VR Side-Effects: Memory & Proprioceptive Discrepancies After Leaving Virtual Reality

Figure 1: While most tend to think that virtual reality (VR) hardware is still far from providing precise realism to replicate the real world, we argue that its current level of realism can already lead to side-effects as users leave to the real-world, i.e., cause an unwanted lingering effect leading to potential risks.Here, we demonstrate two such examples, inspired by cases we observed in our user studies: (a) This user is playing a VR game that uses hand-retargeting, in which the position of avatar hand differs from user's hand.(b) Suddenly, they hear their fire alarm and leave VR.However, they fail to locate their kitchen's fire-extinguisher, and instead, look at the position of an in-game extinguisher, despite not being in VR anymore--a memory side-effect.Then (c) they reach for an alarm button on the wall, but fail to accurately press it since their hands are still retargeted from the VR--a proprioceptive side-effect.