From: J.P.Wann@RDG.AC.UK Subject: Re: HUMAN-FACTORS: Long term immersion in VR Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 15:15:08 +0100 Message-ID: Toni C. Emerson asked: >This still leaves me with the burning question. Is there a scholarly >research that addresses the issue of long term immersion and the side >effects of wearing a HMD that long? Is there a published study on >long term immersion in a virtual environment? -- In terms of "scholarly" and "published" research there is the problem of research ethics. In an academic setting all the research we do has to be approved by an ethical committee. I'm not sure what happens in military establishments at present, but most Journals also have specified ethical criteria. After we first observed some HMD problems we were interested in the effects of (a) Long-term [continuous] usage and (b) repeated short-term usage. But after we'd identified that there may be some short-term problems then we couldn't get ethical permission to expose participants for longer periods. Hence with our appraisal for Virtuality, we steadily moved up the time scale: 10 minutes - clinical appraisal - no problems, Then 20 mins - ditto - no problems Then 30 mins - ditto - no problems. But this a very labour intensive way of moving up to XX hours. The only unfettered way of doing this research is on yourself - I've spent longish periods in various HMDs with different effects - but you can't generalize about effects from n = 1 or 2 subjects. The bizarre aspect of this is I think most people in the HMD research/development area would agree that we should have some appraisal of the effects of different HMD designs on 6-16 year olds. But who's going to give ethical approval for pilot testing on this age group? My other research field is developmental psychology and getting permission to do ANYTHING with children is hard enough, never mind something that "might" have a negate effect. This is the fundamental problem in resolving the stereo-HMD issue - I believe that the right design can minimise negative effects, but to confirm this you need to try that design with high-risk groups. John W ********************************************************* Dr John P. Wann < J.P.Wann@rdg.ac.uk> ********************************************************** Action Research Laboratory: Development, Rehabilitation, Immersive Virtual Environments (Wann, Mon-Williams, Smyth , Langaas) ARL - DRIVE Department of Psychology University of Reading PO Box 238, Reading RG6 6AL, UK +44 1734 318532 Fx +44 1734 316604 ***********************************************************