IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023 - 9

the use of immersive technology to provide realistic-looking
but factually-dishonest experience.
This risk applies to all AR experience based
Figure 1. Los Angeles Times published their bestburger
list in 2019 using a combination of AR models
(left) and photos (right).1
still being developed.2 While some applications,
such as creating gaming assets, are more tolerant
to the ambiguity, it poses serious questions
for fact-based news reporting.
For example, it would be scandalous if a
photo editor publishes a photo that is heavily
edited,3 but it is not an uncommon practice for
an AR developer to repaint a 3D model to make
it look " real, " especially when the main selling
point of using AR is an immersive and realistic
experience.
In fact, when looking carefully, one will find conflicting
information between newsroom ethics
guidelines and what it would take to create an AR
experience. For example, the Los Angeles Timesd
states that it does not " add color, create photomontages,
remove objects or flop images. " However, as
Table 1 shows, this is nearly impossible to follow
when creating realistic AR objects using current
technologies (e.g., photogrammetry), which
requires large amount of manual editing, such as
painting colors and creating textures.
Since most newsrooms test AR technologies
with less serious contents, such as food,
sports, or lifestyle, not much attention has
been paid to the potential negative impacts of
this reporting technology. As immersive technologies
mature, one can imagine using AR for
more serious contents, such as war or natural
disaster reporting, in which case a misrepresented
fact could cause huge damage to the
reputation of a newsroom.
This leads to the main point of the article:
Artificial Reality, a new term created to describe
d
[Online]. Available: https://www.latimes.com/la-times-ethics-guidelines-story.html
on the recreation of real world objects. This is
because the current processes of creating
these objects introduce multiple touch points
where the creator's own bias can affect the
final outcome. However, today's newsroom
lacks the expertise to understand, remedy,
and properly inform readers about the potential
risks.
We should note that Artificial Reality could
be the result of well-intended purposes. For
example, AR content creators are incentivized to
make the AR model smaller through various optimization
techniques so that it consumes less
data when the reader loads it on their phone.
However, as we will see in the next section, this
process is heavily affected by the creator's own
judgement. Without proper standards on acceptable
modifications and optimizations in place,
newsrooms could eventually find themselves to
be in ethically challenging situations.
POTENTIAL ETHICAL CONCERNS
WITH 3D MODELS OPTIMIZATION
FOR AR
Generally, the workflow for creating AR contents
usually starts with the acquisition of highresolution
artifacts of the element that have to
be modeled and obtained directly from the real
world. In case of 3D objects, two common
approaches are the laser-scanning and the photogrammetry.4
The former leads to the generation
of complex point clouds, which also store
the color information for each point, and hence
it requires a further processing step to obtain a
3D mesh. The latter, which can be performed
with relatively cheap equipment like smartphones
or drones,5 consists in generating a 3D
mesh and the relative color texture from a high
number of images taken from various point of
views around the real element.
In both cases, the result is characterized by
high objectivity, being the result of application of
algorithms, which tend to maximize accuracy
(and, consequently, the fidelity) of their output.
However, these artifacts are usually too complex
to be directly integrated into a real-time 3D
January/February 2023
9
https://www.latimes.com/la-times-ethics-guidelines-story.html
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2023
