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Comment by tseabrooks | Hacker News Reader

Watch the first couple of videos.. It's pretty clever and cool. Doesn't look like it'll be fat friendly. All that aside, let's pretend like we're responsible adults for a second. The video, especially the end of the first, sort've makes me think this might be the "line". People have talked about violence in video games, and realism, and for the most part I don't think there is any real issue today, it's all malarkey. Something like this, however, changes the game. It's suddenly a very different experience when you have the VR goggles on and the VR running board and you gun down civilians in CoD, or kill XYZ in random FPS.

tl;dr. Does the omni + oculus rift increase realism enough that violent games require extra caution?

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There's some dejavu for you. I remember this exact same discussion when "Wolfenstein 3d" hit the scene. That 3d killing of Nazis was sure to be "the line".

The secret jumped out at me when I read that drone pilots were getting real, bona-fide combat PTSD just from pushing the button while looking at those grainy monochrome heat images. People (almost all of them) know the difference between real and imaginary. "The Line" is in us, not on the screen.

One of the documented side effects of virtual reality is a mental disease called derealization , which makes people feel like real life isn't real, and causes a lot of anxiety.

Also there's the fact that military training conditions people to kill automatically without thinking and the fact that virtual reality has a proven ability to decondition people with PTSD or fear of spiders(with real results in real life), which is basically the same psychological process of military conditioning.

All this raises interesting questions about "the line" between real and virtual , that at least be tested before wide scale deployment of VR.

Where is that documented? 'cause that's a pretty big claim.

Derelealization:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20712501

Efficacy of VR exposure therapy in anxiety disorders , in cluding PTSD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality_therapy#Efficac...

Exposure therapy probably works via habituation or conditioning.

http://www.nelsonbinggeli.net/NB/CBT-Exposure.html

The knowledge on how military training works is found on dave grossmans's book : "on killing".

I think this is an interesting thought, but I would probably say no. I don't think that just because the Omni makes violent gaming more realistic that it changes its effect on players.

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