Funny side of playing with gadgets
When you put on a hi-tech blindfold that tricks your brain into thinking you’re somewhere else, there is bound to be a mishap or two, says Alan Martin.
Not since Nintendo encouraged people to pretend the Wii remote was a bowling ball have there been so many TV-related accidents.
United Kingdom insurer, Aviva, saw a 31 per cent year-on-year increase in virtual reality-related accidents last year, which itself is up 68 per cent since virtual reality (VR) headsets first became commercially available in 2016. If you die in VR, you may not die in real life, but there’s a good chance your more fragile furnishings will.
‘‘As new games and gadgets become popular, we often see this playing through in the claims made by our customers,’’ Aviva’s property claims director Kelly Whittington told The Guardian. ‘‘In the past we’ve seen similar trends involving consoles with handsets, fitness games and even the likes of rogue fidget spinners.’’
It’s hard to imagine the damage a fidget spinner could do unless used as a projectile, but it’s no real surprise that virtual reality results in many a television going to the great electronics graveyard.
You are, after all, essentially putting on a hitech blindfold that tricks your brain into thinking you’re somewhere else that then fills your immediate surroundings with things awaiting to be poked, prodded and hit. Is it any wonder that television sets turn from innocent bystanders to surrogate pinatas in the process?
The average claim, Aviva says, comes to around £650 (NZ$1331) and damage is usually done by punching motions, though one customer did throw his controller at the TV in surprise after being ambushed by a zombie. A throwback to the Wii Sports injuries of old, albeit with an added taste of the undead.
Amusingly/horrifyingly, this is now a kind of spectator sport with the subreddit VRtoER showing the kind of thing that routinely happens if you get too carried away in virtual worlds.
Spoiler: you damage ceiling fans, Christmas trees and TVs; many people get punched in the face; and children get valuable, if painful, lessons in spatial awareness.
I’ve never broken anything in VR. I will, however, tell you of something equally embarrassing that happened while reviewing some hardware seven years ago.
A career lowlight
The review was for a drone: the Parrot Hydrofoil drone, to be precise. New as I was to drones I wasn’t prepared for the task in hand. And specifically, what happens if your phone’s Bluetooth is on the flakey side. I’d had a miserable day at the office and just wanted to head home. But I had this drone to review, and I hadn’t yet tested its USP: that it can turn into a remote control boat with an add-on in the box. So I decided to go to a South London park on my way home. It wasn’t far off my route, and I consoled myself with the fact that the battery would only last 10 minutes, so I would be home maybe half an hour later than usual. How wrong I was. With the drone pootling around the water, my Bluetooth suddenly failed, and the drone disconnected. It wouldn’t reconnect and, presumably, the battery then died, leaving the drone lost at sea.
At first it was about 2 metres away, and I had hopes of poking it back with a stick. But it gradually drifted further away, to the point that any stick that could reach it would qualify as a tree trunk.
I was only four months into the job, and wasn’t prepared to leave a NZ$286 loan floating around a lake, so there was nothing else for it: I had to retrieve it.
But I couldn’t do so right away, thanks to the presence of the friendly neighbourhood drunks who sat on a nearby park bench. Perhaps it’s an unusual phobia that someone will steal your clothes and wallet if you leave them unattended by a lake when retrieving a drone – nonetheless, it felt important at the time.
It took them a good two hours to leave, by which point the sun had set, and I could only make out the drone’s location from its vague silhouette and a memory of its last-known location.
So, with nobody around to document my shame (other than a handful of bemused swans), I stripped down to my pants and walked about 6 metres into the lake to retrieve the runaway tech.
Do you know how cold British lakes get in September? Neither do I, but a quick Google search tells me it will have been between zero and 10 degrees Celsius. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there for any longer than necessary – about a minute all in – and didn’t fancy going back to the house for a thermometer. Instead, I got a takeaway on my soggy walk home, and lamented the fact that I was about an hour away from bedtime. The only consolation was that nobody knew about it except me and the swans – something I decided to sacrifice on the altar of reaching a word count for the subsequent review which I ultimately filed with a nudity warning. And again here, of course.