Having borrowed the gear nearly a week beforehand, I finally found some disposable time to sit down and give my son’s Oculus Quest VR a robust test drive. I was so looking forward to “taking her for a spin”. With great anticipation I held the headgear in my hands, studying how to best don the peculiar looking cap, when suddenly I froze with apprehension.
Looking at the soft surface designed to make a tight fit over my eyes and forehead, I noticed it was particularly dirty, questionably so, and thought to myself “Do I want to clean this darn thing before I put it on?” Given the angst of possibly courting any unwanted and unexpected covidian germs, I slowed down to think it all through, especially given the ugly and scummy surface that lurked distastefully in front of me.
It was then no surprise that this unseemly encounter shifted my thinking towards the thousands of schools/universities that use similar VR or AR headgear, and how the threat of covid-related sanitary issues has already put the kibosh on the use of this technology in classrooms. I wondered “How can schools and universities address this acute hygiene problem?”
I remembered a posting on the nearly 12,000 strong VR/AR Media Group on LinkedIn, to which I paid little attention at first, but which now grew afresh in my mind. Apparently, Uvisan (a UK company) rolled out a noteworthy UVC cabinet touting the highest photobiological safety rating in line with the IEC 62471 standard. I interviewed Anthony Graham, Distribution Manager for Uvisan, who added:
“All of our equipment has RoHS and CE certification and UV efficacy has been subjected to extensive laboratory testing to guarantee maximum effectiveness.”
The history on this product was fascinating to me. Immotion Group, a UK-based out-of-home VR company, had apparently developed a “Pre-covid” UVC cabinet for MGM, owners of Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas as part of a 36 seat motion platform VR Theatre in their their Shark Reef aquarium facility. The ‘disinfecting’ cabinet technology enabled Mandalay to sanitize and simultaneously charge the headsets between showings of Immotion’s undersea VR short films.
Then, as the pandemic spread, Graham recounted “we decided to put the research and effort that went into our cabinets to good use and create Uvisan as a stand-alone solution”. As the Covid crisis expanded, Mr. Graham rationalized that “the short disinfecting cycle, charging and security capabilities made it a perfect fit for many organizations”. Graham underlined that their UV anti-bacterial cleaning cabinets will support much more than VR headsets: tablets, tools, AV equipment, and phone headsets are also now supported. [I would expect that this could also apply, in an educational context, to headphones, earphones, science probes/apparatus, utensils, and other instructional instruments used by waves of students.]
The Uvisan CabinetAs far as the VR origins of this product, Graham noted that “the cabinets were originally designed for VR Headsets, and we have a range of sizes that can house, sanitize and charge 12, 20 and up to 30 headsets, using our specifically placed 254nm low pressure medical-grade UV lamps to give maximum surface coverage.” But he added that the Uvisan cabinets are alternatively able to support up to 100 phones and 50 tablets. I asked Mr. Graham about any educational customers that were using this tool, and he responded “We have Chichester University and London College of the Arts using our cabinets in an educational setting and enquiries from others coming in daily.” He offered this case study on the Chichester implementation.
Some other customers who have found this solution particularly valuable include the VR sport business HADO (who told Graham that “they could not have run a championship event unless they had the cabinet to rapidly sanitize the headsets”) and the British Film Institute, who recently used their cabinets at a VR event which was part of this year’s London Film Festival. Graham is also proud to mention that Uvisan also has a cabinet in place at the Academy for Applied Sciences in Germany. Graham concludes:
“We have a very versatile, safe and effective product and we are now seeing demand coming through from healthcare and industrial partners.”
Now, back to the borrowed and grungy headgear, which I described in the first paragraph. It’s all in the family, I thought, so I put on the soiled HMD on and went ahead with my virtual journey. I am certain I would not do that in an educational institution, however, because no one has any idea where all those little foreheads have been. Fortunately, there are some commercial-grade solutions now available to educational institutions to specifically address these hygiene concerns. – Len Scrogan
