This month, a judge in Colombia held the first virtual reality hearing in the country’s history. In a two-hour session conducted by the Magdalena Administrative court of Colombia, the parties to a traffic disagreement showed in the virtual courthouse as characters. A representation of Judge Maria Quinones Triana, decked out in her black attire.
Two hours of testimony was presented by lawmakers in the South American country using Horizon Workrooms, a Meta tool for holding remote meetings. The conference was broadcast live on YouTube, and Colombian attorneys attended by wearing virtual reality headgear. Meeting participants were represented by digital representations of themselves.
The nation is one of the first in the world to experiment with holding real court proceedings in the metaverse, a type of interactive virtual reality that creates the impression that digital places are more authentic and frequently uses characters to symbolise each participant.
“The use of information technology in the development of judicial proceedings has the essential purpose of facilitating and expediting these processes [of executing justice],” said María Victoria Quiñones Triana, magistrate of the Magdalena court.
While more and more court proceedings are being conducted via video conferences sponsored by companies like Zoom and Google, very few people have tried out the metaverse, which is a place that tech titans like Meta, Microsoft, and others are competing to create.
The early instances of conversations and encounters that took place in the metaverse have been ridiculed because the representations were often awkward and ridiculous. Despite this, the judicial proceedings that took place in Colombia on February 15 and were broadcast on YouTube went off without too much of a mishap, with the exception of some disorienting camera movement and some contorted movements.
