VR Headsets sanitization machines hands-on: Uvisan VRProXS and Cleanbox CX1

Today, I’ll talk about a topic that is of paramount importance: XR headsets’ sanitization. And I’m doing that by going hands-on and comparing two of the leading devices on the market: the Uvisan VRProXS and the Cleanbox CX1.

[Disclaimer: this article has come out of a proposal by Uvisan, which has also provided me with the two machines to perform my hands-on sessions. I’m very thankful to Uvisan for the idea of putting the spotlight on headset sanitization and for having lent me the devices (and for the patience they had with me!). Anyway, I’ll perform this comparison in an objective manner, without taking sides, as usual. This is not a sponsored post, and there has been no monetary compensation for writing it.]

Why is XR headset sanitization important?

Before delving (a word I like to use, even if I’m not an AI) into the actual comparison between Uvisan and Cleanbox, I want to stress why, for me, headset sanitization is so important.

There are two contexts in which you may use an XR headset. The most common one in our community is domestic: you have an XR headset at home, and you use it by yourself, or at maximum you share it with your family. In this case, it is your personal item, or you share it with people with whom you have very close physical contact. So it is just important that you follow some basic hygiene guidelines to avoid the device from becoming too dirty or from becoming the home of a family of spiders (Yes, it happened to various people on Reddit, I guess I have unlocked a new fear in you!).

The second case is that you try a headset in a place where headsets are shared between people. It can be a VR entertainment center, or an XR-related event like AWE, or a training session in your company. In this case, the same headset is shared by multiple people who are not part of the same family. An XR device gets in contact with sensitive areas of the body like the face and the eyes, so if someone has some ongoing infection (e.g. COVID), the headset gets contaminated during his session. And when other people put the headset on their faces after him, they have a high risk of getting the same disease.

If you think this is excessive paranoia, well, you had better know it is not. In June, I attended AWE, and after the event, some people got sick, with some of them complaining on social media that they got COVID. Probably, if all headsets had been sanitized properly, most of them wouldn’t have gotten sick.

So, if you are making a demonstration in a public setting using an XR headset, it is your responsibility to guarantee the safety of your users. Make sure to sanitize it between different usages. At least, use antibacterial wipes on the lenses, controllers, and facemask. But if you can afford it, buy a sanitization machine using UVC lights like the ones offered by Uvisan or Cleanbox: they provide full sterilization, hence the maximum safety possible.

In this article, I’ll show you two of them, the Uvisan VRProXS and the Cleanbox CX1, so you can see how they work and which one could be the best for your use case.

Design

Let’s start this hands-on by comparing the design of Uvisan VRProXS and Cleanbox CX1.

Cleanbox CX1 appears as a fully transparent box, where you can clearly see the headset being sanitized.

On top, there is a hinge to hang your device, so that the central white cylinder can irradiate it with UVC light. There is a front door that opens and closes to let you put in the headset. On the top left of the front face, there is a button to launch/stop the sanitization procedure and a status LED. In my opinion, its fully transparent design makes it appear quite “friendly”.

It’s also lightweight, so it is very easy to move the box wherever you need it. This can be important if you have to do many exhibitions in different locations: the fact that the device is easy to carry is a plus.

Uvisan VRProXS immediately appears as something more business-oriented. It looks more like a device for hospitals: it is white, it is sturdy, and quite heavy. I’ve jokingly said in my YouTube video that it looks like a professional microwave.

The lid of this machine is on top, and it is protected by a grate that filters the UVC rays (this is also similar to the grate on the front door of microwaves, hence my comparison). The machine has an internal big empty area where you can put the elements to sanitize. The interior is all covered in a reflective metallic material (probably aluminum) and features three big light bulbs.

On top of the device, next to the lid, there is a little touchscreen display that you can use to operate the machine. Uviasn VRProXS gave me the impression of being a more solid and resistant machine, but being also heavier, it seemed something that you usually put in one place and stays there for a long time.

Hands-on sanitization

Both machines are very easy to use.

Cleanbox CX1 requires you to connect it to a power outlet. At that point, you can open its door and regulate the hinge where to hang the headset: there are two pairs of screws you can use to make this hinge go up-down and forward-backward. Once the hinge is ready, you can hang the headset by the back part of the strap, so that the main body of the visor goes below the white cylinder that emits the UVC rays.

At this point, everything is ready: you can close the door and press the button that executes the sanitization. The status LED goes from green to red, and you can hear some noise (which resembles a bit of a hair dryer) and see some flashing lights. After one minute, the procedure ends, with the machine stopping operating: the LED goes back to green and you can take out your device, fully sanitized.

Uvisan VRProXS works in a similar way, but with a few additions. You attach the machine to the power outlet and let it turn on. Then you can open the top lid and put your headset inside. There is no preferred way to put your device: Uvisan claims that no matter how you put it, the bouncing UVC rays will sanitize it all. Interestingly, the VRProXS can actually accommodate whatever you want: as long as you don’t make the devices overlap, you can put multiple objects inside. You can put a headset and two controllers, you can put inside two headsets, a headset and a phone, a phone, and a tablet, a laptop and a little toy, etc… The VRProXR is a cabinet that allows you to sanitize whatever you want.

And there are also two USB-A ports inside that let you charge your electronic devices while you sanitize them. I think these are two great pluses of this device.

After you have put the objects to sanitize inside the machine and have optionally connected one or two of them to the charging USB ports, you can close the lid. At that point, you can use the touchscreen display to select how much time to run the sanitization, with the default time being 2 minutes. When you press the start button on the display, you see some blue-ish light turning on in the chest, and the sanitization starts.

Contrarily to the Cleanbox device, there is no noise when operating; the machine is very silent. But I’ve noticed that when the sanitization is finished and I opened the lid to take back the objects, there was some smell… similar to the birthday cake candles when they are turned off. I don’t know if the smell was due to the fact that I used the machine after some weeks it was inactive… for sure it was NOT a sign that the machine was breaking or the elements inside got “cooked”, because all the elements inside showed no signs of issues.

Safety of the procedure

Both machines are pretty safe to operate. Both of them have a safety mechanism that, if you try to open the lid while the sanitization is in progress, they immediately stop the operation to avoid flooding you with UVC rays.

Also both companies claim that their UVC sanitization is of no harm to the elements inside, may they be electronic parts, cloth elements like the straps, or plastic parts like the headset covers. I’ve tried to verify the claim by sanitizing the same headset multiple times with both machines, and I can say that in this small test, I saw no sign of damage happening to my device. With the Uvisan cabinet, I also tried to put inside a phone and a cute toy, and these objects also came out exactly like when I put them inside.

Of course, I can not repeat the test 1 thousand times to verify the long-term claims, but I can tell you that for sure, a few sanitizations have no impact on the devices you put in.

Who performs better sanitization?

Performing a headset sanitization is a bit anticlimactic. You run the procedure for one minute, the device then stops, you take out the headset… and it looks exactly like when you put it in. The fact is: you can’t see the bacteria, so there is no visual proof that the headset is cleaner than before.

That’s why both companies have plenty of lab tests conducted by third parties that testify that the sanitization works. Uvisan, for instance, made a recent analysis together with Dr. Andrew Morris, while Cleanbox boasts having worked closely with Dr. Matt Hardwick. I don’t know anyone of these people, I don’t have their posters in my bedroom, but I’ve been told they are big experts in bacteria and disinfection.

When it came to comparing the performances of the two devices, I felt a bit lost, because I am not a microbiologist and I don’t have a lab to verify how many bacteria are on the headsets (but if I had a lab, for sure, the picture of Dr. Matt Hardwick would be there). So I did the best that I could: I spoke with both companies and tried to understand from them what their strengths are, and how they respond to the claims of the competitor. I started going so deep down the rabbit hole of headset sanitization that probably in the end, it will be Dr. Hardwick having a poster with my face in his office.

As I’ve said, both companies have plenty of lab tests that confirm the fact that 99.999% of bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens are killed by their machines. Depending on the operating times, there could also be some 9 less, or more (e.g. 99.99% for shorter operating times). Uvisan has also made a comparative study through the external lab of Dr. Morris, in which they also verified that Cleanbox performs a 99+% disinfection on the headsets. And if even a competitor confirms that your machine works, it means that it truly works!

So both machines can kill bad microorganisms. But there are some differences in how it happens. In the same study carried on by Dr. Morris, one of the results is that while Uvisan disinfects literally all parts of the device (internal, external, lateral, etc…), the Cleanbox CX1 instead performs a 99%+ disinfection only on the lenses, facemask, and all the front part of the headset. The lateral and rear parts of the device are sanitized only with a 30% efficacy. Of course, the part that goes in contact with the face is the most important one, so it’s the most important to sanitize, and both machines do that perfectly, but the lateral parts of the device are still touched by the users, so they may still cause the transmission of diseases. This difference in the results on the lateral and external parts happens because the machines operate in a different way: Cleanbox illuminates with UVC light mainly the front part of the device, while Uvisan has these big lights that emit many rays that bounce on the metallic reflective surfaces of the box, and by bouncing they end up on all parts of the headset.

This study seems to give an edge to Uvisan, so I asked Cleanbox how they answer these claims. Their answer has been threefold:

• They claim that the straps of the headset are actually disinfected by Cleanbox devices and that there are many studies that prove the efficacy of Cleanbox CX1. I have had access to some of these studies, but not to the ones that quantify the efficacy on the headset straps, though
• They say that if there is a concern that some parts of the headset are not properly cleaned, the headset can be hung in a different way, so that to irradiate more these parts of interest
• They say that the comparison between the Cleanbox CX1 and Uvisan VRProXS is not completely fair because there is another new device by Cleanbox that has features more similar to Uvisan VRProXS, and it is the Cleanbox Omniclean. Cleanbox Omniclean is a machine where you can put inside every device that you want (tablet, phone, etc…) and it gets flooded by UVC rays that completely disinfect it. I agree that this would have been a fairer comparison, because the Omniclean can sanitize whatever object, like the Uvisan VRProXS does. Unluckily, I never had access to a Cleanbox Omniclean

Cleanbox claims instead to have an edge over Uvisan regarding the technology used to emit UVC rays. Cleanbox uses LED lights, which are the new promising technology, while Uvisan uses light bulbs, which have been the standard until now. LEDs are more power efficient, do not contain mercury, are instant-on with no warm-up or cool-down delays, and are very flexible. But most importantly, they can operate at the 265nm wavelength of the UV Spectrum, which is the most effective for pathogen inactivation across a range of pathogens. Uvisan replied that while mercury bulbs are being phased out, the UVC lights used in the healthcare sector are exempt from this. And even if they can’t operate at the optimal wavelength, they emit so much more light when compared to LEDs that in the end, even if this light is slightly less efficient, it is so much more that it manages to do a great job anyway. Uvisan prides the fact that bulbs emit a lot of UVC light, and this is why all objects in the VRProXS become fully disinfected, while LEDs require the object to disinfect to be close to them to perform well.

Uvisan also claims that light bulbs have a longer lifespan. Cleanbox instead claims that LEDs are the ones having a longer longevity. At this point, I got confused, so I searched online, and Google seems to take more the side of LEDs, but there are also some caveats to take into account when talking about the duration of these lights.

Cleanbox also explained to me the reason why its device is so noisy: the CX1 blows air on the headset. This performs a mechanical action that dries a bit the device and blows away some physical dirt, for a more efficient cleaning operation. This is for sure a plus of this machine.

Cleanbox also explained to me that the two devices are not necessarily competitors, but could potentially operate together. In their view of things, the Cleanbox CX1, thanks to its versatility, is the device that you can use for a quick disinfection between consecutive usages. But when the device has to be charged, it can be put into a Uvisan VRProXS for a long disinfection cycle accompanied by a recharging operation.

In general, I enjoyed talking with both companies about this topic: both of them showed they know what they are talking about, and they could explain the choices they have taken when designing their devices. This is, for sure, a good sign of competency.

Price and availability

Both devices are available on the market, and both of them have a similar price of around $2500.

Cleanbox CX1 has an MSRP of $2,495.00. You can get in touch with the company to buy one.

Uvisan VRProXS can be bought by authorized resellers. VR Expert sells it for $2400.

Final considerations

I’ve come out with a positive impression of both devices. They have been made with different design choices and present different tradeoffs. For instance, Cleanbox CX1 seems more modern, portable, and user-friendly, and is able to remove some physical dirt from the headset. Uvisan VRProXS seems to be built on the design of the traditional UVC cabinet used in healthcare; it is more sturdy, effective, and also allows the disinfection of multiple devices together.

I personally don’t think there is a device that is clearly better than the other: you should evaluate which fits you the most depending on your use case. Or maybe, as I have hinted above, you can also use both of them. In any case, remember that the health of your users should be your top priority.

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