This was a project I completed on my master’s programme on the topic of the metaverse and speculative design. This was one of my favourite projects on the course as I was free to think about the good, the bad and the ugly of what future technologies could bring.
For this, I selected Love and Relationships as my theme. Within this, I discovered a new virtual assistant in Japan which also appeared as a hologram. It was designed to be a girlfriend for lonely people. This is where I was questioning if this is something which could spark debates over if the way they’re designed is misogynistic, which further made me think about the ethics side of the metaverse. After some thought over different romance-related topics, I settled on creating a piece of work around the porn industry in the metaverse. Porn in the metaverse takes its intimacy of it to a whole other level and could be considered cheating. From this, I created ‘Love Without Limits’, “a privacy service dedicated to assisting people with romantic freedom in the metaverse”. This service works by covering up the actions of those living a double life, with a relationship ‘IRL’ (in real life), and relationships/romantic encounters online. I created a website for the company where clients can pick from three different packages, they then have to fill out a background information form so that the agents can develop a full understanding of whose life they’d be covering up.
This project as a whole raised questions as to how ethics will exist in the metaverse, and how our relationships may change through different situations being normalised.
I didn’t aim to find a solution for this issue, but create an outcome which defines the problem.
