EFF Unveils Virtual Reality Tool at Public VR Lab December Meetup

The Public VR Lab, Brookline Interactive Group, and Boston VR invite the Brookline and greater Boston community to attend a meetup on Monday, December 10th from 5:30-9:00 pm to demo VR experiences and hear about ways civic-focused technologists are using VR/XR in the public interest space. This event will feature special guests from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Crowdsourced Intelligence Agency, The Boston Children’s Hospital VR team, and demos of several VR-in-the-public interest projects.

EFF launched a virtual reality (VR) experience on its website in November that teaches people how to spot and understand the surveillance technologies police are increasingly using to spy on communities, and will be presenting their work at the December 10th event in Brookline, MA.“We are living in an age of surveillance, where hard-to-spot cameras capture our faces and our license plates, drones in the sky videotape our streets, and police carry mobile biometric devices to scan people’s fingerprints,” said EFF Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass. “We made our ‘Spot the Surveillance’ VR tool to help people recognize these spying technologies around them and understand what their capabilities are."

EFF’s VR experience is one of several XR (VR, AR, MR) projects that will be presented at Boston VR and Public VR Lab’s joint December Meetup event at BIG at 46 Tappan St in Brookline.

“We think it’s important to highlight ways creative technologists, municipalities, nonprofits and citizen watchdog organizations are using VR in the public interest,” explained Kathy Bisbee, executive director of BIG and the founder of the Public VR Lab.

She added that the mission of the Public VR Lab is to make emerging media more accessible, through events such as the December presentations and demos, as well as ongoing classes, workshops, fellowships, and hackathons. “Much of the growth in the still-nascent VR industry focuses on commercial products and isn’t accessible to those who can’t afford a $2,500 computer and headset rig for VR. EFF has made their experience in the public interest more accessible using WebVR to create it and making it available to anyone with access to a web browser.”

Spot the Surveillance, which works best with a VR headset but will also work on standard browsers, places users in a 360-degree street scene in San Francisco. In the scene, a young resident is in an encounter with police. Users are challenged to identify surveillance tools by looking around the scene. The experience takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.The surveillance technologies featured in the scene include a body-worn camera, automated license plate readers, a drone, a mobile biometric device, and pan-tilt-zoom cameras. The project draws from years of research gathered by EFF in its Street-Level Surveillance project, which shines a light on how police use, and abuse, technology to spy on communities.Created by EFF’s engineering and design team, the Stop the Surveillance VR experience can be found at https://eff.org/spot-vr.“One of our goals at EFF is to experiment with how emerging online technologies can help bring about awareness and change,” said EFF Web Developer Laura Schatzkin, who coded the project. “The issue of ubiquitous police surveillance was a perfect match for virtual reality. We hope that after being immersed in this digital experience users will acquire a new perspective on privacy that will stay with them when they remove the headset and go out into the real world.”The current version is now being made publicly available for user testing, as part of the Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon festivities. EFF will be conducting live demonstrations of the project at the event on Nov. 10-11 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Swartz, the brilliant activist and Internet pioneer, was facing a myriad of federal charges for downloading scientific journals when he took his own life in 2013.EFF seeks user feedback and bug reports, which will be incorporated into an updated version scheduled for release in Spring 2019. The VR project was supported during its development through the XRstudio residency program at Mozilla. The project was also made possible with the support of a 2018 Journalism 360 Challenge grant. Journalism 360 is a global network of storytellers accelerating the understanding and production of immersive journalism. Its founding partners are the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Google News Initiative, and the Online News Association.

To learn more about the event and sign up to attend, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/civic-xr-using-xr-in-the-public-interest-tickets-52691286055

For access to the VR experience and instructions on it use: https://www.eff.org/pages/spot... details on the Aaron Swartz International Hackathon events at the Internet Archive, including talks by EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, International Director Danny O’Brien, and Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass: https://www.eff.org/event/2018...

For more on Street Level Surveillance:https://eff.org/sls

About Brookline Interactive Group (BIG):
Brookline Interactive Group (BIG) is an integrated media and technology education center and a community media hub for Brookline, MA and the region. BIG facilitates diverse community dialogue, incubates and funds hyperlocal storytelling, arts, journalism and technology projects, and serves over 500 youth and adults annually through innovative classes and partnerships. BIG offers extensive multimedia training, Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-video cameras and training, access to high quality filmmaking equipment, production grants, and provides low-cost professional media services to non-profit organizations, education partners, businesses, and to local government.

About the Public VR Lab
The Public VR Lab is growing a field for Community XR that promotes accessibility, digital inclusion, and diversity. The Lab is disrupting traditional media communications in community-based civic media, journalism and arts, cultural and educational organizations by providing XR Toolkits, equipment, training, cohorts, artists residencies, fellowships and content in the public interest. The Lab is a project of Brookline Interactive Group, a next-generation public access community media arts center.