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Ask HN: How wise would it be to demo VR to an 8 year old?

2 points by henchik ↗ HN
My son is 8 years old and obsessed with the concept of virtual reality even though he has never experienced it. He is a huge gamer, has developed many fairly complex games in Scratch and built impressive structures in Minecraft. He knows I have a quest 2 and a day doesn't pass that he doesn't beg me to allow him just a few minutes to experience it. And of course I would love to.

However most organizations recommend not allowing children under 12 access to VR and I generally agree with this. Its getting harder to say no though as he has a few friends that are allowed access to their parents VR headsets, albeit for very limited periods.

I'm wondering what the wise course of action would be and if there are any risks for an 8 year old to play VR once off for 30 mins. I'm hoping this would satisfy his curiosity to the point that he can go back to enjoying his non-VR games until he is 12+ and mitigates the risk of him with becoming totally obsessed with the concept and doing it without supervision behind my back at his friends houses.

Is anyone else in a similar position? What have you done?

5 comments

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themodelplumber
> However most organizations recommend not allowing children under 12 access to VR

Why? If your child is different from you in that they need more dopaminergic experiences in order to access their best cognitive tools--just as one common example--VR would seem a de facto therapeutic option...

ggm
In general, vision development in the young worries me. There are reasons that a life held mostly indoors causes more myopia. I would worry that forcing a young pair of eyes to use the artificial perspective vision effect inherent in VR alters their eye development for focus adaptation for near and distant objects.

Thats an ill informed worry, based on my belief without evidence. I'd expect a person who understand brain/sight/development issues to correct me on that.

I also worry about latent epilepsy triggers, and trip risks.

As to effect on their mental health, sleeping, behaviour I can't comment. I do know game exposure in young minds causes problems for some, but overall is now held to be net beneficial statistically to development (maybe?)

tsukikage
AIUI this is actually one of the concerns behind the minimum age recommendation in the literature.

The brain combines multiple sources of information to estimate how far away things in the world are from us. From our visual system these include: correlation between the inputs from the two eyes; shapes and patterns detected within the scene; motion parallax; the distance at which our eyes are focused; and the angles from the point on which we are focusing to our eyes.

A problem with current VR tech is that some of these pieces of information do not match each other when we are wearing the VR headset. Specifically, instead of accurately recreating the light field that our eyes would be exposed to for a given 3D scene, the scene is instead presented in sharp focus a short distance away from each eye. The angle through which our eyes have to rotate towards each other to focus on a single point, the shape the lenses have to take to bring that point into sharp focus, and the relative positions of that point in the two scenes our eyes perceive do not have the same relationship to each other that they would in the real world. Moreover, while wearing the headset, we make deliberate effort to interpret what we see as a deep three dimensional scene, which has the effect of training our brain and visual system to just rely on the stereo vision aspect while ignoring the other conflicting sources of information. Some people are better at this than others, and this leads to some of the variation between how ill people feel after prolonged VR sessions.

We know that the brain is very plastic here - e.g. after just a day or two of wearing mirror glasses that flip what we see upside down, we can reliably learn to compensate for that; people who only have good sight in one eye still have some depth perception; etc. We know it's more plastic in kids, and in young kids is still in the process of learning how to synthesize information from various sources to create reliable depth perception. Last time I worked in this field, I was not aware of any firm results in research quantifying relevant ages or long-term effects. A few minutes of VR is very unlikely to cause any lasting harm. Hours or days will have noticeable effects on adults, never mind children - though I know of no results that show whether any such are anything other than short-term, given that we equally do not know if there is lasting effect, some level of caution with respect to long/regular sessions seems prudent.

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