A controlled study of the safety features of a virtual reality system for the development of the hyper hospital

The safety features of a virtual reality system were studied from the physiological and psychological viewpoint within an ergonomic framework. The virtual reality was developed for constructing a novel online hospital system using a virtual environment called "Hyper Hospital". Ten healthy young male subjects were exposed to the virtual reality system with different intensities of the physiological and psychological stimuli. As a psychological stimuli, they underwent an interview with a virtual (an electronic) nurse. The interview session was divided into two parts, namely one of low stress and one of high stress. Following each interview session, subjects were exposed to a jet-coaster like moving scene of varying intensities. The responses were compared with those obtained in the control experiments in which an environmental video (just a scene of Northern seaside) was presented. None of the physiological or psychological parameters such as urinary catecholamine release, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. showed that significant fatigue occurred. This implies that fatigue was not induced by the usage of our VR system compared with the results of the control experiments.