Privacy Risks
Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR highlighted another risk of virtual reality environments: privacy. Facebook has repeatedly raised the ire of its users by changing privacy policies and further angered the public when it recently revealed that it has run psychological experiments on users.
A virtual environment can dramatically expand the scope of potential privacy violations because every single behavior in a virtual environment can be tracked, and every element of a virtual environment can be manipulated.
Mudd recommends that companies decide in advance how much monitoring they will do, and communicate that policy to employees or customers. You do not want to have a situation where an employee or customer goes into a virtual world, uses a personal avatar, and then claims they expected their actions to be private, for example
Violations of customers’ privacy could also land companies in hot water with the FTC and state regulators, and violations of employee privacy rights have legal consequences. “Companies need to talk to their legal counsel so that the excitement of the technology does not lead to litigation,” Mudd advised.
Risk of Wasting Money
Most companies will not be spending $2 billion on virtual reality projects like Facebook did, but price tags for custom virtual environments can easily climb into the six digits and higher.
According to Irwin Lazar, an analyst at Chicago-based Nemertes Research Group, it was common for early entrants into the space to spend a lot of time and money on these projects. “If people do not use it, it is an investment that did not pay off,” he said. “If I am going to make a big investment, I need to figure out what the ROI is, and what it gives me that I cannot get otherwise, so I do not spend a couple of millions dollars and then do not see any value in it.”