Virtual Reality: General Issues of Legal Regulation

The article focuses on the general issues of legal regulation of relations that emerge in the field of application of VR technologies and presents issues associated with the regulation of development of such technologies. It looks at the features of this technology that create challenges for the development of a system of legal regulation of its application. The article also gives a perspective at major factors that make application of the existing law difficult and offers analysis of the emerging issues of its regulation. The author arrives at a conclusion that this technology is fundamentally different from the other existing technologies as it combines the properties of both physical reality and cyberspace. Among the challenges of the legal regulation of VR are a high realism, complete immersion user experience, and low cyber protection of both hardware and software components. The author evaluates several regulatory approaches, which could be used in the case of virtual reality and finds that all of them have major deficiencies. Contemporary research findings in secure application of VR in the fields of teaching and entertainment get rapidly outdated as they cannot catch up with the technology development, therefore they can only serve as a ground for the development of a system of VR regulation with consideration of this factor.