The Oculus Rift is a startup pioneered by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It does what you’d think a virtual reality device would do: it encloses the user’s face, enveloping them in the movie, cat video, or game of their choice.

In an academic sense, Oculus could be incredibly useful. Recently, it was used to play back a real surgery to pre-med students, enabling them to see a real-time surgery up close, something that otherwise is often difficult to achieve.

That said, we already know the effects on our eyes when we’re exposed to screens for long periods of time. So why would the Oculus Rift (or even Google’s cardboard version) be any different? Of course, it hasn’t been around nearly long enough for ocular health issues to emerge, so there is no answer to the question, “Well, how will virtual reality affect my eyes?”

However, Kester Brewin makes an excellent point when he writes, “There are so many worries about how distracted by our phones we are — and here we are moving towards a technology that actively blocks out any other sights and makes us undistractable from our screens [ . . . ]”.

Brewin talks about the ‘battle for our eyes’ as consumers of popular media — and now the ammunition is not just advertising, but the medium for that advertising. The key for all of us should be to put our eye health before our entertainment addiction.