Ethical Ethics Of Virtual Reality

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Virtual Reality (VR) is a constantly evolving technology, whose use in the field of mental health is a challenge at the deontological level. Barfield, Zeltzer, Sheridan, & Slater (1995) define VR as a tri-dimensional computer-generated interactive and multi-sensory environment in which a person is immersed. The concept of immersion in virtual reality is different from the presence in virtual reality (Patterson, 2010). Immersion refers to the involvement in the virtual environment due to objective stimulatory conditions (Eichenberg, 2011) ensured by specialized technology. Stimulation involves a model for the presentation of reality in which the model created may be mistaken with reality. The virtual reality is based on stimulation and it helps …show more content…

Any new technology meets needs and brings benefits, while raising ethical problems that were not previously signalled. Therefore, the technological evolution should necessarily be doubled by the adaptation of ethical codes to the specific problems. Just like the use of hypnosis in psychology determined the specialised associations to elaborate a set of specific principles and standards, the use of virtual reality has to be regulated in order to protect both the researcher or the therapist and the participant to a research or the patient. Since 1992, Holvast has reckoned the advantages of elaborating an ethical code. Thus, he argues that practitioners will find in the ethical code a guide meant to orient them in difficult situations, that the ethical code establishes a standard which needs to be observed, and that a practitioner might be exonerated, provided that he followed the principles stipulated by the …show more content…

People do not suffer from cybersickness in VR if they close their eyes because it is only induced visually (Kim et al, 2005). The severity and the duration of these symptoms may be influenced by the exposure duration and the experience intensity. Recently, several researchers have noticed that no participant showed cybersickness (Holden, 2005; McLay et al, 2010), while others simply identified a minority of patients that could not benefit from VR therapy because they could not finish their sessions due to cybersickness (Botella et al., 2009); another found that a percentage ranging from 80% to 95% of the individuals exposed to virtual environment experience side effects (Rizzo & Kim, 2005), of which vomiting was recorded in approximately 1% to 2% of the subjects (Lawson, Graeber, Mead, & Muth, 2002). The duration of these side effects of cybersickness varies according to different studies and the discomfort reported by users occurs either during or after a session in the virtual environment (Kim et al., 2005). Regan and Ramsey (1994) even identified a persistence of the side effect 5 hours after the immersion in VR, while other studies revealed a percentage of 80% of all the participants showing an increase of the cybersickness symptoms 10 minutes after the immersion in VR (Cobb,

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