Here’s Why You Must Have TV Insurance If You Have A VR Headset

Do you have a VR headset? Are you Muhammad Ali in VR boxing? Do you live in a house? If the answer is three yes’s, you must ensure that your TV is insured. As amazing as VR is, it blinds us to reality.

Aviva, one of the U.K.’s largest insurance providers, has put forward some numbers that tell us why VR should be played in the open. Aviva says that home content claims that involve VR headsets rose by 31% in the last year. It also says that these claims have increased by 68% in the last 5 years.

Facebook, now Meta, is building a VR ecosystem that is as close to reality as we can imagine. Thanks to that, and a boom in VR content, these headsets have been one of the most common Christmas gifts in the last couple of years.

Head-First into the TV

It’s not funny when your virtual fistfight turns into a real-life headbutt on TV. Or when you think you threw a shuriken at the zombie when you end up busting your screen with one of the controllers.

Aviva says it has received claim requests from people crashing into their televisions while playing a VR game. The average value of such claims is around £650, and TVs are the most commonly damaged items.

This year, one of the claims includes a person who threw a controller into the screen when a zombie jumped him in the game.

I recently tried a friend’s Occulus headset myself, and speaking from personal experience, toppling a glass of water on a laptop keyboard isn’t funny. Virtual reality headsets are immersive, so you should have as much open space around you as possible.

Fun fact, there’s a whole Reddit thread called VRtoER where you can find videos of people bumping into TVs, wrecking showpieces, and punching their relatives in the face, all while on a VR headset.

One of our friends here at Fossbytes spent a week in the Metaverse. Click on the linked article and check out how he did it.