Handsets, headsets and hyperscreens: Emerging ideas for immersive experiences and the importance of governance by design

Twenty-first century technologies have reinvigorated the frontiers of discovery, allowing people to not just explore, but also to create entire new worlds.

These emerging digital realms, however, remain subject to existing and rapidly evolving laws and political realities within our physical world.

Therefore, companies developing or implementing these revolutionary technologies need to take the time to simultaneously pursue compliance, particularly with those laws concerning privacy, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. The best way for companies to do so is to promote a close collaboration among development, operations and legal teams throughout the entire product life cycle. This compliance-by-design approach better ensures the long-term success and profitability of these innovative products and experiences.

But how to apply traditional laws to a highly integrated virtual world is the challenge. This pragmatic guide can help navigate the compliance challenges of immersive experiences and products.

Jurisdiction: Navigating the borderless terrain

As a threshold matter, it is important to first identify which U.S. states or countries' laws apply in a world that exists in the ether.

To be clear, cyberspace is not a global commons. State laws generally apply depending on where the organization, or its servers, are physically located, or depending on the residency or location of the impacted individuals. Of course, in the decentralized and increasingly interoperable metaverse, it is often complicated to determine where and who the individual is, particularly as virtual private networks can obscure locations, or place the user in a different jurisdiction, and avatars can increasingly step across platforms and enter different worlds controlled by different organizations.