A man in Moscow has died while (or due to) wearing a VR-headset. Apparently while wearing it he stumbled around his apartment and fell over a glass table, cut himself and bled out. No information is available on what he was watching or playing. So VR goggles will soon have to come with some kind of warning label? Real world items may hamper VR experience and cause death?
"According to preliminary information, while moving around the apartment in virtual reality glasses, the man tripped and crashed into a glass table, suffered wounds and died on the spot from a loss of blood"
It must have been a fairly serious cut if you bleed out almost instantly and die on the spot. Did he decapitate himself or something?
http://tass.com/society/982465
Also at Newsweek.
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Don't want to join the growing ranks of virtual reality fatalities? In-headset room tracking may be for you:
Occipital, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, focuses on 3D scanning hardware and depth-sensing cameras: One of its Structure camera sensor arrays works with both an iPhone mixed-reality headset and an upcoming home robot. Occipital's team put an HTC Vive VR headset on me, outfitted with an in-development feature that let me see the room even with my headset on. The technology is called Occipital Tracking. Its aim is to replace external room-sensing hardware completely, like the Oculus Rift's cumbersome stands or the Vive's light-emitting Lighthouse system, in favor of all in-headset tech.
Inside-out tracking, as in-headset room-tracking tech is called, has been in place on Microsoft's VR headsets and upcoming hardware like the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Daydream as well as AR devices like the Microsoft HoloLens, but Occipital Tracking aims to make that tech even better for VR with far more room-aware scanning.
Much as Apple's ARKit or Google's ARCore can scan a room and sense edges and surfaces using a camera and the phone's motion sensor, Occipital's tech pinged my demo space and found glowing points in space that formed a map. The test demo alternated between the real world via pass-through cameras and a fully closed-off VR world with edges of the room overlaid. The VR hardware I tried had stereo cameras, but Occipital says the tracking will work with a single camera, too. It really does seem like ARKit/ARCore for VR.
A game could show a partial overlay only when you are in imminent danger of colliding with something, or even create a virtual environment that incorporates real life obstacles (walls, tables, etc.).
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:08AM
stay turned for darwin awards daily
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:29AM
No.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:33AM (8 children)
Jugular vein, stab to the aorta, femoral artery, just for starters. "died on the spot" doesn't necessarily mean that he bled out in less than a minute, either. He may have attempted to reach his phone, stumbled, tried again, and stumbled. Maybe he spent more than a couple minutes searching for his phone, but it was knocked under the sofa or some such.
Not a pleasant way to die, but at least he didn't suffer for months or years in a hospital. Remember 'Grouchy Old Men'? Lucky bastard!
It does seem odd that he had a glass table that was so easy to break. We had one when we were first married. I came into the house to find my middle son beating on it with a cast iron skillet. I don't know how long he had been beating on it, but I heard, and then saw him hit it a couple good licks. That glass was pretty damned sturdy! We got rid of that table for fear of what COULD have happened.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @01:03PM (1 child)
> That glass was pretty damned sturdy!
There's glass, and then there is Glass and even GLASS. Visit Corning Museum of Glass for some amazing demos of various kinds of toughened glass.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 25 2017, @12:35AM
but Corning was unable to sell it.
But decades later they got a call from Steve Jobs asking if they made a really tough glass.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday December 24 2017, @02:13PM
Actually exsanguination is considered mostly painless baring the actual cause. This was brought up during some Kosher flame-war where some ER doc linked multiple journal reports that detailed how people doing dialysis and the like that had their central venous catheter fail and came very close to bleeding out (but survived) specifically mentioned not feeling pain or even major discomfort with a few mentioning they felt cold.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deadstick on Sunday December 24 2017, @05:57PM
Or simply being knocked unconscious, maybe with liquor or other drugs abetting the process. A friend of mine checked out that way: a drunken fall, head laceration on a table corner, unconscious and bleeding out. Much like William Holden.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 25 2017, @03:22PM (1 child)
Or didn't know how to effectively stop arterial bleeding, and died during the half hour or so it took for emergency services to reach him. Offhand I'm not even certain that there is any way for an amateur to stop jugular bleeding that isn't rapidly fatal in its own right.
(Score: 1) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:29PM
Tourniquet around the neck, obviously!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 25 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
Which segues into this article [harvard.edu] and this paper [nih.gov]. Plate glass tables, sliding doors, windows can be surprisingly lethal if you break through them [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday January 11 2018, @11:03AM
I recall an old TV show, I think it was called Watchdog, on the BBC. There was one episode about fire safety and they talked about upstairs windows that only had a small opening. The double glazing was so tough that in the event of a fire people were unable to break it, unable to climb out the small window, and perished.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:38AM
VR is just a sideshow, the dangerous thing here is him failing to reassess risks when the situation changed materially.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:47AM
I'd put a big warning label on that model of glass tables too.
Not that I defend VR. The meatbag's body is a good natural firewall, quite stupid to tear it down yourself.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Sunday December 24 2017, @11:27AM
You'd assume they found him still wearing the goggles, or it wouldn't have made the news.
Many people hurt themselves wearing these goggles.
Some even get filmed, so ther must be many more injuries where there wasn't a camera.
https://www.youtube.com/results?q=vr+fails+2017 [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 24 2017, @01:41PM (1 child)
Please excuse the broken English - I'm sure it was translated from Russian by something like Google Translate.
https://5hotnews.com/2017/12/22/the-details-of-the-death-of-the-secret-designer-virtual-reality-glasses-at-anything/ [5hotnews.com]
_____________________________
Is this the Russian version of unverified sensationalist reporting? Is 5hotnews their version of a televised Enquirer magazine? I don't know, just thought I'd post the story.
Newsweek has a more detailed story as well. http://www.newsweek.com/virtual-reality-gamer-slips-and-dies-blood-loss-after-falling-glass-table-757966 [newsweek.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @03:36PM
Newsweek is already in the summary.
Vodka and painkillers is a much more typical and boring death for the Russian man. Maybe he drugged himself in VR but was assassinated by an intruder.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday December 24 2017, @04:16PM
The body cannot live without the mind.
--Morpheus
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday December 24 2017, @07:03PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMceVbo3Tm4 [youtube.com]
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday December 28 2017, @06:15PM
There are already warning labels that tell you to make sure nothing is in your way. Falling off a cliff while wearing a VR headset, isn't the companies fault either. You have to be responsible for your own actions at some point. Caution is necessary when you are wearing a blindfold as well. I would say doubly so, for a blindfold that lets you see into a different world.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"