Horizon Worlds, developed by Facebook (Meta), is one of the most popular VR games at the moment. It has an 18+ age restriction, but because it’s easy for children to enter the game, they face the following risks:
Exposure to explicit content Cyberbullying, phishing, harassment Sexual exploitation
Meta has been slow to respond to these risks. There are privacy complications when it comes to surveillance — plus, children are actually targeted by the social media giant to drive up profits. If you’re wondering how children can engage with VR in a healthy way, there are several steps you can take. Read the full article below for more information and advice! According to the Entertainment Software Association, 76% of American kids play video games. Some sources put this number even higher, at about 90%. In recent years, the popularity of virtual reality (VR) gaming has grown, and with good reason: VR has the power to immerse users into a gaming world like nothing else. This is why the Meta Quest 2 (formely Oculus Quest 2), developed by Facebook’s parent company Meta, was topping Christmas wishlists in 2021. This might make parents wonder: is VR safe for kids? In this article we look at:
The effects of VR on children’s social and physical safety How kids are getting into age-restricted social virtual reality apps Unmoderated VR games and the lack of privacy legislation that exists to protect teens What steps parents can take when it comes to kids and VR
What Is Virtual Reality (VR)?
Virtual reality is a type of 3D simulation technology that makes people feel like they are physically “inside” a virtual world. By putting on a VR headset or other wearable items, such as gloves, users enter a digital world in a very immersive way: with a 360-degree view, thrilling sound effects, and an adaptive environment. VR gives us a glimpse into a future that once seemed far-fetched. Virtual reality has created endless possibilities. for all kinds of sectors:
Business: It allows us to contact people or visit places that are physically out of reach. Medical field: VR tech has done wonders not only when it comes to treating patients with PTSD and mental illnesses, but also when it comes to surgical training. Education: Adding gamification to classrooms can widely expand the learning experience.
Aside from all of these sectors, the entertainment industry has also dipped its toes into VR. At the moment, the market leader in terms of VR entertainment is Meta. They created the Meta Quest 2, a VR headset that allows you to play games. It’s an incredibly popular device, and not just among adults. In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced his plan to develop a “metaverse” for the Meta Quest: a social virtual reality space that people can enter as avatars. Here, they can conduct work meetings, play video games, and even attend virtual concerts. The first version of this social virtual reality world is known as Horizon Worlds. Since the release of Horizon Worlds, however, Meta has struggled to effectively deal with the large crowds of children the 18+ game has attracted. We will discuss this game as a case study below.
Children and Virtual Reality: Is VR Safe for Kids?
Kids have been attracted to VR since its invention. It can be a thrilling and immersive experience that provides them with a high level of entertainment. Undoubtedly, VR has benefits for children. In general, 3D games improve kids’ spacial reasoning skills. On top of that, online environments can enhance children’s education, entertainment, and social interaction. They are able to engage in new experiences, use their imagination, and get comfortable with tech-enabled environments. However, VR devices also come with a lot of drawbacks. First of all, it compromises users’ privacy and online safety in new ways. Secondly, when used by children, VR headsets can create physical development issues. On top of that, VR also makes children more vulnerable to cyberbullying, exploitation, and phishing, especially in VR environments that aren’t suited for them, like Horizon Worlds. Regardless, VR keeps growing in popularity. During the 2021 holidays, the Meta Quest 2 VR app hit the #1 spot in the Apple App Store. Between December 23 and December 29, there were 1.5 million Meta Quest installations. Other headsets by Sony, HTC, and Samsung also continue to be popular presents for children and adults alike.
Age restrictions: VR devices compared
Virtual Reality devices are usually not manufactured for kids younger than 13 years old. Below, you can see the official age rating for the most popular VR gaming consoles. It’s important to note that health and safety warnings are often very difficult to find and that the age rating is not clearly visible on all products. Moreover, none of the devices have any hard checks on age restriction: it’s not difficult for children to create a fake account and pretend they’re older. The lack of parental controls on most headsets can also make it challenging to stay properly involved. This means that, in practice, age restrictions don’t keep kids away from VR. They are getting their hands on headsets and finding their way in, anyway, even though most health and safety guidelines advise against letting kids use VR. As a result, child development experts worry about children’s physical and mental health. We’ll discuss the biggest risks below.
Physical Risks of Virtual Reality for Kids
One of the biggest concerns about VR is the potential way it might impact the developing brains of young children. For ethical reasons, it’s difficult to properly test these long-term effects of VR on children. There are all sorts of limitations in place that ensure minors can be safely subjected to an experiment. That’s why research on VR effects on children is limited. Even so, the following risks have been identified by experts.
Visual damage
Virtual reality was not developed with kids in mind; VR headset manufacturers model their devices on adults. Unfortunately, improper fitting can have lasting effects. In order for virtual reality to work, the headset needs to be adjusted to match the distance between a person’s eyes (IPD). For kids, VR doesn’t offer the right IPD, which can cause serious discomfort. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, staring at digital devices, including the screens of VR headsets, puts a strain on your eyes. Adding this to the fact that children won’t generally tell their parents if their IPD is adjusted properly, VR does not offer a healthy visual experience for kids. On top of that, there is the issue of vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). Meta has actually received many complaints about this phenomenon. Generally, when we look at something, our eyes can auto-focus: the eye first points the eyeball at an object (vergence), and then focuses (accommodation). In VR, these two cues are in conflict with one another, which can cause severe strain for adults and kids alike.
Motion sickness
Physically, our bodies respond to VR in much the same way as they do to reality. This means that, if you’re sensitive to motion sickness in real life, you will also experience motion sickness in VR. In general, depth perception is seriously affected by VR; you’re projecting your eyes on something that seems far away, but is only an inch or so away. This can cause nausea and headaches.
Insomnia and sleep deprivation
When you use VR, you tend to blink less than you usually do. Often, it takes a lot of concentration to make sense of what you’re seeing, which forces you to keep your eyes open. This lack of blinking dries out the front surface of your eyes; a common effect of screen time, but one that is amplified when you use VR. For kids, the short-term effects of dry eyes include a higher risk of infection and irritation. The long-term effects, however, can be even more damaging. Dry eyes have been linked to daytime sleepiness, which in turn, can lead to clinical insomnia and complete sleep deprivation down the line. Disrupted sleeping patterns as a result of excessive gaming have their own side effects, including heightened anxiety and even depression.
Hearing damage
Finally, there’s the risk of hearing damage. In order to make VR games more immersive, sound effects can be excessive. The longer a child listens to loud audio, the more it starts to sound normal to them. Long-term damage can be the result. We might expect children to inform parents about their physical discomfort, but for all sorts of reasons, they might not. The younger a child is, the more they’ll struggle to communicate their needs clearly. Even worse, since VR games are so engaging, kids might be so invested they ignore the uncomfortableness.
Mental Risks of Virtual Reality for Kids
Besides physical effects, experts are worried about the mental strain that VR can put on kids. A growing body of research confirms that long exposure to VR can damage children’s mental development in all sorts of ways. Experts have expressed concerns about exposure to violence and misinformation, and they fear that VR users (whether young or old) are made vulnerable to addiction and abuse. Even if VR is technically “not real,” the emotional and physiological effects can be just as strong. Here are the main ways in which VR might affect your child’s mental development.
Trouble differentiating between VR and reality
According to research by Standford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, VR gets stored in the brain’s memory center the same way real-world experiences do. For children, especially young kids, this makes it very challenging to differentiate between what’s real and not. On top of that, a VR environment can have a lingering impact on users, even after they disconnect from it. Your brain first has to adjust to the VR world and then re-align itself again when you return to reality. This can come with certain side effects or after-effects, like lingering aggressive tendencies and fears.
Unsuited or inappropriate content
A lot of VR content is absolutely unsuited for kids. Many VR games or experiences are either 13+ or 18+. They can contain graphic content that, because of the heightened level of immersion, can be very confronting. Some examples can actually be found in the VR section of the PS Store. Exposing children to certain language or visuals can cause fear, anxiety, or extreme stress. On top of that, it can normalize extreme content or desensitize kids to it. The more immersive a VR world is, the more disturbing it can be to children.
VR games are addictive
VR games are designed to be addictive. Though VR guidelines recommend taking regular breaks (10-15 minutes after every half-hour played), without a timer, it’s easy to skip these breaks and play for hours. Since most games don’t have parental controls, this can go unnoticed. Addiction to video games has been associated with depression and anxiety but also increased aggression and sleep deprivation.
Social risks
According to a study by Jakki Bailey of the University of Texas, children use VR in very social ways. In the study, two groups of kids were given little tasks to do by a cartoon character — one in 2D and one in VR. The children in the VR test group were much quicker to obey the character. This makes them more vulnerable to anything from cyberbullying to phishing. It also goes the other way: in VR, every single user is portrayed as a cartoon-like avatar. This dehumanizes people to the extent that it becomes easy to treat them as “objects.” For kids, extended exposure to this type of behavior can turn them into perpetrators of harassment as much as victims. To show how this might happen, we need to look at an example. The popular game Horizon Worlds proves the reality of these risks.
Horizon Worlds: Sexual Exploitation and Harassment in Social VR
Horizon Worlds is an open multiplayer VR game that allows people into a virtual world as avatars. From the get-go, there have been concerns: not only is racist and sexist abuse common, but the game is also flocked with children, despite being 18+. All a child has to do to get into Horizon Worlds is to put on a headset that’s configurated by someone over the age of 18. Once a Meta Quest device is tied to an adult’s Facebook account, kids can access all the same apps. When the Meta Quest 2 got released (as Oculus Quest 2), reviews quickly came rolling in, many of them complaining about the presence of children in Horizon Worlds. Kids are attracted to this world because its graphics are similar to popular games like Roblox or Minecraft. Because Horizon Worlds is a multiplayer game that’s open to pretty much anyone, there is a serious concern about sexual exploitation. In 2020, a record number of 37,872 reports on “online enticement” — adults trying to sexually groom or abuse children online — were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Horizon Worlds lacks moderation
One of the main problems in Horizon Worlds is its lack of moderation. Many VR spaces, including Horizon Worlds, are self-moderated, meaning users are encouraged to control their own experiences. A specific feature meant to help here is the “Safe Zone,” which you can activate by raising your wrist and tapping the “Shield” button with your other hand. This will put you in a protective “bubble,” where others can’t interact with you. If you feel harassed, you can mute, block, or report users here, too. After complaints of insufficiency, Meta implemented the “personal boundary,” which keeps the avatars in Horizon Worlds four feet apart at all times. On top of that, they have recently added a voice feature that allows you to change voice chat coming in from other users into gibberish. However, when it comes to kids, these types of safety measures are not enough. Experts agree that mixing children with adult strangers in any online space opens up the way for online abuse, sexual exploitation, blackmail, and stalking. Research by the Seattle Times further confirms that video games and online chatrooms are “hunting grounds” for predators. Especially when an environment is largely self-regulated and doesn’t have solid systems for reporting, those looking to groom children will take advantage. Another danger is that, even if violation within a game like Horizon Worlds stays at a minimum, kids can be persuaded to leave the VR world and get into contact with predators on other platforms such as Instagram, which is a lot more personal.
Legislation and Responsibility of Tech Companies
Who should be responsible for keeping kids safe online? It might be easy to point at parents, but VR is a relatively new type of technology, one that not all parents are familiar with. Moreover, games like Horizon Worlds don’t have any parental controls. So, what responsibilities should tech companies and legal authorities shoulder? As it turns out, there’s a legislative gap that allows companies to turn a blind eye to teenage users, as well as an ethical conundrum for social media companies when it comes to keeping children safe online. We discuss both in this section.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
Many VR headsets have a 13+ age restriction. Is this because the age of 13 marks a child as responsible and developed enough for VR? Not necessarily. Rather, it’s likely that the 13+ age restriction is in place because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which has been active since 1998. In the United States, COPPA was designed to keep companies from easily obtaining personal data belonging to children under the age of 13. It details what responsibilities a company has when it comes to privacy and data collection on children. COPPA, however, has been criticized for being outdated. Why is this the case?
Liability issues
In the late 1990s, children weren’t widely sharing personal data online. Now, more than twenty years later, tech companies still use COPPA to determine their ethics on this issue, despite the rise of social media and the fact that the online landscape has changed completely. Children, especially teenagers, are more online than ever. COPPA relieves companies of the liability of treating their data with care; it presumes anyone older than 13 must be responsible enough to understand the risks of their own digital footprint. Most teenagers, though, are not this aware, nor are they concerned about their personal data. COPPA allows companies to neglect this reality.
COPPA and VR
For VR, specifically, it’s important to note that vast amounts of biometric data are gathered by this kind of technology. From eye movement to symptoms of “cyber sickness” such as nausea and dizziness, a tech company will be able to keep extensive tabs on users’ physical health. Moreover, as we’ve seen with Horizon Worlds, the minimum age of games often isn’t actually enforced; children’s data, including that of children younger than 13 years old, is constantly being collected without parental consent. COPPA does not provide sufficient legislative protection to justify data mining via VR technology.
Responsibility of tech giants
When talking about tech giants in VR, there’s one company that can’t be left out: Meta. Meta, the parent company of the Meta Quest devices as well as popular social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, has received a lot of criticism in recent years. Struggling with issues surrounding censorship and being accused of leaking data on multiple occasions, the social media platform has been said to willingly target and exploit children. Facebook rejected the accusation that they choose profit over people. They claim they spend over $5 billion per year to keep their platforms safe. But do they? When it comes to regulating or moderating VR, Meta and other tech developers face several challenges.
Limited moderation
Moderation can be done both manually and automatically, but that costs time, manpower, and energy. AI can be used to analyze and process text chat, but it’s much more difficult for artificial moderators to respond effectively to people behaving as they would in reality. After all, how would one accurately scan an avatar’s body language, real-time conversations, and one-on-one interaction between people? In Horizon Worlds, human moderators are sparse. Avatars are around to answer questions if needed, but they don’t enforce age restrictions or respond proactively to everything that happens. To limit negative experiences, the app continually records each user’s experience and stores the last few minutes for review. This, in turn, creates even more concerns when it comes to kids and privacy.
The ultimate dilemma
Tech companies often advocate for wide parameters of freedom on their social media platforms. While codes of conduct exist and a degree of moderation applies to graphic or criminal content, users generally enjoy a lot of liberty. When children are involved, however, pressure to moderate content grows. Censorship that is otherwise criticized is considered ethically responsible when it comes to keeping kids safe online. This creates a tricky dilemma for VR operators and tech giants: in order to protect children from online harm, they’ll have to actively monitor — and indeed, censor — what is happening on their platforms. Yet, this type of surveillance creates bulk data on minors, which, in turn, affects their privacy. This conundrum is not easily solved.
What Can Parents Do?
There are a couple of things parents can do to help their kids navigate the world of virtual reality safely. We would like to offer six useful tips: Finally, it’s important to make sure you discuss family rules with your child upfront and show them that you want to be involved in a positive way — playing together — rather than monitor every second. This goes for the use of parental control software as well. It is okay to use it, but always discuss this with your child and respect their privacy when needed, too. Allow them some independence; being too controlling can backfire.
Best VR For Kids: A More Positive Experience
Children are very eager to play virtual reality games. Most VR content is either 13+ or 18+, but it’s very easy for kids to get past these age restrictions. This can negatively affect their physical and mental health. As a parent, you can take steps to improve your kid’s VR use. If you choose to allow VR into your child’s gaming routine, keep the following tips in mind:
Know the risks of VR and discuss these with your children. Set time limits on VR use. Filter your network to block objectionable content. Cast or sync the virtual reality headset to another device for adult supervision.
Are you looking for more information? Here are some extra resources that might help:
The XR Safety Initiative: This is a non-profit trying to create a safety standard in immersive industries. On their website, you can find guides for parents and guides for children. Social Media Safety for Kids: Some tips we outlined there can also be useful for the VR environment. Advice From Experts: We spoke with multiple experts on online safety for children, and this is what they said. How to Deal With Teenage Sexting: If your child is a bit older already, this article might contain some useful tips for managing their online habits.
Visual strain and hearing damage Dizziness and disorientation Increased anxiety, stress, addiction, and sleep deprivation
Because VR is immersive, the experiences register as real on a neurological level. This is why VR is often age-restricted to 13+ or 18+. Some suspect the restriction also has to do with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA doesn’t allow companies to obtain the personal data of children under 13. Experts fear that any game or world that attracts a lot of kids also piques the interest of predators. Roblox, for example, has similar issues. Horizon Worlds, which is 18+ but frequented by children, is feared to be a “hunting ground” for groomers and abusers. Because VR is difficult to moderate, it’s extra important to keep children out of spaces unsuited for them. If you want to get into the VR game yourself, you can often sync your device to the headset and watch along. Make sure this is a positive experience for your children. If you’re too controlling, it might backfire.
