The PlayStation VR headset is coming October 13, and ‘experts’ are already warning that immersing ourselves in rich 3D worlds could have unforeseen consequences.
Specifically, doctors (or this one doctor) seem to think that PlayStation VR could lead to long-term eye damage, and cause a fair few funny tums.
Leading laser eye surgeon Dr David Allamby, clinical director of London’s Focus clinic told The Mirror:
With virtual reality headsets about to experience a real boom, we are setting up the next generation of gamers for some potentially serious eye problems. Parents and younger people need to know the risks. With VR, we’re going to potentially see more and more people suffering from a lack of exposure to daylight – something which affects the way our eyes naturally grow and which can lead to short-sightedness, or myopia.
He added that being immersed in a 3D environment for so long – especially when playing through fast paced action sequences – could cause some gamers to forget to blink, leading to ‘painful dry eye’.
I dunno – if you’re that stupid that you don’t make a conscious effort to fucking blink, I’d say you deserve a spot of painful dry eye.
If you’re not yet disgusted with the very notion of PlayStation VR, allow me to throw another bucket of piss on the fire.
Would you believe that recent research from the University of California Los Angeles found that, when tested on rats, a virtual experience caused 60% of the brain cells in the Hippocampus region to ‘shut down’?
As long as you don’t let your pet rat have a go on the headset and regulate your own play time, I reckon you’ll be fine.
Then of course, there’s the motion sickness. We’ve all known that certain users can experience motion sickness in a few VR games, but The Mirror brings up reports of the Resident Evil 7 demo.
While forgetting to mention that the survival horror VR experience was a work in progress, they recall how a number of journalists described feelings of nausea.
Obviously, Virtual Reality is set to bring about the end of the world as we know it, as an epidemic of vomiting and blindness sweeps the world. May God help us all.
Or, as long as we remember to blink, go outside, eat, wear clean underwear, and turn off our videogames once in a while, we should all be just fine.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.