics

There are many different ideas about what the Metaverse is or will someday become and even what we might call it. But there’s one thing all professionals in XR can agree on:

We want to build things that customers love, that clearly help them and never harm them.

The practical challenge is determining what that means. The easy path is to ignore deep questions, racing headlong into the unknown, break it, sometimes fix it, and then make excuses for our repeated and embarrassing failures. Like:

“How could we know that kids would wind up using our headsets not designed for them?”

“How could we know that our computer vision code doesn't work for minorities?”

"How can we possibly know any novel problems before we launch a product?"

It turns out, the process of building the best products for customers is nearly identical to the process of building them to be most Ethical, Responsible, and Trustworthy, because these are all part of what makes products good. We can't find all problems up front, but we can always do better.

Enter the XR Guild. We’re a collection of professionals in XR, Metaverse, and Spatial Computing who have been around the block a few hundred times. Our mission statement is simple:

The XR Guild provides the resources, organization, mentorship, and a common set of ethical principles to professional members to help us all achieve the most ethical outcomes for our products and services — benefiting consumers, companies, and makers alike.

The XR Guild includes Designers, Developers, Artists, Researchers, PMs, Producers, Writers, Directors, Creatives, Lawyers, even CEOs. Some of us have over 30 years in the field. The XR Guild is not a labor union, but we all agree to a common set of ethical principles up front. Like the skilled trade Guilds of the past, we can teach professionals to spend more time on ethics in their everyday product decisions and back each other up when bad decisions can be reversed up front.