How Dangerous Is Virtual Reality?
My idle thoughts are preoccupied by the day I can finally slide a VR headset over my eyes and ears. Undoubtedly, I will spend my time flying through space in Eve: Valkyrie, sweating with cold palms in Alien: Isolation, and constructing monuments to my prowess in Voxelnauts. But as Virtual Reality headsets prepare for a consumer release some citizens are voicing concerns. Danny Unger of Cloudhead Games warned last year, "When the commercial version comes out, somebody is going to scare somebody to death - somebody with a heart condition or something like that. It is going to happen. Absolutely." When the virtual xenomorph pierces my chest cavity will it kill me? Or, are speculators vastly overestimating the power of immersive multimedia?
Imagine wearing the HTC Vive while crawling down the hallways of del Torro’s/Kojima’s axxed Silent Hill. A malefic presence causes the hair on your neck to stand at attention, while anxiety festers. Your heart rings in your ears, the pulse quickens, and your breathing labors. Stress hormones surge throughout the body causing the muscles to work in overdrive and prepare the fight-or-flight response. You turn to run only to be confronted by Lovecraftian horrors, and the prolonged exposure prevents your heart from relaxing. Given enough time the body shuts down, unable to cope with the experience. Faced with malignant horrors will you die?
Under highly specific circumstances you can be scared to death. But it largely depends on your heart’s health. If your name is Agatha, you’ve had recent open-heart surgery, and you have a crippling fear of roller coasters, I wouldn’t recommend trying the Oculus Rift’s Riftcoaster. Too much adrenaline and the heart gives up. But healthy functioning hearts are far less likely to succumb to heart failure as a result of overstimulation, and in all likelihood only extreme scenarios will lead to death—such as your country’s team being disqualified from the World Cup.
Physical harm is largely confined to the inexplicable future offered by the Matrix. Rather than focusing on the body, the more interesting question is what effect VR could have on the brain.
Popular Science asked if VR could induce post-traumatic stress disorder in cybernauts. It can undoubtedly cause anxiety, as stated by Psychologist Grainne Kirwan. And anxiety increases the quality of immersion one feels in VR according to a study published in the journal Presence. But could distress tip over into PTSD?
“I think that somebody would have to be psychologically compromised to begin with to mistake the events that go on in the virtual world for real events," said psychiatrist Skip Rizzo. Events in reality are impossible to avoid, and our hopelessnesses to escape the experience escalates cognitive blowback. But we are only subject to the stress of VR so long as we submit ourselves to the virtual world. Although, the brain behaves radically different when navigating VR terrain.
A study on rats wearing minuscule VR goggles showed that their brains do not map the rendered environment. Neurons responsible for brain mapping, located in the hippocampus, shut down—the brains GPS turned off. The brain is saying, “This isn’t real. Why am I going to bother working?” It’s likely brain regions shut down because only two senses are being tricked (sight and sound), but brain mapping relies on all five—smell evoking the strongest memories of the five senses but there is no way to stimulate the olfactory bulb in simulated reality. Researchers can't determine whether the neurons on strike are harmful long-term, yet. Perhaps the brain would believe the digital environment if all five senses were tricked.
What if a VR system was identical with reality, fully tricking the five senses and presenting a one-to-one imitation of our own world (barring notions that this is an impossible feat)? It echos philosophical quandaries of what is real postulated since the Ancient Greeks, and currently explored as the Simulation Hypothesis.
Let’s imagine, at some future time, a developer creates a doppelganger experience depicting gruesome or disturbing events. In these imagined situations, prolonged exposure could induce PTSD. Whatever can cause psychological trauma in reality would do the same in a perfect simulation. But the technology to render even a small segment of the universe is purely science fiction.
But VR is a long ways off from mimicking reality, due to huge technological hurdles that will have to be crossed. The inadequacies are endless. Even the field of view is subpar. "To get to the point where you can't see pixels, I think some of the speculation is you need about 8K per eye in our current field of view [for the Rift]," said Oculus Rift creator Palmer Lucky in an interview with Ars Technica. "And to get to the point where you couldn't see any more improvements, you'd need several times that.” While VR will undoubtedly improve once it hits the consumer market, exponential improvement will not be immediate. And incorporating the senses beyond vision and hearing is confined to Stark Trek’s Holodeck for now.
While the future is uncertain, and long-term effects unknown, researchers have shown the vast positive potential of virtual reality devices. For every blog purporting the dangers of VR, there are dozens of studies highlighting VR’s benefits as a tool to alleviate psychological traumas. Sufferers of phobias, PTSD, and anxiety undergo exposure therapy while wearing a device. And the potential to relieve sufferers of phantom limb syndrome needs almost no introduction—substituting Ramachandran’s mirror box with a VR headset. It’s given rise to its own form of therapy, known as Virtual Reality therapy.
I don’t doubt that there will inevitably be a headline serving the dangers of VR to dinner tables across America, sensationalizing tragedies and misattributing causes. Such is the way of any new technology, whether it be autonomous vehicles or drones. There are interesting questions, both moral and practical, that loom on the horizon, like a great shadow illuminating human nature. But their answer will remain nebulous, and can only be examined a priori. It’s important to distinguish fact from fiction when analyzing the current generation of VR devices, by recognizing the actual capabilities of VR and not the imagined situation. Regardless, I’ll be purchasing a VR headset when it’s bundled with Half Life 3.
Sources:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-08-22-were-very-close-to-having-the-first-death-in-vr
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118031/soccer-increases-heart-attack-risk
http://www.popsci.com/article/science/can-you-get-ptsd-virtual-experience
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/pres.17.4.376
http://www.livescience.com/49021-virtual-reality-brain-maps.html
http://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/handle/10182/623
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=virtual+reality+stress&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C31&as_sdtp=
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box
From Mega Man II to Ape Escape, I've been playing games for as long as I can remember. I've spent months killing porings in Ragnarok Online and more recently lived a second life in Eve Online. I usually play as gUMBY, gUMBLEoni, or gUMBLes in-game.
