Broken fingers, rib contusions and facial lacerations are among the results of virtual sword fights and sports games.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Bryce Gillespie, an orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta who specializes in hands and upper extremities, wrote in an email that the most common VR injuries he sees are finger fractures. Fortunately, most simply require a cast and not surgery, he wrote in an email.“The injuries I’ve seen are typically teenage boys using VR headsets while playing games” at home, Gillespie wrote. “They lose track of what objects are around them. Some have tripped over a table and landed on their hands.
Brian A. Janz, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Catonsville, Md., who specializes on hands and upper extremities, said the rise in VR-related injuries is similar to what happened some years ago when people began buying hoverboards, two-wheeled self-balancing scooters that people steer by leaning forward, backward, right or left.
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