A self-experimentation report about long-term use of fully-immersive technology

Abstract

Virtual and digital worlds have become an essential part of our daily life, and many activities that we used to perform in the real world such as communication, e-commerce, or games, have been transferred to the virtual world nowadays. This transition has been addressed many times by science fic- tion literature and cinematographic works, which often show dystopic visions in which humans live their lives in a virtual reality (VR)-based setup, while they are immersed into a vir- tual or remote location by means of avatars or surrogates. In order to gain a better understanding of how living in such a virtual environment (VE) would impact human beings, we conducted a self-experiment in which we exposed a single participant in an immersive VR setup for 24 hours (divided into repeated sessions of two hours VR exposure followed by ten minutes breaks), which is to our knowledge the longest documented use of an immersive VEs so far. We measured different metrics to analyze how human perception, behav- ior, cognition, and motor system change over time in a fully isolated virtual world.