John Mingione stood in his living room, put on his Oculus headset and began playing a Star Wars game. Mingione, 54, had given the virtual reality device to his son as a gift and he was testing out a new game.
Soon, he was in a pitched battle with a stormtrooper and getting closer and closer to the edge of a cliff. Mingione lunged forward and suddenly felt himself falling, falling, over the edge, but the ground came up much faster than he expected. Bam! It turns out he hadn’t fallen over the cliff but had walked into an ottoman in his living room and flipped right over it and face planted onto the floor.
The house shook so much when he fell, his wife and kids came running. They found Mingione lying on the floor in pain, pieces of the remotes and batteries scattered around him.
“I told them I was fine, but my knee was killing me,” Mingione said. “… When I fell, what stopped me was the floor, not my hands, or anything.”
His knee and elbow swelled up painfully and continued to ache for about four weeks. He hasn’t touched the headset or any other game since: “I’m retired,” he said.
Mingione was luckier than a friend who was wearing a VR headset in a virtual boxing match as his family watched. A family member said, “You know you can kick, too,” and so his friend kicked into the air as hard as he could — and broke his toe on a coffee table.
“You definitely have to be careful, because you can’t see a thing while you play,” Mingione said.
Injuries are rising
As the number of people using VR headsets rises, so, too, are the number of people injured when the virtual world crashes — literally — into the real one.
Sales of virtual reality headsets rose from $4.42 million in 2018 to $21.76 million last year and are expected to reach $27.26 million in 2028, according to Statista Market Insights, which also reported more than 5.4 million units were sold in 2019 and more than a projected 14 million for this year. Headsets cost from several hundred to several thousand dollars.
A study published last year found just 125 incidents of VR-related injuries were reported to emergency rooms in 2017. By 2021, that figure was estimated at 1,336, the study found, using data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, known as NEISS.
According to Melissa Kovacs, an associate professor of trauma research at Dignity Health Medical Group in Chandler, Ariz., and the study’s co-author, unofficial figures from 2022 that she’s seen show a 100 percent increase since 2021 in VR-related emergency room visits reflecting the rise in sales and use of the headsets.
She added the number of injuries is probably much higher than the NEISS figures, since those reflect only people who went to ERs, not those who went to doctor’s offices or urgent care or who dealt with injuries at home.
“These injury numbers, they are small, but they are increasing, kind of really alarmingly quickly,” Kovacs said.
Daniel Cucher, a trauma surgeon who works with Kovacs at Dignity Health and is a co-author of the study published last year, said that after trying one of the VR headsets himself, he understands how people get injured. “It’s quite a physical engagement,” he said, and “they’re typically used in people’s living rooms or their basements or enclosed spaces, where they’re predisposed to injury if they’re flailing around wildly with their headset on” and cannot see, or sense, the real world of walls, ottomans and chairs around them.
Fractures, lacerations, strains or sprains
According to the study, the most common VR-related injury, accounting for 30 percent of ER visits, was a fracture, followed by lacerations, at 18.6 percent, contusions at about 14 percent, and strains or sprains, which accounted for 10 percent, according to the data.
Young children, up to the age of 5, were most likely to injure their face, while those 6 to 18, were most likely to hurt their hands or their face. Adults, up to the age of 54, primarily hurt their knees, finger and wrists, while the majority of people over 55 hurt their upper trunk and upper arm.
Among the NEISS cases were: a 60-year-old man who ran into an object, striking his chest on the wall and suffering a contusion to his ribs and dental pain; a 13-year-old boy who ran into a table, lacerating his face; a 9-year-old who dove and hit his face on a television stand, giving himself a dental injury and cutting his upper lip; and a 12-year-old who was evaluated for a head injury after leaning onto a virtual shelf that caused him to fall into a real shelf.
