From: Russ Eberhart Subject: HEALTH: Possible health effects of using VR systems Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 17:34:47 -0400 BIOMEDICAL IMPLICATIONS OF USING VR SYSTEMS There has been recent discussion on sci.virtual-worlds relative to health effects of VR systems. The Biomedical Engineering Center at Research Triangle Institute is beginning to examine these issues. First, a word about who we are. Research Triangle Institute (RTI) is a not-for-profit contract research institute located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, with about 1,500 employees. I am Director of Biomedical Engineering. One of the resources for our biomedical work is the RTI Virtual Reality Laboratory, located in the same building as biomedical engineering (BME). The RTI VR lab has equipment that spans the range from a Silicon Graphics Reality Engine to RISC 6000s to PCs and Macs. We have several software systems available, the most powerful of which is IBM's new VR Distributed Environment Construction Kit (RTI is the first installation of this system outside of IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center). With IBM's system, all of the above-mentioned machines are networked. We can, for example, build models on one machine (a Mac, for instance) and port them to another (such as the SGI). We have the IBM voice recognition system running. We work closely with folks at UNC (Fred Brooks et al.), NC State and Duke University Medical School. We are in the process of installing equipment that will let us use all of the VR lab capability from within our Human Studies Facility. There are a number of issues (or non-issues; that's the point, we don't know yet) we are looking at or planning to look at. VR equipment can expose users to electric and magnetic fields, physical forces and torques, non-ionizing radiation, and restriction and constriction, to name some. Effects may be physical and/or psychological. And there are cognitive issues to be addressed that may or may not have biomedical implications. We are starting at, we hope, the beginning. We are measuring the values of electric and magnetic fields, and of physical forces and torques. We are measuring disorientation effects due to lag times. We are measuring cardiovascular and neurological effects of wearing and/or using VR equipment. For example, we will be running experiments to determine physiological responses to wearing HMDs during upper body (hand-crank ergometer) and lower body (treadmill) exercising. We have physiological data acquisition capabilities that include ECG, EEG, impedance cardiography, respiration, beat-to-beat blood pressure, and pulmonary acoustics. And we do all of our studies in a facility that has a human exposure chamber where the environment is very tightly controlled (temperature, humidity, gas constituents, ventilation rate). We are working with frequencies, modalities, etc., which for the most part have not been studied previously. Are there EEG effects? What happens when we visually stimulate a "normal" VR user (is there such a person?) at EEG beta frequencies? At alpha frequencies? What is different if the person is epileptic? Maybe nothing. (I use this as an example mainly because I have some experience in EEG analysis: I developed [with colleagues at Johns Hopkins] the first on-line neural network-based EEG epileptiform spike detector.) We don't know what we will find. We hardly know where to start. We believe answers require a hard-nosed engineering/scientific approach. And medical expertise. RTI has, in my opinion, world-class people working on this issue, and has committed internal research and development (IR&D) funding to bootstrap our efforts. We hope our commercial and governmental clients will contribute to our work (we may be not-for-profit, but we're not-for-loss, either!). I'll be presenting the first report on our work in progress at the symposium on VR for Persons with Disabilities being held in San Francisco in June. Russ Eberhart, Ph.D. Director, Biomedical Engineering Research Triangle Institute P. O. Box 12194 Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 phone: 919-541-7123 email: rce@rti.rti.org fax: 919-541-6965 P.S. My definition of virtual reality: VR is beyond the interface into the computer, beyond the interface into the person, where the Turing test has no meaning.