18Dec/17Off
The very real health dangers of virtual reality
"I see more falling than anything else," said Marientina Gotsis, an associate professor of research at the Interactive Media and Games Division of the University of Southern California. "You can trip and hit your head or break a limb and get seriously hurt, so someone needs to watch over you when you are using VR. That's mandatory."
Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, uses VR himself and on subjects in his lab daily. Yet he has let his 6-year-old daughter use it only four times in her life, each time for a duration of only five minutes.
"We read a lot of new studies in our work," he said, "but what we are seeing is a ton of studies on medical applications and not many with young kids, and not really any with really young kids."
Berkeley's Banks agrees. "The research has been done primarily in young adults ... so we don't really know what is going to happen to a young child."
In a recent study by Jakki Bailey of the University of Texas, funded by the nonprofit Sesame Workshop, 55 children between the ages of 4 and 6 played the game Simon Says with the furry blue monster Grover, a popular character. Half of the children played in virtual reality; the other half played with Grover's character on a TV. The games lasted five minutes.
The good news, says Bailenson, is that none of the children in the VR experience became dizzy or had unpleasant physical reactions to their short exposure.
"But the children who saw Grover in VR saw him as more real," he said. "Grover was more influential in immersive VR than on TV, and it was harder for the children to inhibit their actions and not do what Grover did."
"A spider can be a fun spider or a scary spider. I don't know what it's like until I actually try it," Gotsis said. "So I find that nothing will replace the parent doing the experience themselves and saying 'OK, this is fine for my child.' And then do it with them. Walk them through it. There's a huge difference between experiencing something alone or with others."
And as long as parents do their job, Bailenson believes, future research will show that virtual reality can be enjoyed by children without harm.
"I'm not worried about kids using VR. I'm worried about kids using any media uncontrolled," he said.