User succumbs to a seizure in virtual reality while other players can only watch | Hacker News Reader

User succumbs to a seizure in virtual reality while other players can only watch

theverge.com

60 pointsatomicnumber124 comments

VRChat was released last year and has been picking up momentum all over the place. If you have not had the chance to see what it's like, it's worth at least checking out as an observer.

The worlds and experiences are reminiscent of Stephenson's Snow Crash or Cline's Ready Player One in so many ways. It's eery, fascinating, and altogether odd.

Add on top of this that spectators, sometimes in the thousands, watch these virtual experiences live on Twitch.tv, and you have a very "we're in the future" feeling.

You can check out plenty of live streams of people experiencing this on Twitch.tv now:

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/VRChat

I wonder why Second Life hasn’t been more aggressive capitalizing on VR. It seems like they were perfectly positioned for it.

The founder of Linden Labs, Philip Rosedale, recently released his new VR only successor to second life, Sansar (https://atlas.sansar.com/). It seems pretty promising.

>The worlds and experiences are reminiscent of Stephenson's Snow Crash or Cline's Ready Player One in so many ways. It's eery, fascinating, and altogether odd.

It looks more like VR Idiocracy to me. Especially if you check out twitch and see donation stuff and stream overlays. It's just a platform for vomiting memes. https://imgur.com/ZkJq1cr

On the other hand, if it were super-serious-Deus-Ex-plotting-the-control-of-the-proletariat-VR-Chat, I don't think I could take that seriously either (and would be quickly overrun with Uganda knuckles anyway).

There's more to it than simply what you see at first glance. Snow Crash and Ready Player One described the experience at length. The freedom of expression, of identity of who or what you could be. The ways that people talk, interact, explore, and represent themselves in the virtual realities of those books is more than just "how it looks." Some concrete examples are pulling up virtual windows to access resources from "outside" the reality, or the multitude of sizes and shapes that people represent themselves with.

The descriptions of what earlier versions of the virtual realities in Snow Crash or Ready Player One were, line up with the basics that VRChat encompasses.

Those are some of the things I was addressing when I said it was reminiscent.

> Rogue Shadow VR says he caught up with the player afterwards on Steam, and that he is doing better now.

Since one of the definitions of "succumb" is "die from the effect of a disease or injury," this title is more than a little clickbaity! Mods, can you potentially edit to "User has seizure..."?

Another is to "fail to resist", and I don't think the title is trying to imply the user died (at least I didn't read it that way at all).

I also associate succumb with die for some reason, although I'm not sure why. Maybe in the newspapers if they say 'x succumbed to their injuries' it would imply that?

If you succumb to cancer or another often fatal disease - "fail to resist" it -- that clearly has to mean death. If you succumb to a cold -- failing to resist it just means you are stuck in bed with a bad cold. So I think it's probably because you are used to hearing it used with more serious illnesses, and in your mind a seizure is closer to cancer than a cold.

You can absolutely die from a seizure. Very appropriate language IMHO.

Misleading headline -- the person managed to survive and didn't "succumb" (die)

  1. To submit to an overpowering force or yield to an overwhelming desire; 
     give up or give in. See 'yield'.
  2. To die, especially from a disease or injury.

Just because "succumb" is euphemistically used to refer to death doesn't mean it's the only meaning. Perhaps "Users suffers a seizure..." would have been a better phrasing though.

Not for driving clicks.

succumb only means failed to prevent it in no way means die, you literally need to add "die" into the sentence to indicate death

succumbed to fear <> die

succumbed to love <> die

etc

What is it with twitch and other game streamers all having crazy colored hair? What am I missing?

Could the VR have triggered the seizure?

That's one aspect I would have expected in the article.

I think it definitely could have, but it's very hard to determine the trigger for a seizure.

It could not be related to any triggers too (audio/visual).

It can only be identified by review of the person who it happened to... The rest of us are just speculating, and no point in that :)

Systems, including VR, should have an option to disable/slowdown fast paced color switching on a end-user level of they are known to be susceptible to seizures with visual triggers

There’s a “Black Mirror” episode in there somewhere...

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