VR Safety - Wall Punch Risk

Assessing the Wall Punch Risk of any game or app in VR is essential as it is easy.

A game in VR has to have the right combination of elements to have a solid degree of Wall Punch Risk. First off, any game where you have very little arm movement, if at all, are not likely to maintain much Wall Punch Risk. Games where you are seated are also less likely to have the risk as well. The VR experience would most importantly have you swinging, hitting, punching, lunging at, or downright smacking things in VR. Something that’s going to get your arms swinging around will have the highest Wall Punch Risk potential.

There is another necessary ingredient needed for to push the risk up even higher: Gameplay Ferocity.

How deeply you get into the game… how immersed you become makes all the difference. Any VR experience where you are flailing your arms around you won’t necessarily become a danger to your walls and furniture unless you are so “into” the experience that you completely forget where you actually are in real life.

One of my first experiences with this, I was playing one of the Star Wars: Vader Immortal games and I was so determined to slice a robot in half with my lightsaber that I extended my hand well past the on-screen guardian and slammed my hand down onto my desk. Shortly after that I nearly knocked my Bass guitar off the wall and hit a lamp. That’s right, even though there are boundaries you can set to prevent this there are some games where you get so into it that it’s easy to push past the boundary you set… it becomes somehow worth the risk of breaking your belongings and a few bones in your hand to achieve a particular goal. In my case, to slash at these evil Robots.

This is more of a reminder that when you are setting the boundary around your play area… depending on the game, you may want to make your boundary a little smaller, putting more space between it and your stuff as a safety buffer in case you decide to push past it in a fit of glory.