The interest and dissemination of Virtual Reality (VR) is still expanding across multiple domains. While VR has the capacity to revolutionize many different industries and fields, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has also increased awareness of hygiene and safety associated with VR usage. Despite the growing commercial availability of both VR headsets and preventive and disinfection solutions, confirmatory studies required to validate both the efficacy and safety of the different solutions are severely lacking. This paper presents the findings of a survey aimed at gathering information about current hygiene practices in various domains, along with the perception of research availability. Cleaning methods varied among respondents (n=42), but most popular methods consisted of several consecutive solutions. Respondents primarily used anti-bacterial or alcohol disinfection wipes (81%), permanent face covers (leather/silicone) (43%), disposable cover/mask (26%), and UVC light disinfection (26%). 65% of the respondents stated that the Covid-19 pandemic made them change their practices. A majority of respondents remarked that there was a scarcity of research, yet, most respondents were fairly or completely confident that their cleaning protocols were sufficient, despite remarking that it was sometimes not adhered to. The efficacy of VR hygiene solutions and practices remains largely understudied despite the urgent need to establish validated and efficacious cleaning protocols and practices. Current solutions and practices primarily focuses on the inside of the headset, although the outside of the headset may be far more exposed to contaminants through e.g. hand-contact. Further research is needed to define and evaluate context-dependent risk-assessments as well as suitable cleaning protocols for VR-headsets.

Using video games in rehabilitation settings has the potential to provide patients with fun and motivating exercise tools. Within the Medical VR and MxR groups at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, we have been leveraging the technology of the Microsoft Kinect 3D depth-sensing camera. Our Kinect-based rehabilitation game “JewelMine” consists of a set of static balance training exercises which encourage the players to reach out of their base of support. We plan to demonstrate a sophisticated post-session analysis tool and several content themes which can be changed dynamically during a therapy session.

The Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST) is middleware to facilitate integration of full-body control with virtual reality applications and video games using OpenNI-compliant depth sensors (currently the PrimeSensor and the Microsoft Kinect). FAAST incorporates a VRPN server for streaming the user's skeleton joints over a network, which provides a convenient interface for custom virtual reality applications and games. This body pose information can be used for goals such as realistically puppeting a virtual avatar or controlling an on-screen mouse cursor. Additionally, the toolkit also provides a configurable input emulator that detects human actions and binds them to virtual mouse and keyboard commands, which are sent to the actively selected window. Thus, FAAST can enable natural interaction for existing off-the-shelf video games that were not explicitly developed to support input from motion sensors. The actions and input bindings are configurable at run-time, allowing the user to customize the controls and sensitivity to adjust for individual body types and preferences. In the future, we plan to substantially expand FAAST's action lexicon, provide support for recording and training custom gestures, and incorporate real-time head tracking using computer vision techniques.