During an interview with Did You Know Gaming, former Nintendo of America associate producer Jim Wornell went into detail about the extreme testing process Nintendo used for the Virtual Boy console.
When they were testing people out for Virtual Boy, they had us go through this… did you ever see the movie Clockwork Orange? The scene where the person’s pinned down in the chair, and they’ve got their eyelids open? That was kind of like what Virtual Boy testing was like. They would dilate our pupils, they would have us sit with our heads in this vice type thing, and they would shine light in our pupils. They would have these plastic rods, they would have them just barely touching our eyes — and they would say ‘okay no matter what, don’t blink for a minute.’
They put us under just the most bizarre tests, just to make sure I guess to make sure the thing was safe to use. They would blow air into our eyes, they would have us play a Virtual Boy test kit for 10-15 minutes, then we’d have to rest. Then they’d dilate our eyes again. 2 or 3 rounds of these just bizarre, inhumane torture tests just to make sure this thing wouldn’t kill me, or blind me, or whatever.
But umm… yeah, it was interesting.
While it sounds extreme, the testing process for VR gaming probably has helped modern Virtual Reality a great deal.