Is virtual reality (Oculus, Vive, etc…) safe for kids?

In the last times, I found myself arguing a bit on online communities with people sharing videos of their babies wearing Vive or Oculus headsets and having funny reactions. While the videos are surely amusing, I’m worried about little kids using VR and I often comment that… and usually people answer me that there’s no problem in children using virtual reality. In fact, out there there are virtual reality headsets especially crafted for children (like the Mattel View Master of the header image).

At the good old Oculus DK2 times, we all remember the first HEALTH & SAFETY warning stating that the device should not be used by kids under 7yo. That age was risen in 2014 to 13yo: this decision was interpreted by me as a move by Oculus to play ultra-safely. Even now, Oculus says that kids under 13 years old should not play VR. Vive and PSVR come with similar warnings (12-13yo age limit). But people seem not to care about these warnings and continue saying that there are no practical and proven reasons for this limit.

The good ol’ health and safety warning (Image from Oculus Forums)

Well, actually, there are. And I’m going to briefly list them here.

Virtual sickness: it depends on age or sex?

Some days ago I published this article about motion sickness. I shared it on Linkedin groups where I got in touch with a very interesting man, Steven Aukstakalnis, that gave me more info about this topic. He gave me some references and I started doing some researches with them and through Wikipedia. It has been very interesting and I want to share some info I got during this process. Obviously this article won’t be a complete review on motion sickness, but will provide some useful hints. If you want, there is a lot of research papers out there that you can read: people are researching on virtual sickness since a lot (some articles date in the 80s). I wonder if these researches from long time ago still hold today, when the headsets are completely different, but this is just another topic. Before beginning, to show my kindness to Steven, I want to say that he’s written a great book, Practial Augmented Reality, with this and many other considerations on AR and VR.

How to reduce motion sickness in virtual reality

Today I’ll talk about another one of the most frequently asked questions on reddit: after having talked about about if you have to buy a VR headset, which one you should buy and how to start developing with it, today I’ll talk about how to overcome the motion sickness in VR.

The typical scenario is this one: some smart guy reads a lot about VR and feels the urge to try this awesome technology, so he/she buys a brand new PC, a brand new headset (like Oculus or Vive), starts using it and… he starts feeling bad: nausea, dizziness, headaches. In short, he/she just spent 2000$ to buy some illness… it isn’t that cool!