Legal Issues Arise Where the U.S. Government Meets the Metaverse

The rise of blockchain, metaverse, and Web3 applied sciences has led to fast adoption throughout all sectors of the economic system. The federal government sector isn’t any exception. Maybe probably the most compelling examples is the latest announcement that the US army is constructing its personal metaverse.

There isn’t any one exact definition of a metaverse. Slightly, there shall be many metaverses, every of which can have completely different traits. We view metaverses as a confluence of applied sciences and enterprise fashions together with these set forth under. Whereas the time period “metaverse” has acquired a number of consideration just lately, lots of the applied sciences and enterprise fashions concerned are usually not new.

A number of the core applied sciences utilized in metaverses, reminiscent of digital worlds, have been utilized by the federal government for over a decade. However advances in a number of the different applied sciences used, together with AR/VR and blockchain have catapulted the usability of metaverses.

The model of a metaverse used within the just lately introduced US army deployment consists of augmented actuality, synthetic intelligence, and online game graphics, as an illustration, to allow fighter pilots to observe dogfighting towards digital opponents, together with Chinese language and Russian warplanes whereas pulling a number of Gs. Red 6, the corporate that’s growing the know-how, says this delivers a much more practical check of a pilot’s talents than a traditional flight simulator. “We are able to fly towards no matter menace we wish,” says Daniel Robinson, founder, and CEO of Red 6. 

This isn’t the primary, and sure won’t be the final, main government-related use case on this area. As we covered again in 2019, blockchain has quite a lot of purposes for defense-related functions. And, in fact, authorities adoption of blockchain and different Web3 know-how means authorities contractors might want to perceive and improve their capabilities to take part on this market. A number of the points for contractors to contemplate are specified by our prior paper on What Government Contractors Need To Know About Blockchain.

All of this creates nice alternatives for the federal government and authorities contractors, in addition to these firms trying to broaden their enterprise to incorporate authorities contracts. However with these alternatives come quite a lot of authorized problems with which these working on this area should be conscious. Corporations focused on taking part in government-related metaverse tasks have to have competent authorities contract attorneys, however should additionally concentrate on the distinctive authorized points that may come up with metaverse deployments. We offer an summary of a number of the authorized points with metaverses in our article Metaverse Law and Legal Issues.