Eric Greenbaum of Jema VR talks about some of the on hygiene considerations that you should take into account if you’re giving public VR demos. Specifically, the open foam on the Oculus Rift DK1 should either replaced with closed-cell liner, or at a minimum be wiped down with an alcohol swap in between uses.
Eric has been developing a number of hygiene and ergonomic solutions called About Face VR that include hygiene barriers & removable liners for your VR HMD. He talks about how to use these for public VR demos in order to prevent the spread of potentially contagious dermatological conditions.
Eric ran into these hygiene issues in the process of developing an exercise bike rig and series of exercise environments for VR called “Velo VR.” He talks about the hygiene issues that he ran into, and his approach to solving them. He also talks about some of the things that you can do to minimize simulator sickness in an exercise simulator including not having too steep of an incline or decline, and to avoid sharp turns.
Finally, he talks about how he’s applying his neuroscientist and patent lawyer background to solve new problems in VR, and productize them into a business. And he sees that most of the really big problems in VR are being addressed or coming soon including positional tracking, having multi-user networking, and being able to capture and display facial expressions for authentic social interactions in VR.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Jema VR creating an exercise system for VR, but ran up against hygiene and ergonomics issues with VR HMDs
- 0:38 – Need a removable liner for your HMD, and should have a closed seal especially if you’re publicly displaying VR demos.
- 1:05 – What’s the worst that can happen? There are a variety of contagious dermatological conditions like a staph infection, but they can be prevented with some simple hygiene steps.
- 1:40 – What are some best practices that people can do with their existing VR HMDs? Consider replace open cell foam with closed cell foam. Have users wipe their faces, and then wipe down the rift between uses.
- 2:15 – How do you wipe it down? Alcohol swap to disinfect it
- 2:28 – Swappable foam mod kits. Have a personal HMD, but also want to demo. Have a variety of different interchangeable foams that you can swap out and use in different contexts. Uses magnets as a connector
- 3:30 – Creating mod kits? Or working with VR HMD manufacturers? Both. Engaging HMD manufacturers to raise the issue of hygiene. Willing to consult and help out. Planning a Kickstarter with a mod kit. VR is a grassroots movement, and you have to see it to believe it. We want people to share VR, but we have a responsibility to do it safely and create a safe environment for VR evangelism.
- 4:51 – Created a VR recumbent exercise rig, and you start to sweat after 5 minutes, and the foam liner gets pretty nasty quickly. Initial interest is VR exercise. Gamifying exercise into a video game. Make health benefits of exercise more transparent. VR is poised to fundamentally change exercise.
- 6:04 – What do you see in your VR environment? It’s a mountain bike simulation in a forest and high mountain passes. Convinces user that you’re outside exercising somewhere pretty. Want to have more city and fictitious environments. VR exercise frees from the reality-based physical limitations of how we exercise
- 6:50 – Dealing with motion sickness in VR with this exercise bike. More of an issue at the beginning. But going up or down should trigger the vestibular senses, and if you’re not going up or down, then that’ll cause motion sickness. Keep things flat and mostly straight with some gentle curves and gentle inclines and declines.
- 7:41 – Possibly biked more miles in VR with a HMD than any one else. Building up tolerance as VR dev. Important to let others try it out.
- 8:17 – Neuroscientist and patent lawyer. Scientists dissect and approach problems, and confidence to look at a new area and figure it out. Patent lawyer helps with being familiar with the IP landscape for starting a new business
- 9:17 – Open problems in VR. A lot of them are being solved quickly. Absolute positioning for eliminating motion sickness. Networking multiple users into one place and time. Another big challenge is capturing facial expressions for having a meaningful social interaction in VR.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:25.393] Eric Greenbaum: an important problem, which is hygiene and ergonomics for virtual reality. So over the last couple months, I've really been focused on addressing hygiene and ergonomics issues with regard to head-mounted displays.
[00:00:37.722] Kent Bye: Right. And so how do you address that issue of hygiene and head-mounted displays?
[00:00:41.624] Eric Greenbaum: So at a first level, you need to have a removable liner for your head-mounted display, something that you can take off and wash. And especially if you are in the business of publicly displaying your demo or your head-mounted display or your piece of software, it's important to have a closed-cell foam liner that you can wipe down between each use to keep everything clean.
[00:01:05.324] Kent Bye: So what's the worst that can happen if you don't do this?
[00:01:08.566] Eric Greenbaum: The worst that could happen is pretty bad. There are a variety of contagious dermatologic conditions that could conceivably be spread by sharing a head-mounted display. So, I mean, in a worst-case scenario, that's what you're talking about, metasteph infection or some other kind of nastiness that, for the most part, you can prevent with some fairly simple hygiene steps. And at least for the immediate future, that's going to be one of my focuses, is kind of raising awareness of that issue and providing some solutions for dealing with that issue.
[00:01:40.160] Kent Bye: And so say you're going to an event and you're doing demos, then what are some of the best practices that you would recommend that people do with their existing Oculus Rifts?
[00:01:48.924] Eric Greenbaum: So for an existing Oculus Rift, you might want to consider removing the open cell foam that came included with the Rift and replacing it with a closed cell foam so that you can wipe down the part of the Rift that touches your face between each use. Alternatively, if that's not something you're willing to do, at the very least encourage all users to wipe down their faces before each and every use and wipe down the rift in between each use would be ideal.
[00:02:15.294] Kent Bye: When you say wipe it down, how do you wipe it down? With alcohol or what type of stuff do you use?
[00:02:19.356] Eric Greenbaum: An alcohol swab would be generally the best practice. It won't really damage the foam too much and it won't kind of disinfect, for the most part, a lot of the nasties that are out there.
[00:02:28.777] Kent Bye: I see. And so you have this closed foam that then you're having also magnets that are kind of having the head-mounted display. Maybe you could talk about what you're doing to actually connect the HMD to the foam.
[00:02:40.387] Eric Greenbaum: Sure. So one of the things is, for example, let's say you have a head-mounted display that you want to use at home, but also kind of bring out into public and demo it for your friends. So the idea would be to have a variety of interchangeable liners that you could use for different purposes at different times. So for use at home, I have a microfiber lined piece of foam that is super comfortable against the skin. It's antibacterial in and of itself. And after you wear it for a couple of days, you can take it off and throw it in the wash. If then you decide to bring it to your friend's house and let a bunch of strangers try it out, you could remove that liner and replace it with a closed cell foam liner that you can wipe down between each use. And the way that I designed it was to use magnets as a connector so that, you know, it will hold the liners in place fairly securely, but it's also pretty easy to take them off and replace them with different ones.
[00:03:30.587] Kent Bye: And so are you planning on creating mod kits for people to buy and then do this themselves? Or are you going to the level of showing some of your work to Oculus VR to say, hey, maybe you should consider integrating some of these changes for hygiene?
[00:03:44.776] Eric Greenbaum: I would say all of the above. You know, I am kind of actively engaging HMD manufacturers to kind of raise the issue of hygiene and make sure that they're thinking about that. You know, I'm willing to consult and I'm willing to help HMD manufacturers to design their products and incorporate hygiene and ergonomic features into their products. I'm also planning a Kickstarter to release a mod kit so that will allow people to, you know, have the variety of liners and interchange them pretty easily to kind of maintain the hygienic aspects of virtual reality. I mean, it's a kind of a grassroots growth of this industry and a big part of it is you have to see it to believe it. And we want people to be able to share the experience and show their friends and start a meetup and show your community what VR is. And we have a responsibility to do that safely. And it's really something that we have to take kind of seriously. So that's a role I'm happy to fill and happy to kind of help the VR community to be aware of hygiene issues and to create a safe environment for VR evangelism.
[00:04:50.088] Kent Bye: I see. And so I also saw a photo of you on like an exercise bike with a Oculus Rift on it. So maybe you could talk a bit about this exercise rig that you have set up.
[00:05:00.560] Eric Greenbaum: Sure. So my first kind of encounter with the hygiene issue came out of the development work that I was doing in VR exercise. So, when you strap into a recumbent exercise bike and put on an Oculus Rift and pedal for five or ten minutes, you start to sweat. And when you sweat into that foam liner, it gets kind of nasty pretty quick. So, my real interest here initially remains VR exercise. So, I have a recumbent exercise bicycle that I've rigged up such that user exercise input in the form of RPM translates to avatar movement in a virtual environment. And the faster you pedal, the faster you move. And there are really kind of endless derivations and endless options for gamifying that and making exercise into kind of a video game and bringing kind of the health benefits of exercise, kind of making them transparent by coupling them to a video game. And I think we've never really seen a platform that can transform exercise the way VR is poised to transform exercise.
[00:06:04.929] Kent Bye: I see. Wow. And so what are you actually seeing in your VR environment then?
[00:06:08.270] Eric Greenbaum: So the environment that I have created personally is kind of a mountain bike simulation where, you know, you're kind of cruising through a forest and some high mountain passes and it really, you know, it does a pretty decent job of engaging the user and kind of convincing them that they're in fact kind of outside and exercising somewhere pretty. You know, looking forward, I'd love to have various cityscapes. I'd love to have totally fictitious environments where, you know, you can, you know, cruise through Middle Earth or bike in a user-generated environment that only exists in someone's imagination. I mean, and that's what VR exercise does. It frees us from the reality-based limitations of where we choose to exercise.
[00:06:50.542] Kent Bye: I see. I'm curious if other people have used this and if they have felt any sense of motion sickness of, you know, moving through VR sometimes. If you're not actually moving physically, but you're seeing a visual, you know, how have you seen people react to motion sickness with this rig?
[00:07:07.097] Eric Greenbaum: Sure, it definitely, especially initially, it was more of an issue. You learn pretty quickly that any time you present a user with something that should trigger their vestibular sense of saying, oh, I'm going up or I'm going down, and they're not actually feeling that, it's going to lead to simulator sickness. So initially, I had some kind of rolling hills, which I removed and really kind of kept things pretty straight, kind of gentle curves, gentle inclines, gentle declines. And that, I found, really eliminates or minimizes simulator sickness in the majority of users.
[00:07:40.229] Kent Bye: I see. And I imagine it may be difficult if you build up a certain amount of tolerance for that as yourself. How many miles have you biked in virtual reality, do you know?
[00:07:49.513] Eric Greenbaum: I'm fairly comfortable saying that I've probably biked more miles in virtual reality, at least wearing a head-mounted display, than maybe anyone else. Probably at least when I was developing, like two or three hours a day for six weeks at a time. I mean, I spent a lot of time going around and around one track. And you definitely do kind of build up a tolerance for the issues. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why it's so important to kind of engage the community, let people try it out, and see where your issues arise, because very often we can't see them ourselves.
[00:08:17.966] Kent Bye: I see. And so you've talked a lot about, you know, game development and hygiene, and yet you're a neuroscientist and patent lawyer. So I'm sort of curious about how those other two elements of this collide in the virtual reality space.
[00:08:30.068] Eric Greenbaum: Sure. Well, the scientist aspect, I mean, one of the things you learn more than anything else in graduate school is you learn how to dissect and approach problems. And it kind of gives you a lot of confidence to look at a new area that maybe you're not super familiar with, but enough confidence to know that you can take it apart and figure it out and, you know, address the issues. And from the standpoint of a patent attorney, it's a critical part of business. The IP landscape of VR in particular is kind of interesting and fairly unique. So to be able to, kind of have a scientist mindset in terms of experimentation and willingness to try stuff that's new with kind of a patent attorney sense of, okay, this is kind of how I can protect this, and this is how I can leverage it for business purposes. I mean, I think it's a pretty decent combination for starting a company.
[00:09:17.558] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as some of the other biggest open problems when it comes to virtual reality?
[00:09:23.620] Eric Greenbaum: A lot of the problems are being solved really fast. I mean, the absolute positional tracking, that was absent in DK1 for the Oculus Rift and is now present in DK2, that makes a really big difference in terms of simulator sickness and eliminating simulator sickness. The ability to network multiple users in one location at one time, which is being solved pretty quickly, but that's going to be absolutely critical. And another super big challenge is capturing user facial expressions. To have a meaningful social interaction over virtual reality, you absolutely must capture facial expressions. And it's going to be a hard nut to crack. And anyone who's working on it, I'd love to talk to you.
[00:10:04.687] Kent Bye: Great.
[00:10:04.928] Eric Greenbaum: Well, thank you very much. Thanks for your time.
