SPRITE+ Phase 1 Research Fund awards have recently been officially announced following an application, selection, and decision process in spring 2023. Prof Jill Marshall is part of a three person inter-disciplinary team with Lancaster and Manchester universities
The projects were developed and chosen at a research ‘sandpit’ held in Cheshire in January 2023, focused on the sandpit challenge: “Future Digital identity: Created, Remembered, Forgotten”. Over a series of online and in person sessions, sandpit participants, chosen to attend through an application process, worked together to develop inter-disciplinary, multi-institution, cross-sector research proposals from scratch.
The Trust, Rights, and Identity in the Metaverse ('TRIM') project seeks to understand how individuals’ identities in the Metaverse might be exploited for harm, and how human rights in the Metaverse might be preserved, including protection against discrimination/harm on the basis of someone’s identity/identity expression. Together the team draw on their inter-disciplinary strengths and expertise from computer science, psychology and law using a novel combination of methods to explore three distinct areas:
- What is the role of identity presentation in the trust we place in others?
- How have fiction authors imagined harms taking place in metaverse-like future worlds and technologies?
- To what extent could current laws be used to protect us from harms and human rights infringements in the metaverse?
Methods include controlled experimentation, with an analysis of speculative fiction (sci-fi), and of current laws and legal theory.
