VR Health?

[Normchacho]

Instead of just guessing, why don't we actually do some research.

This is what the professor of Optometry at UC Berkley had to say about it.

Nearsightedness, or myopia, is where close objects appear clear, but objects far away look blurry. It has been on the increase in recent years. One study in the U.S. found that nearsightedness in those from age 12 to 54 rose from 25 percent in 1971-1972 to 41.6 percent in 1999-2004. There’s a lot of evidence linking this trend to near work, such as reading or using a computer.

The damage occurs when a child focuses on something near for long periods of time, so it’s understandable that some may fear VR headsets will add to the problem. The screen is just two inches from the user’s eyes. But the technology is more complex than that.

“Let’s contrast a kid using a VR headset compared to a kid using a smartphone. When they use the smartphone they typically hold it very close to them and so they have to focus their eye close,” explains Prof. Banks. “You might think that with the VR headset they’d have to do the same thing because the image is close to the eye, but [VR headsets] have optics in the setup that make the stimulus effectively far away, so, in terms of where the eye has to focus, you have to actually focus fairly far away to sharpen the image in the headset.”

So VR should be less damaging to the eyes than reading or using a Smartphone. It even goes on to explain later in the article that VR could be used to diagnose or even treat certain eye problems.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/virtual-reality/is-vr-safe-for-kids-we-asked-the-experts/amp/