How do Fatal Vision® goggles simulate impairment?

Have you ever had someone say, “that’s not what it’s like!” when they try on one of our simulation goggles? Well, they are right. Our goggles won’t make someone feel drunk, high, or concussed. The goggles elicit the behaviors associated with alcohol, concussion, marijuana, opioids, and drowsiness and distraction impairment.

It’s interesting, I’ve demonstrated the alcohol goggles to an adult group and got the “that’s not what it’s like,” comment. Ironically, one of the spectators said, “that’s exactly how you acted last week!”   

We use a variety of technologies to simulate the behaviors of each impairment.   

The Fatal Vision alcohol simulation goggles work by shifting the wearer’s view. The result is that the wearer’s balance and equilibrium are affected, making them stumble and struggle to walk a straight line as if impaired by alcohol.

The marijuana impairments that we demonstrate are: executive function disruption, short term memory problems, slowed perception, and delayed reaction times.  With the Fatal Vision Marijuana Goggle, we achieve impaired behaviors by filtering out the color red.  Yes, we know if someone is consuming marijuana, they can still see red.  What this technique produces is that the wearer misses one visual cue, the color red, and it models a state that causes them to be slower to solve simple problems, slower to perceive traffic situations, and react appropriately to them.   

Concussions cause people to perform poorly in physical activities like a sport or to struggle in school. These concussion goggles shift vision that  induces a visual disconnect, that is, the eyes can’t work together to focus, causing the wearer to stumble when walking a line, have targeting errors when throwing, catching, or performing a simple transfer of balls from one spot on a mat to another. They also cause the wearer to have a slower reaction to simple tasks, card game activities, tracing, and other demonstrations that show how concussions impact a person’s performance academically and in the workplace.

When designing the drowsy and distracted driving goggles, we reviewed studies that showed how drowsiness impacts driving. For example, someone doesn’t necessarily fall asleep and stay asleep. They sleep in waves, called microsleeps. So when a person becomes drowsy, they might close their eyes for a fraction of a second, startle themselves awake, and then close their eyes for a little longer, and repeat the cycle of sleeping, waking, until they finally fall asleep. The lenses on the goggle open and close in timed waves.  The activities that correspond to the goggles show what happens when a person is in this cycle of sleep. We demonstrate distraction by closing the lens of the goggle according to studies that have timed distraction. For example, we close the lens for 5 seconds when demonstrating texting distraction. The wearer experiences how long their attention is diverted from driving while texting.

The Opioid goggle demonstrates divided attention failure and nodding off. We used several techniques to achieve these behaviors.

We added a film to the goggle to demonstrate how someone’s contrast sensitivity is impaired when using opioids   

We  made it hard for the wearer to focus on an activity to demonstrate divided attention failure. We continually change the wearer’s focal point to induce this mental state.   We set up the goggles to close at specific time intervals to achieve the sense of nodding off. We add hand weights to demonstrate the feeling of heaviness that occurs when nodding off.

We specially design activities that are associated with each goggle to highlight the impairments we are simulating.

Our goal is to provide an engaging experience for your audiences to demonstrate the impairment and have them consider the consequences of that impairment.

If you have more questions, please reach out to us. We love to hear from you!

Deb Kusmec
Chief Operating Officer/Product Development