Cyberselves: How Immersive Technologies will Impact our Future Selves

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People have long been fascinated with the idea of transcending the limits of our physical bodies, of projecting ourselves outside of our bodies, into a different body, or even into a radically different world. From mystical experiences brought about through trance or psychedelic drug use, to film fantasies such as The Matrix, Avatar and Surrogates, such experiences are the source of dreams and aspirations, but also give rise to great anxiety and fear about the future. With the development of next generation virtual reality and telepresence technologies, the possibility of experiencing the world from a point-of-view other than that from behind our own eyes is becoming a possibility for all of us. Such immersive technologies, through which you have the compelling feeling of being in another place or body, are here now. As more and more people devote time and energy to life in social media, virtual or 'cyber' realities, our cyberselves, the people who we become in these virtual worlds could become as important to us as our 'real' selves. We may start to find it hard to distinguish between these different versions of ourselves, or we may wish to lead distinct lives, one in 'meatspace' and one, or many more, in cyberspaces.Since the technologies are advancing so rapidly, there has been little time to consider the transformative effects that widespread access to deep and prolonged immersion could have on people, their relationships, and our societies, both real and virtual. There is a pressing need, while these technologies are still being developed, to ask important questions, about the kind of selves we wish to fashion for ourselves, or the kinds of worlds we want to inhibit, and what rules we want to live by in those worlds. Our Cyberselves project thinks it imperative that we examine the transforming impact of immersive technologies on our societies and cultures. Our project will bring an immersive, entertaining experience to people in unconventional locations, a Cyberselves Roadshow, that will give participants the chance to transport themselves into the body of a humanoid robot, and to experience the world from that mechanical body. Using state-of-the-art motion capture, virtual reality and robotics equipment, we have developed at Sheffield Robotics a system that will give participants a sophisticated experience of telepresence, and a chance to talk to cultural researchers, philosophers, engineers and robotics developers about their experiences: what is good, what is bad, what excites them for the future and what most worries them. By collaborating with a wide cross-section of the public, industrial partners, educators and policymakers, we hope to understand better what people want, and do not want, from such technologies, so that these technologies are more genuinely useful to those people on whose lives they will have the most impact. We want to use our project to allow users to drive technological development, and have real, meaningful input into (i) the public conversations on what these technologies are for, and what they are doing to our concept of ourselves as 'humans' in different 'societies', (ii) the ethical and legal challenges that such technologies will inevitably force us to confront, and (iii) the direction and design of the technologies themselves. We hope that by understanding what drives the dreams and aspirations behind technology, and the nightmares that new technologies so often give rise to, we can promote a culturally- and scientifically-informed debate about the potential benefits and risks of living as cyberselves.