Whether it’s for the Year in Review or the Friend Anniversary videos, Facebook loves to use its algorithms to show us what we’ve been up to on Facebook. Unfortunately for them and for us, often times our activities really aren’t as exciting as they think. This can make these videos awkward and weird, like a friendship anniversary video showing us that we liked our friend’s posts a whopping 10 times over the last three years, or it can make it downright upsetting by reminding us of a time we were so distraught we posted about it. This isn’t the case for all videos, but a significant amount of them seem to be pretty underwhelming in my and my friends’ opinions.

While this clearly isn’t as big a deal as a breakthrough in technology, it does seem a little odd that Facebook hasn’t noticed this phenomenon yet. It seems as though they don’t have much interest in improving whatever program collects the information for these videos. Although the technology for sentiment analysis is relatively basic at this point in time, this seems like a great opportunity for Facebook to further develop it in order to create more positive videos and fewer awkward or uncomfortable ones.

Source:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/7/16745656/facebook-year-in-review-ai-2017-terrible

Virtual Reality games and experiences are becoming popular extremely quickly today in addition to becoming more and more realistic and believable. Like most other technological advancements, the innovation of VR comes with both incredible benefits, but also with large drawbacks. In the article “The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality,” Simon Parkin discusses how VR is so vastly different from a “flat-screen” experience, and how this affects its users.

VR can absolutely have positive impacts, one of the most substantial being that it can be used as therapy for people who suffer from PTSD. For example, while asking Vietnam veterans to imagine themselves back in Vietnam is not very effective as therapy, using a VR experience designed to look and feel like Vietnam is incredibly effective. Despite these positives, Parkin says that VR experiences are much more traumatizing and psychologically impactful than flat-screen ones. One of the major reasons for this is that    ” ‘The gap between ‘things that happen to my character’ and ‘things that happen to me’ is bridged’…This distinction can transform an experience from merely flinch-inducing to sincerely frightening. ‘The way I process these scares is not through the eyes of a person using their critical media-viewing faculty but through the eyes of I, the self, with all of the very human, systems-level, subconscious voodoo that comes along with that.’ ” Parkin references a study that shows that playing these VR games has a longer-lasting psychological effect on players than other games. Because of this, he says that it may be crucial to the players’ psychological health to be “carefully screened” before they use the game in order to “minimize the risks of aggravating an existing psychological disorder or an undetected psychiatric vulnerability.”

There are solutions to the negative impacts of VR, as Parkin discusses Wevr, a team creating guidelines game developers should follow in order to make their VR games less traumatic on their players. In order to ensure the mental safety of players, it is important that these developers realize that the games they are creating are much more powerful than the ones before them.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-coming-horror-of-virtual-reality