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Philosophy of Extended Reality at the Collège de France
The conference coincided with the launch of Apple’s new VR headset, and the questions of its implications
Etienne Aucouturier graduated with a PhD in Philosophy from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2011. He is currently a researcher in Ethics of Science and Technology at the CEA.
5th June, 2023
The irecs team was at the Collège de France, in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris, to attend a two days international conference on the philosophical analysis of Extended Reality (XR) technologies. This conference, entitled Virtual and augmented realities: epistemological and metaphysical issues, was organized by Professor Claudine Tiercelin, who holds the Chair of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge at this historic Parisian academic institution, and Assistant Professor Alexandre Declos.
Speakers included Prof. Philip Brey (University of Twente) who was involved in the European Union’s SIENNA project, Prof. Katalin Farkas (Central European University) and Australian philosopher Prof. David Chalmers (New York University), who is known for his thesis that virtual reality is genuine reality — a thesis he calls virtual realism.
Our team was there to learn about and discuss philosophical issues related to XR, one of the four technologies selected and analysed by the
irecs team. The conference coincided exactly with Apple's unveiling of its new extended reality headset. This coincidence led Australian philosopher David Chalmers (NYU) to give us, in his concluding lecture, his take on these new kind of XR devices, which are becoming increasingly affordable, and allow users to easily alternate between augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality, thanks to video passthrough features. These XR headsets in passthrough mode capture the user's environment with one or more cameras and other sensors, and render this image in real time on the screen inside the headset.
These passthrough capabilities make it much easier, among other features, to blend physical and virtual reality. This increasingly indistinguishable mix between physical reality and artificial or virtual reality raises a myriad of ethical issues, which we are currently addressing
within irecs. Among these, the question of the ontological and moral status of people and objects that can be experienced in extended reality is of prime importance, and is correlated with the public policy issue of how to ensure that virtual objects and people remain always distinguishable from physical ones.
Extended reality technologies also raise questions about the future modalities of our interactions with and in the metaverse: governing the metaverse in a diverse, connected world will also be a major challenge in terms of public policy, if access to XR technologies becomes more affordable and accessible.