When Ravi Yekkanti places on his headset to go to work, he by no means is aware of what the day spent in digital actuality will carry. Who may he meet? Will a baby’s voice accost him with a racist comment? Will a cartoon attempt to seize his genitals? 

Yekkanti’s job, as he sees it, is to verify everybody within the metaverse is secure and having a great time, and he takes pleasure in it. He’s on the forefront of a brand new subject, VR and metaverse content material moderation. 

Digital security within the metaverse has been off to a considerably rocky begin, with studies of sexual assaults, bullying, and youngster grooming—a problem that’s solely changing into extra pressing with Meta’s current announcement that it’s reducing the age minimal for its Horizon Worlds platform from 18 to 13.

As a result of conventional moderation instruments, corresponding to AI-enabled filters on sure phrases, don’t translate nicely to real-time immersive environments, mods like Yekkanti are the first approach to make sure security within the digital world. And that work is getting extra essential each day. Learn the total story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley

The flawed logic of speeding out excessive local weather options

Early final yr, entrepreneur Luke Iseman says, he launched a pair of sulfur dioxide–crammed climate balloons from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, within the hope that they’d burst miles above Earth.

It was a trivial act in itself, successfully a tiny, DIY act of photo voltaic geoengineering, the controversial proposal that the world may counteract local weather change by releasing particles that mirror extra daylight again into house.