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How big an issue is the nausea problem for VR products?

387 points by BrandiATMuhkuh 10y ago

Kim_Bruning 10y ago
Wouldn't a collimator solve the problem of having the image too close to the eyes? In fact, that's how a hud solves it too.
IshKebab 10y ago
Well, he's obviously wrong because we have it now and it does work. I've tried the Vive an Rift and while some things made me feel a bit sick, it was mostly when the camera moves without your direct control (e.g. in Lucky's Tale). His section about momentum is stupid - the Vive especially allows 1:1 mapping from VR to real life so that isn't an issue. Also, this comment is probably the most stupid thing in there: > Sadly, the $80,000 googles we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick - so this seems unlikely. Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  He's wrong because he's worked with the tech for decades, but you tried it and didn't get sick? The friendly article notes that only about half of users get sick within a few minutes, although most of the rest do as well within an hour. 1:1 mapping from VR to real life is fine if you're walking around a small room (and not puking all over the place). However, it's not fine if you want to anything that involves a more interesting range of motion: driving, flying, even walking in a straight line for more than a few meters. > consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones Remember Google Glass, which was all revolutionary and state of the art in 2013? DARPA had these in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display#MicroOptical_and_MyVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display#M...
  - cma 10y ago
    >The friendly article notes that only about half of users get sick within a few minutes, although most of the rest do as well within an hour. Practically no one gets sick from Vive in 1-1 experiences, which is all the parent said. The article says VR won't work, but really he just means artificial vection won't work. There are also plenty of ways of making vection work by limiting certain things. For example with Vive allowing easy 360 tracking of hand and headset, you can avoid all artificial rotation. Some people only get sick from artificial yaw. Also there are things like FOV restriction you can do during movement which limits vection. Then you can snap back to full FOV once the artificial movement is done and let the user walk around the room again with full FOV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY I would guess the article author is bound by non-competes locked into ancient military contracts and can't get in on the startup action in consumer VR and is just bitter. People are probably asking him what he does at parties, and they say in response, oh I know of Vive and the Rift, and it is getting on his nerves so he is just sort of trolling to lash out. Flight sims with visible horizons do indeed cause tons of motion sickness in a lot of people though. But that doesn't say anything about VR in general.
  - hodwik 10y ago
    Film made everyone sick when it first came out as well. People will get used to the sensation, and get over it, especially as they grow up with it from childhood.
    - dominotw 10y ago
      >Film made everyone sick when it first came out as well. i am really surprised by this. Do you have source for this claim perhaps?
      - Razengan 10y ago
        Well I for one know that the head bob back in DOOM made me nauseous, in a fun way. As did another commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796367
- gedrap 10y ago
  >>> Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones. Any argument for this statement, or just 'I tried Vive and it was great'? It doesn't say anywhere that $80k was a budget but it's rather clear that it was cost of the unit. Sorry, but you just make loads of big claims and all with nothing backing them.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    Yeah I meant budget as in 'budget to make one of them'. The argument is obvious - consumers are the biggest market for displays by a huge margin. The military don't have super-advanced displays that LG and Sony can't match. The military didn't make a 4K 5.5" screen before Sony. They don't have huge display research divisions. I feel like the original author should have to show this $80k low latency, high res VR system before I can disprove it. All I could find was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-rFLlvdD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-rFLlvdD4 It looks shit compared to the Vive. Look at how bad the field of view is! No numbers on latency or resolution but come on. There's almost no chance they're as good. Hell, the technology to get really low latency, like G-Sync and OLED displays didn't even exist until really recently. Just because it's 'military' doesn't mean it is the best.
    - jobigoud 10y ago
      I'm also very skeptical that the military units are as good as the consumer versions we have now. We have predictive tracking and timewarp to reduce the felt latency to virtually zero, does the military unit have that? Full positional audio? I'm sure the military have fine engineers, but do they have John Carmacks, Mike Abrashes, JMP van Waverens, Cass Everitts, etc.?
empath75 10y ago
I've had an oculus for weeks and have none of these problems. I even played Ethan carter without comfort controls and as long as I'm not standing up its fine. Standing up while moving in vr just makes me lose my balance. The only time I've gotten sick at all on vr is playing project cars, and that was only from reversing and going forwards a few times after a wreck. It really sounds like he's basing this on no experience with the current generation of headsets.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  He states in the article that he worked on an Oculus project, and in general has worked with both military and civilian simulators for years. He's basing his conclusions on extensive data.
  - jobigoud 10y ago
    I want to know if he worked on a DK1 or a later headset. If the former then his entire essay is completely moot (no positional tracking).
Sephr 10y ago
They're comparing apples to oranges. The $80,000 military VR headsets of 1989 absolutely did not use OLED or OLED light field displays. They've only recently been available from manufacturers at any price with their current pixel density and refresh rate (OLED has always had amazing response time, but refresh rate has been lacking until recently) specifications. Even the most expensive research OLED panels with high enough pixel densities for VR have only existed since the early-mid '00s. The studies he linked to are from 1989. > Depth perception The author neglects to mention that OLED light field displays have already solved this problem completely. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g The technology already exists (you need a pair of expensive MicroOLED displays and some special lenses), it's just not available at a consumer price point. > Momentum For someone involved with military devices, it's surprising that this guy has never heard of galvanic vestibular stimulation. GVS will never be easy and will always require very, very extensive calibration per-user, but it's still possible to use for simulating perceived movement. This isn't that important for me personally, as I've never experienced VR sickness even when playing fast-paced high-momentum VR games for multiple hours at a time. I could see people who get VR sickness wanting this, as GVS would help prevent it from happening.
- yoo1I 10y ago
  > vestibular stimulation Whoa! I have been kind of watching the whole VR thing from the sidelines, and I didn't expect this to be even anything somebody was even thinking about. Thanks for the hint! Are there any specific projects that you'd think are worth mentioning here ?
  - hodwik 10y ago
    Entrim 4D (out of Samsung's C-Labs) seems to be a bigger one.
- venachescu 10y ago
  I think you're missing the bigger point that he's trying to make - our sensory systems work in concert to provide a full picture of reality and they're very sensitive and extremely well tuned together through a lifetime of experiences. Just providing an accurate projection of the visual field to the eye's doesn't solve the problem completely. Visual perception is not a passive mechanism, our eyes 'explore' the visual field through quick movements and readjustments and this process inherently locks together the proprioceptive signals from the ciliary and ocular muscles to the stream of information from the retina. By only providing screens, we can't simulate this process in a natural way and our body will detect it. Similarly - our vestibular sense is strongly tied to our experiences of our body moving through the world. Just using a blanket stimulation of electrodes on the skin will not recreate these signals in anywhere near a convincing enough manner to fool the brain's perceptual processing. All of our sensory perceptions are strongly linked together - if just one is perturbed in an unconvincing way (try wearing glasses that aren't prescribed to you for a while), our brain will do our "caveman brain" thing and make us sick.
zxcvcxz 10y ago
It will work, it just won't catch on because people don't want to wear shit on their face all day and look like a moron talking to beings 90% of the population can't see. It's just a toy for gamers and developers right now. No telling when the general population will start using VR regularly but probably not until the devices start to look like a regular pair of glasses.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  I'm guessing that the future will be AR. Heads up displays that annotate reality, e.g. turn static printed books and magazines into hyperlinked text you can tap and expand like a Kindle. When the glasses or projection devices become sophisticated enough, the possibilities will be endless.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    Why does one have to exist but not the other? VR and AR solve pretty different things.
- Razengan 10y ago
  > people don't want to _______ all day and look like a moron talking to beings 90% of the population can't see. You mean, like radio and telephone and television and computers and smartphones?
  - putzdown 10y ago
    Oh no. Oh no no no. I think it's pretty clear that VR headsets make you look like a moron at a whole new level. Take away a person's eyes—hide their eyes so that they seem to have none—and you take away a lot. Put them in touch with a private world and you make them even more alien. Radio, telephone, even television can't compete with that level of moron-looking.
    - Razengan 10y ago
      I assure you people said those exact same things when radio, telephone, television and smartphones came on the scene. Since that last one is pretty recent, I'm sure you would remember all the comics and satire around people being absorbed in their iPhones and whatnot.
geon 10y ago
If the focus distance and convergence distance being mismatched would cause nausea, how comes 3D movies have no such issues (at least for the vas majority of viewers - I haven't head anyone complaining)? And if the distance disparity would indicate hallucination and trigger vomiting as a defence mechanism agains shrooms, how comes existing FPS games have no such issues? Some people claimed to have problems playing Mirrors Edge back in 2009, but it seemed like it was mostly the hype and the attention-craving. I myself never felt any issues, and neither did anyone I've talked to.
- etendue 10y ago
  3D movies do cause problems in many people, which is why there is a market for these: http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Turns-movies/dp/B004X4L1UC http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Turns-movies/dp...
  - gruez 10y ago
    I like how the price is $40 when it's just a regular disposable 3d glasses with the same filter on both sides.
- nabla9 10y ago
  People experience dizziness, headaches and nausea in the 3d movies. > how comes existing FPS games have no such issues? People can get very seasick. FPS gamers are self selected group. People who feel nausea stop playing. I often get fever like nausea if I play too long. Not too bad though.
- mistersquid 10y ago
  Anecdotally: I get very nauseous watching or playing FPS's. Watching a friend play _DOOM_ in 1996, playing _Halo_ in the 2010s, playing _Fallout 4_ (on a 65" screen about 2 m distant) today: all these scenarios have induced nausea in me. On more than one occasion, an hour of play has put me in and out sleep for 12 hours.
  - e12e 10y ago
egeozcan 10y ago
I get simulation sickness even from games I play on a 1080p screen from an arm's length away. I couldn't stand a 3D-glass for more than 15 minutes and therefore I'm too afraid to even try the VR headsets more than ten seconds (It gets really bad when it starts with a splitting headache and nausea combined). However, I feel like I'm in the minority on this. No one around me seems to have any trouble watching movies in 3D, for a start. I guess, just as some people aren't fit to operate a vehicle (problem in eyesight or other reasons) there are some who aren't fit to use VR and I really doubt they (we) amount to the mentioned 50%.
- sunwooz 10y ago
  An interesting anecdote - My friend who absolutely cannot play or even watch someone play an FPS game had no problems with the samsung gear(arguably a device on the lower end). You should give it a try and see how you fair.
  - Alphasite_ 10y ago
    I would suggest a positionally tracked headset as the absolute best test case.
- drewrv 10y ago
  My wife gets sick in 3D movies and she can handle the vive surprisingly well. When the image adjusts to your own movements it's less nausea inducing than viewing lots of motion in a movie while sitting still.
  - SolarNet 10y ago
    This actually probably has more to do with the fidelity of rendering in the Vive apps. It's important to remember that due to hunter/gatherer specializations men and women (testosterone and estrogen dominant individuals actually, we tested this with hormone treatment patients that were swapping genders) tend to perceive visual reality differently [0], indeed the eye has the second most (besides genitalia obviously) sex differentiating receptors than anywhere on your body. All of the stuff the OP was talking about with motion sickness and parallax are mostly male concerns (as men use parallax and motion as our primary vision perception systems). Women use shading and lighting as their primary systems; which makes them prone to sickness when those aspects are screwed up (as in older systems) but if rendered with enough fidelity (as we are beginning to be capable of) may not have that problem. At the end of the day, we don't really understand how vision effects different people's brains that well. [0] http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf
fsloth 10y ago
VR for flight sims is a bit different than the designer scenarios that to me seem the most interesting use scenarios of the current fad in VR. An architects experience on hololens: https://youtu.be/70xDCokzAck https://youtu.be/70xDCokzAck Microsoft promo - but I doubt the architect would like to make a total ass of himself. I work in CAD for construction and while not directly involved in Hololens projects people mostly see this as transformational for their clients. So, there might be actual value here but the market has not yet spoken. In previous VR surges designers were not so educated in digital and the workflows were not there. VR was a thing itself - now it's more like a one more view into an established process and dataset - and is actually only an incremental change and not a profound one (and is thus likelier to succeed)
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
The problem with this response is that it's mostly right, but misses enough that it ends up being misguided but for a reason that is unstated. Similar to the author I worked with HMD systems while in the air force, specifically the integrated HUD avionics F35 helmet system. He is correct about the current lack of accommodation (depth perception) and the vestibular mismatch for movement. Other posters discuss vestibular stimulation, without realizing that such stimulation actually induces physical motion. The biological systems are too tightly connected to just simulate physical movement in the brain without a physical reaction. What he misses, which is critical is that certain virtual retinal displays can solve the accommodation and multiple depth object focal lengths. This is the major thing that magic leap has going for it, but while it's hard it's not impossible to do in multiple ways. We have our own multi-depth accommodation vrd patent filing. There is no real solution to the movement problem though... Except to actually work with virtual objects in the real world, AKA augmented reality. So the actual solution to his problem doesn't lie in VR solutions, it's in AR. Until we have sufficient BCI that works around vestibular and ocular pathways we aren't going to see the matrix levels of presence in non AR displays.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >So the actual solution to his problem doesn't lie in VR solutions, it's in AR. In other words, he's still right that VR headsets won't work with current technology.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Yes-ish. The mixed reality continuum doesn't require different displays to provide different types of systems, so the distinction between AR and VR from a hardware implementation standpoint eventually goes away. If you build a VRD for AR then you are 90% of the way towards a combined system that could also work for VR. The trick then is figuring out how to "render black", arguably the hardest challenge for a combined system or even just hmd AR system. So yes, currently it's an issue with current systems but won't always be the case. In terms of locomotion, i agree that you can't get there (at least for systems with 6DOF) through systems that are ocular input only and not have the vergence problem. The caveat being if you can build a fast enough photon to cortex system.
bitL 10y ago
Perspective projection is the problem. Make the following experiment yourself: Stand in front of a tall building/chimney. Now look at the base of the building. Slowly raise your eyes to go from the bottom to the top. You perceive dimensions of the building as the same all the time. Now do the same on camera. You notice the building changes its dimensions as you raise the view. This effect will make you feel sick when you have it right next to your eyes. Brain simply does much more for our perception to work.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  That's just because the camera and your eye's focal range differ. It's trivial to fix.
  - bitL 10y ago
    Not really. Even if you take FOV 60 degress, the artifacts are still there. It's simply a matter of projection based on similar triangles on a plane. Retina is curved, eyes are also micro-moving all the time amongst other things to estimate depth. Perspective projection is the elephant in the room of CG/VR, there were multiple PhDs on how to perceptually correct this but everybody stays with simple affine matrix because it is convenient and 1/z is linear for quick depth comparison. Remember Wolfenstein 3D? Raycasting there didn't deform dimensions of objects. Doom however deforms them. Just start W3D in front of a wall and look left-right. Wall's dimensions don't change. Now do the same in Doom. Vertigo!
    - WalterSear 10y ago
      I stand corrected :)
- jobigoud 10y ago
  Solution: capture the light field of the scene using a renderer with a thin-lens camera model and then reconstruct the correct rays to display in the headset in real time. Oh, wait, we already have the software to do it, while I'm again convinced the military units and projects discussed in OP don't.
JackPoach 10y ago
Time will tell.
tempodox 10y ago
I'm wondering why the Oculus developers didn't take those things into account, especially since they are so well known to experts. The most interesting challenges of VR seem, as of yet, unsolved.
- drewrv 10y ago
  The whole momentum section has been solved. If you take an existing video game where you use a controller to move an avatar that will make you sick, however if you map the games controls 1:1 to the users motion then the problem disappears.
valine 10y ago
> so driving a car while “under the influence” of post-VR disorientation is probably as dangerous as drunk-driving. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. The only evidence cited is that the military issued a warning about driving after exiting a military flight simulator. I'm not questioning that the effects of VR can persist after exiting the simulation, I just don't think they can be compared to the effects of alcohol without significantly more investigation.
45h34jh53k4j 10y ago
One game that seems to work for me in VR is EVE: Valkyrie; An arcade style multiplayer dogfighting in 0G space. As you are in space, the lack of an 'up' feels like you are never at the 'wrong' direction. It took some getting use to doing barrel rolls or adjusting yaw and pitch too quickly. As I improved, the sickness from more complicated manoeuvres subsided. I think that attitudes that VR is somehow dangerous and impossible to be done without sickness are foolish and ignore historical precedent; Many things throughout human development have felt 'unnatural' and required adjustment and training - driving, flying, skydiving, moving pictures; yet humanity has adjusted to these in short course.
- serg_chernata 10y ago
  I think this is a very valid point. Myself coming from elite dangerous and star citizen. The very first thing I noticed was how I can make a choice that there is no up and down, thus I shouldn't keep trying to right myself and it completely changed my dizziness and perception. Whereas certain people can't even watch space flight on a monitor.
putzdown 10y ago
The proof is in the pudding. I'm kind of amazed that the first response to this article is not either: "Correct. We tried Vive/Oculus on 1,000 subjects and 90% were sick within ten minutes," or "Incorrect. We tried it on 1,000 subjects and 10% were sick after 2 hours." Or some other clear test from real players. How can the viability of VR be this speculative this deep into launching to real customers?
- angelbob 10y ago
  Some of that is related to the article talking about differing nausea when synthetic imagery was different distances away -- it depends a lot on what you're looking at.
- exDM69 10y ago
  Yes! This is the kind of research I want to see. And I know that this kind of investigations have been done in private by Oculus and others, and they have honestly admitted in the public that simulator sickness and nausea are issues that need to be worked on. We haven't, however, seen any data in public.
- jimrandomh 10y ago
  Both major VR headset manufacturers have measurements like that, including data on specific optical features which affect the rates of simulator sickness. But I don't think they're sharing any data that's that raw. Anecdotally, I have a Rift, and do not get sim sickness except in rare circumstances involving at least an accelerating viewpoint, and even then not severely and only briefly.
  - yborg 10y ago
    Anecdotally, guy brought his Vive into the office and a half-dozen people including myself tried it out. I mostly tried Into the Blue for about 15 minutes watching the jellyfish. Basically a static perspective and I did not feel any kind of discomfort. The very strange thing was that I felt uncomfortable after I took it off for about 20 min. Another person had more or less the same reaction and was ill enough to actually have to go to the restroom to throw up afterward. Motion sickness tolerance varies a lot of course, I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the percentage who would have this problem with VR, but unlike say, watching a color television, the percentage is not insignificant.
serg_chernata 10y ago
I'm still confused about the price comparison he keeps using. Is that really apples to apples? The Navy may have wanted to sell a dozen of these units at a time whereas oculus and HTC go into true mass production. I was always under the impression that rally limited runs of anything are far more costly per unit.
DoctorBit 10y ago
I don't have a VR headset so I can't speak from direct experience about VR, but I don't buy the author's argument that the disparity between the divergence system and the focusing system makes elimination of nausea impossible. I have two pairs of single-vision prescription glasses: one for walking and driving, and one for looking at computer screens. They have different focusing characteristics, and yet I can switch from one pair to the other without any disabling effects. Hell, I even wear a set of bifocals sometimes and switch back and forth from one second to the next. Some people even like wearing "progressive" lenses that have continuously varying focal lengths from the top of the lens to the bottom of the lens. Lots of people like using reading glasses too; I've never heard of anyone getting sick from that. I think the author is underestimating people's ability to get used to different focal lengths.
4rt 10y ago
i had my only ever car crash the morning after getting my dk2. no excuses, but i'm interested if it might have been related.
TheCoreh 10y ago
He mentioned seasickness as an example, yet people still go on cruises. I think the problem will be "solved" with a combination of improvements in the tech (light field, etc), conditioning (the brain has surprising plasticity, especially if you condition it from a very young age), custom designed applications (to avoid the motion problem), and maybe lots of nausea medication. :-)
- hurbledr 10y ago
  It's worth noting that the folks in the article reporting simulator sickness and long term disorientation are pilots, meaning they have been screened and selected for their endurance and resistance to motion sickness. On top of that, the symptoms they are reporting go well beyond seasickness. Have a look at rowanH's comment in this thread for a better idea of the effects we are talking about. I'd certainly agree that the brain can adjust to using VR, but at what cost? If using VR means losing your depth perception and sense of balance, so that you are walking around bumping into things (or worse driving), then it's probably not going to be worth it for many people, despite how fun it might be.
dark12222000 10y ago
I've got a vive and at this point I've probably spent around 40 hours in it, including a few multi-hour sessions. Before that I played with an early Rift dev kit for several days. The biggest issue is when the world moves without you - Windlands is a big culprit here. In general standing and using controller locomotion so far has been a recipe for nausea. But outside of that, so far everyone who has used my unit (and that's about 20 some people currently) has had a blast. No cases of simulator sickness (and I've only seen two reports of that in the community as a whole so far) and no nausea other than an initial misattempt with Windlands. Sorry, VR is probably here to stay, though whether it goes mainstream will be about whether or not the price can drop quickly.
- super-serial 10y ago
  Yeah this military guy can't see past flight simulators and seated experiences in vehicles. No one gets sick as long as your movement in VR is one-to-one with the real world. Just like when mobile apps came out, existing games didn't work on the new platform. No one wanted to play an FPS on mobile. VR is a new platform and developers have to adjust for what works on it. Games like SPT, holopoint and zenblade get it right. They're all simple games inside a room but they are all create amazing experiences. I've been using my Vive almost every night for weeks and this is definitely here to stay.
- AgentME 10y ago
  I've never had any nausea issues with "room-scale" games where you move around by physically walking and maybe using an instant teleporter wand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7dVaembmgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7dVaembmgc). Everything OP mentions about momentum is a total non-issue in games like this. Can't say I've had any particular problems with judging distances of objects either. I've tried a few different games with controller locomotion (hold the joystick up to move your avatar that you see from forward, etc) and I definitely had some trouble. Part of the trouble was mostly about constantly mixing up whether I should try to use the controller or real movements to move in-game, but also a bit of nausea at times too. >The Google Cardboard VR folks seem to know this and basically suggest that applications make it seem like we’re basically standing still and just turning our heads around (which we really are - so no nausea). That’ll work - but it’s not going to get you an immersive 1st person shooter game…or a car racing game…or…well, pretty much anything immersive. Sure, not all currently-existing game genres will translate well to VR, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing VR is good for.
omarforgotpwd 10y ago
I have a hard time believing that driving after using VR is the same as driving drunk. The problems described are real, but we need to work towards solving them sooner or later so why not now? It will get better and better over time.
jimrandomh 10y ago
This is all just empirically incorrect. VR headsets are already in the hands of consumers, and not causing simulator sickness in the circumstances described. Developers have now had lots of time to experiment and find out what does and doesn't cause it. Accelerating the viewpoint? Yes, that'll affect some people. Placing objects close to the viewpoint? That's completely fine, and the author's idea that this will somehow mess up people's depth perception is flat-out wrong.
- putzdown 10y ago
  And yet a few comments above yours are people saying that Oculus has publicly admitted that there are sickness problems, and anecdotes of a fairly high proportion of people who do get sick. How can there be such wildly different opinions about something that should be factual: real evidence of how current VR rigs affect people playing them for substantial periods with currently available games?
  - agildehaus 10y ago
    The idea is that you can fairly easily, with current hardware, make experiences that don't induce sickness. It's mostly about ensuring the framerate stays high and never moving the viewport for the user. Unfortunately Oculus and HTC/Valve can't stop developers from doing the obvious things that make everyone sick. Dumb developers can and will. Some people get sick simply looking at motion on a 2D monitor. So there will always be people getting sick in these experiences.
tacos 10y ago
In addition to the distance cues the brain derives from eye musculature he mentions, there are also distance cues based on audio perception. This perhaps explains why dramamine has an odd impact on VR motion sickness. The audio tech in this area is pretty weak. Dolby Surround is about "gee whiz" not detailed modeling of environments with customizations for the impulse response of each moviegoer's ear canal. Lots of work to be done.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  We do have positional audio in modern consumer VR headsets. (And I'd bet the military units mentioned in OP don't have it). This goes way beyond binaural audio.
  - tacos 10y ago
    The headphones are pretty bad -- and not isolated. So part of my brain is hearing "living room" while the rest is hearing "wide open space." I posit this contributes to the problem. Also two imperfect immersive sources (video + audio) that each lag is far worse than one. I was glad to see Oculus was tackling the problem... then I got a look at what they were actually doing. Can't say more other than to point out there's a lot more work to be done.
satysin 10y ago
I quite enjoy using the current VR systems, Vive in particular is very impressive although not at all practical for most people. PSVR is impressive and what I think will be the most successful system as it the best value and already has a ~40m user install base where it will "just work". For me the biggest issue is using any of these systems for more than 20-30 minutes is uncomfortable as you have this big unit sat on your face. Whereas when I sit down to game I like to do so for a couple of hours but that just isn't possible (for me) with VR.
aniijbod 10y ago
Using the sweeping assumptions embraced in this article, any 3D games which happen to cause motion sickness (due to the player having 'six degrees of freedom' in zero g) to a non-trivial proportion of players when played on a monitor or TV, such as Descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(video_game) prove unequivocally that 3D games 'will not work' on TVs or monitors.
- mercer 10y ago
  I vaguely recall many alarming articles written about Wolfenstein 3D causing motion sickness (even some talking about how it was permanent somehow), and how big of a problem this would be for 3D shooters. I'm sure we'll be fine eventually.
hurbledr 10y ago
I think the real issue here isn't if or how often VR headsets cause simulator sickness. The real issue is that VR can fuck up your proprioception. If pilots, who are using it relatively infrequently, are having issues lasting for several hours to several days, what sort of issues are gamers going to have when they're using these things daily over the course of years? If I recall correctly, this was one of the biggest issues that Sega ran into with Sega VR. They knew that short term exposure to 3d/VR would shut off some of the cues your body uses for depth perception, and they were concerned that prolonged use might have a more permanent effect. Because of this, their lawyers advised them not to release the product for fear of lawsuits if people suffered permanent damage.
- RowanH 10y ago
  Yes - when you get motion sickness badly it's amazing how bad it is and how long the effects last. I experienced incredibly bad motion sickness at a racetrack once; the ole "vestibular disconnect". I had been gradually improving lap times and went to one circuit which was continual left-right-left-right sequence of corners with very little let up (cornering G's around 1.5). After 3-4 laps I had the cold sweats and had to get out of the car... I tried 3 different sessions to shake it and couldn't. Was dizzy for the remainder of the day wanted to throw up constantly. A good sleep and I came right. The dizziness was horrible - you definitely wouldn't want to have that experience then go on to operate heavy machinery :) In my understanding talking to a scientist friend in that field - everyone has different tolerance levels, but when it happens and your body goes into "caveman mode" the results are horrible. The underlying message in the authors answer (my read) is it's "be careful... you can really mess someone up". After that incident at the track my empathy for motion sickness went up a few notches..
namuol 10y ago
> [the goggles] we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles Dubious. > I believe that the most major problem is with depth perception. We're well on our way to solving this problem. (https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254 https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254) > [The momentum problem] simply cannot be fixed by any means. The laws of physics don’t allow it. The solution is simple. VR experiences would need to be more or less fixed to a small room. AR experiences just don't have this problem.
- so_funny 10y ago
  >nah >wrong >simple lmao retort
- jheriko 10y ago
  > Dubious. I would expect, even a fairly incompetent engineer, to not make such elementary mistakes... its pretty easy stuff to measure, and even more trivial to know if you made the thing to start with :P
  - namuol 10y ago
    And since it's so easy, you'd expect to be provided with some figures -- not to mention actual evidence -- no?
intrasight 10y ago
The authors points about both ocular and vestibular sources of VR nausea are valid, and both will probably be resolved. There are two solution paths: technical and biological. The author spent a bit of time on the technical solutions but none on the biological solutions. The simplest biological solution is one that we all already possess to varying degrees - neural plasticity. The brain is a plastic organ. In young children it is even more plastic. I doubt that the studies have yet been done, but I'd bet that kids trained with high-quality VR goggles from the age of three would not suffer from either form of nausea. Also I doubt that they would suffer from the after-effects of VR. Old-timers like myself will experience nausea. For my wife, it will be so bad that she just won't do it. I expect that the majority of today's adults will reject VR. But as with all things, the children are the future. AR is a different thing entirely. The Hololens holoportation demo was one of the most amazing tech demos I've ever seen. Watching that, you know where the future lies. The gear manufacturers may not like to admit it, but there will likely be a long "arcade" phase to AR entertainment were we pay a visit to a "holodeck" facility that has the half a million dollars in gear which would be required to make this a great experience. I have no problem with that - I already pay to go see a movie or go bowling or to an amusement park.
JayHost 10y ago
A lot of people are selling their Gear VR on Ebay. The Gear VR was a really cool device despite The Oculus software being crap. (Forcing online connectivity for offline app) The device made me sick for hours after I used it personally. Worth it! It seems like people commenting don't want to take in the point of view that VR is just too early at this point. VR is very cool but you don't want to develop for the hype train unless you have the dedication to get over the hurdles and can take a a financial upset.
- Lewton 10y ago
  The Gear VR doesn't have positional tracking. It makes lightyears worth of a difference
bhouston 10y ago
My wife tried Google cardboard and immediately felt really bad and it lasted for a while.
- agildehaus 10y ago
  Cardboard isn't real VR. Honestly. Today's smartphones DO NOT have the proper screens or sensors. You will get sick. Don't force it on others who might not be willing to tolerate that. Google's Daydream is all about creating standards to improve this situation.
noonat 10y ago
I've experienced quite a bit of nausea from goggle only VR products like GearVR. Even the menu was enough to get me sick -- moving my head forward without the menu changing distance with me seemed to make my body think I should feel movement but didn't, or something like that. The nausea in these situations was quite bad and lasted for 30-60 minutes or more after taking off the goggles. But I have to say that the experience was quite a bit different with the room scale VR like the HTC Vive. The only time I experienced any nausea in there was in Hover Junkers. The game has you riding a vehicle with frequent changes in direction at high speeds. This again seemed to be related to the perception of motion without corresponding sensations. But the teleportation used in games like Budget Cuts didn't affect me at all. (There were some disturbing bouts of claustrophobia when I teleported too close to a wall, but that didn't induce any nausea.) At the time that I tried the Vive, I spent about 20 hours total playing with it, spread across probably 4 sessions. I think my longest duration without a break was 6 hours. It was exhausting but not nauseating. The others with me had similar experiences. In fact, one of them normally gets so nauseated by things like this that they have prescription medication for nausea for use while riding in the car -- and they didn't experience any nausea at all.
elliotec 10y ago
Part of me wonders if children are exposed to this technology from a young age, will they experience this type of sickness at all? Like how our parents couldn't figure out a nintendo or can barely open an email, maybe our children will be like "duh dad, you puke after 10 min in VR while I can live here all day!" I think children that grow up on the sea adapt to sea sickness, maybe similar here.
- spyder 10y ago
  "The peak incidence occurs in children under 12 years, but it is uncommon in infants. ... Children under two years old are highly resistant to motion sickness, as they are often supine and do not use visual cues for spatial orientation. Susceptibility peaks around 10–12 years of age." http://www.australianprescriber.com/magazine/32/3/61/3/ http://www.australianprescriber.com/magazine/32/3/61/3/
ausjke 10y ago
I also felt VR will be ended up like what 3D-TV did, that something sounds great initially but can't be adopted for many people, you got dizzy and sick after a while and that is enough to stop using it.
n-gauge 10y ago
I've yet to blow chunks on a vr headset, however in 2015 I came close via a homemade headset for a nexus 7 with the cardboard app 'Drive City Rollercoster' Dispite nearly falling down the stairs with a nexus 7 strapped to my head, (I broke my fall with my left arm) I'm sure this tech will take off this year.
reddytowns 10y ago
What he neglects to mention is both studies raise concerns about simulations of helicopters. From the abstract of the first study: "The simulators which exhibited the highest incidences of sickness were helicopter simulators with cathode ray tube (CRT) infinity optics and six-degrees-of-freedom moving base systems. Of those studied, fixed-wing, fixed-base, dome displays had relatively low incidence of simulator sickness." If you read the second study, the VR environments tested we're exclusively those of piloting helicopters. Since helicopters have a lot of lateral and rotational acceleration, its plausible that this is why the simulation sickness is so great.
stevefeinstein 10y ago
I used to play Doom, and Quake and would have to lie down and curse the developers. It was almost identical to having been on a sailboat in rough seas below deck. It's terrible. I wonder if the same seasickness remedies used on water would work with VR. Frankly, after what I got from games 20 years ago, I'm really afraid more modern realistic VR will be even worse.
- Frenchgeek 10y ago
  For some reason, Wolfenstein 3D did that to me. Except when I tried it on a 286... No idea why.
cm2187 10y ago
I find the problem of the pain in the neck of heavy VR headsets a lot worse than nausea. I get nausea after maybe a couple of hours. But for the neck, I have to remove the headset regularly for it to be bearable.
Wintamute 10y ago
Why then is the HTC Vive Reddit filled with post after post of people having a great time playing games for hours, and very few reports of nausea or sickness? I'm not suggesting we ignore health concerns related to VR, but the huge gulf between the anecdotal evidence post-launch and this guys VR sickness apocalypse make me think something is off.
- SolarNet 10y ago
  Hype, people don't want to up-vote nay-saying (if they even bother to report it), would be my guess (assuming the nausea is actually a serious problem, this would be my explanation).
  - Wintamute 10y ago
    I agree, hype could be an explanation, but it seems unlikely. Multiple multinational companies sink many billions of R&D dollars into fundamentally flawed and dangerous consumer technology. Said consumers, not wanting to accept the truth conspire to almost completely suppress any meaningful spread of reports of the flaw. Feels sorta unlikely to me! That's not really how the world works. Surely the simplest explanation is most likely ... that first gen consumer VR is in most cases "good enough", and a significant minority consumers experience some amount of sickness, but not enough to invalidate the industry?
  - spb 10y ago
    Here's a video of people using the Vive for two and a half hours with no motion sickness, one of several put out by the developers of Fantastic Contraption, every week: https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 Why on Earth are people in this thread putting so much effort into weighing in with their two cents "assuming nausea is actually a serious problem"? I understand that Hacker News loves playing devil's advocate, but devising theories to explain non-existent phenomena is just being tedious.
- rm999 10y ago
  People do talk about it a lot; it's often referred to in an optimistic way: "getting your vr legs", instead of a negative manner. That said, the early adopters of VR are self-selecting and probably the least likely to get nausea. I know a few people who are prime candidates for VR (graphics developers, tech nerds, etc) who either sold their devices or refuse to buy one because they know they'll never get over the nausea. I have no real problems with nausea (or motion sickness in general) and I love my Rift. That said, I do get mild headaches if I play it for more than an hour. So yeah, it's a thing.
stcredzero 10y ago
So we’re continually estimating range using the tensions in two sets of muscles - one for focus, the other for convergence. When the brain gets the right signals, these two mechanisms agree perfectly. Just got my HTC Vive. Nausea isn't a problem for me, but age has definitely made me farsighted. Muscles in my eye might strain to let me focus close, but that's just not happening nowadays. Since this has happened gradually over the years, my brain has gotten used to it. Oddly enough, when I tried the Oculus Rift, I found I could focus more clearly on nearby virtual objects than far away ones. Not only is VR an alternate reality where I can play with force fields and laser beams, it's a reality where my eyes aren't old anymore and work correctly.
personjerry 10y ago
Don't we use regular monitor at short ranges too? Why don't we get motion sickness from them to the same degree?
- styrophone 10y ago
  According to the OP, it's because the distance cues from focal length and disparity are consistent with each other.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I really can't stand most FPS games. So it does happen. Actual ships at sea far much less so.
lhl 10y ago
I can't really this guy too seriously when the bolded "kicker" to his story are citations to studies from 1989. Equipment and research from that time period had latency in the hundreds of milliseconds. (For context, modern studies (2009) show that 5ms latencies are imperceptible in HMDs [1]) I'd be interested to hear what vintage and what specs those $80K headsets really were. Knowing the specs of older $50-100K research HMDs, I have extreme doubts that resolution, latency, or tracking accuracy match today's consumer headsets even (most of the tech stemming from the billions and billions of dollars of investment spent on smartphone development from the past decade). When talking about depth perception, hyperbole like "THAT problem can’t be fixed by any known technological means" (in reference to focal/depth plane projection) is completely inaccurate, and contributes to the feeling of crochety old man ranting. There are multiple VRD and light field solutions being worked on to address the multi/vari-focus issue (my current favorite approach is the micro-lensed near-eye light field displays, although I suspect that barrier-based LFDs will be what gets adopted first). Vection is a big issue, but there's a huge amount of 1:1 motion experiences available, and based on personal/anecdotal experience, most people have no problem spending 15-30m in them w/o having strong adverse effects. Thousands of people have done the 10m+ the Oculus Connect and Vive Experience demos w/ very few issues. Based on that, I believe that for experiences w/o artificial vection, comfort is primarily a software problem at this point, not hardware. Personally, I'm pretty bullish on all the locomotion experiments going on (teleportation, re-orientation, redirection). I'm a bit less convinced on vehicle/cockpit vection w/o linked motion control, but the price is certainly not an issue for high-end military simulators and lots of enthusiasts are making DIY 6DOF simulators. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3095496/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3095496/
wcummings 10y ago
The problem with VR is that it's useless. It's a narcotic distraction.
riprowan 10y ago
As an older consumer I have found that as I age I am more and more sensitive to these sorts of effects. I used to love to play games, now I can only play "unrealistic" games. Anything 1st person makes me sick. This effect gets worse as I age.

387 points by BrandiATMuhkuh 10y ago

Wouldn't a collimator solve the problem of having the image too close to the eyes? In fact, that's how a hud solves it too.

IshKebab 10y ago

Well, he's obviously wrong because we have it now and it does work. I've tried the Vive an Rift and while some things made me feel a bit sick, it was mostly when the camera moves without your direct control (e.g. in Lucky's Tale). His section about momentum is stupid - the Vive especially allows 1:1 mapping from VR to real life so that isn't an issue. Also, this comment is probably the most stupid thing in there: > Sadly, the $80,000 googles we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick - so this seems unlikely. Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones.

jpatokal 10y ago
He's wrong because he's worked with the tech for decades, but you tried it and didn't get sick? The friendly article notes that only about half of users get sick within a few minutes, although most of the rest do as well within an hour. 1:1 mapping from VR to real life is fine if you're walking around a small room (and not puking all over the place). However, it's not fine if you want to anything that involves a more interesting range of motion: driving, flying, even walking in a straight line for more than a few meters. > consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones Remember Google Glass, which was all revolutionary and state of the art in 2013? DARPA had these in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display#MicroOptical_and_MyVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display#M...
- cma 10y ago
  >The friendly article notes that only about half of users get sick within a few minutes, although most of the rest do as well within an hour. Practically no one gets sick from Vive in 1-1 experiences, which is all the parent said. The article says VR won't work, but really he just means artificial vection won't work. There are also plenty of ways of making vection work by limiting certain things. For example with Vive allowing easy 360 tracking of hand and headset, you can avoid all artificial rotation. Some people only get sick from artificial yaw. Also there are things like FOV restriction you can do during movement which limits vection. Then you can snap back to full FOV once the artificial movement is done and let the user walk around the room again with full FOV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY I would guess the article author is bound by non-competes locked into ancient military contracts and can't get in on the startup action in consumer VR and is just bitter. People are probably asking him what he does at parties, and they say in response, oh I know of Vive and the Rift, and it is getting on his nerves so he is just sort of trolling to lash out. Flight sims with visible horizons do indeed cause tons of motion sickness in a lot of people though. But that doesn't say anything about VR in general.
- hodwik 10y ago
  Film made everyone sick when it first came out as well. People will get used to the sensation, and get over it, especially as they grow up with it from childhood.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    >Film made everyone sick when it first came out as well. i am really surprised by this. Do you have source for this claim perhaps?
    - Razengan 10y ago
      Well I for one know that the head bob back in DOOM made me nauseous, in a fun way. As did another commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796367
gedrap 10y ago
>>> Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones. Any argument for this statement, or just 'I tried Vive and it was great'? It doesn't say anywhere that $80k was a budget but it's rather clear that it was cost of the unit. Sorry, but you just make loads of big claims and all with nothing backing them.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Yeah I meant budget as in 'budget to make one of them'. The argument is obvious - consumers are the biggest market for displays by a huge margin. The military don't have super-advanced displays that LG and Sony can't match. The military didn't make a 4K 5.5" screen before Sony. They don't have huge display research divisions. I feel like the original author should have to show this $80k low latency, high res VR system before I can disprove it. All I could find was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-rFLlvdD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-rFLlvdD4 It looks shit compared to the Vive. Look at how bad the field of view is! No numbers on latency or resolution but come on. There's almost no chance they're as good. Hell, the technology to get really low latency, like G-Sync and OLED displays didn't even exist until really recently. Just because it's 'military' doesn't mean it is the best.
  - jobigoud 10y ago
    I'm also very skeptical that the military units are as good as the consumer versions we have now. We have predictive tracking and timewarp to reduce the felt latency to virtually zero, does the military unit have that? Full positional audio? I'm sure the military have fine engineers, but do they have John Carmacks, Mike Abrashes, JMP van Waverens, Cass Everitts, etc.?

empath75 10y ago

I've had an oculus for weeks and have none of these problems. I even played Ethan carter without comfort controls and as long as I'm not standing up its fine. Standing up while moving in vr just makes me lose my balance. The only time I've gotten sick at all on vr is playing project cars, and that was only from reversing and going forwards a few times after a wreck. It really sounds like he's basing this on no experience with the current generation of headsets.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
He states in the article that he worked on an Oculus project, and in general has worked with both military and civilian simulators for years. He's basing his conclusions on extensive data.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  I want to know if he worked on a DK1 or a later headset. If the former then his entire essay is completely moot (no positional tracking).

Sephr 10y ago

They're comparing apples to oranges. The $80,000 military VR headsets of 1989 absolutely did not use OLED or OLED light field displays. They've only recently been available from manufacturers at any price with their current pixel density and refresh rate (OLED has always had amazing response time, but refresh rate has been lacking until recently) specifications. Even the most expensive research OLED panels with high enough pixel densities for VR have only existed since the early-mid '00s. The studies he linked to are from 1989. > Depth perception The author neglects to mention that OLED light field displays have already solved this problem completely. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g The technology already exists (you need a pair of expensive MicroOLED displays and some special lenses), it's just not available at a consumer price point. > Momentum For someone involved with military devices, it's surprising that this guy has never heard of galvanic vestibular stimulation. GVS will never be easy and will always require very, very extensive calibration per-user, but it's still possible to use for simulating perceived movement. This isn't that important for me personally, as I've never experienced VR sickness even when playing fast-paced high-momentum VR games for multiple hours at a time. I could see people who get VR sickness wanting this, as GVS would help prevent it from happening.

yoo1I 10y ago
> vestibular stimulation Whoa! I have been kind of watching the whole VR thing from the sidelines, and I didn't expect this to be even anything somebody was even thinking about. Thanks for the hint! Are there any specific projects that you'd think are worth mentioning here ?
- hodwik 10y ago
  Entrim 4D (out of Samsung's C-Labs) seems to be a bigger one.
venachescu 10y ago
I think you're missing the bigger point that he's trying to make - our sensory systems work in concert to provide a full picture of reality and they're very sensitive and extremely well tuned together through a lifetime of experiences. Just providing an accurate projection of the visual field to the eye's doesn't solve the problem completely. Visual perception is not a passive mechanism, our eyes 'explore' the visual field through quick movements and readjustments and this process inherently locks together the proprioceptive signals from the ciliary and ocular muscles to the stream of information from the retina. By only providing screens, we can't simulate this process in a natural way and our body will detect it. Similarly - our vestibular sense is strongly tied to our experiences of our body moving through the world. Just using a blanket stimulation of electrodes on the skin will not recreate these signals in anywhere near a convincing enough manner to fool the brain's perceptual processing. All of our sensory perceptions are strongly linked together - if just one is perturbed in an unconvincing way (try wearing glasses that aren't prescribed to you for a while), our brain will do our "caveman brain" thing and make us sick.

zxcvcxz 10y ago

It will work, it just won't catch on because people don't want to wear shit on their face all day and look like a moron talking to beings 90% of the population can't see. It's just a toy for gamers and developers right now. No telling when the general population will start using VR regularly but probably not until the devices start to look like a regular pair of glasses.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
I'm guessing that the future will be AR. Heads up displays that annotate reality, e.g. turn static printed books and magazines into hyperlinked text you can tap and expand like a Kindle. When the glasses or projection devices become sophisticated enough, the possibilities will be endless.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Why does one have to exist but not the other? VR and AR solve pretty different things.
Razengan 10y ago
> people don't want to _______ all day and look like a moron talking to beings 90% of the population can't see. You mean, like radio and telephone and television and computers and smartphones?
- putzdown 10y ago
  Oh no. Oh no no no. I think it's pretty clear that VR headsets make you look like a moron at a whole new level. Take away a person's eyes—hide their eyes so that they seem to have none—and you take away a lot. Put them in touch with a private world and you make them even more alien. Radio, telephone, even television can't compete with that level of moron-looking.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    I assure you people said those exact same things when radio, telephone, television and smartphones came on the scene. Since that last one is pretty recent, I'm sure you would remember all the comics and satire around people being absorbed in their iPhones and whatnot.

geon 10y ago

If the focus distance and convergence distance being mismatched would cause nausea, how comes 3D movies have no such issues (at least for the vas majority of viewers - I haven't head anyone complaining)? And if the distance disparity would indicate hallucination and trigger vomiting as a defence mechanism agains shrooms, how comes existing FPS games have no such issues? Some people claimed to have problems playing Mirrors Edge back in 2009, but it seemed like it was mostly the hype and the attention-craving. I myself never felt any issues, and neither did anyone I've talked to.

etendue 10y ago
3D movies do cause problems in many people, which is why there is a market for these: http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Turns-movies/dp/B004X4L1UC http://www.amazon.com/Hank-Greens-2D-Glasses-Turns-movies/dp...
- gruez 10y ago
  I like how the price is $40 when it's just a regular disposable 3d glasses with the same filter on both sides.
nabla9 10y ago
People experience dizziness, headaches and nausea in the 3d movies. > how comes existing FPS games have no such issues? People can get very seasick. FPS gamers are self selected group. People who feel nausea stop playing. I often get fever like nausea if I play too long. Not too bad though.
mistersquid 10y ago
Anecdotally: I get very nauseous watching or playing FPS's. Watching a friend play _DOOM_ in 1996, playing _Halo_ in the 2010s, playing _Fallout 4_ (on a 65" screen about 2 m distant) today: all these scenarios have induced nausea in me. On more than one occasion, an hour of play has put me in and out sleep for 12 hours.
- e12e 10y ago

egeozcan 10y ago

I get simulation sickness even from games I play on a 1080p screen from an arm's length away. I couldn't stand a 3D-glass for more than 15 minutes and therefore I'm too afraid to even try the VR headsets more than ten seconds (It gets really bad when it starts with a splitting headache and nausea combined). However, I feel like I'm in the minority on this. No one around me seems to have any trouble watching movies in 3D, for a start. I guess, just as some people aren't fit to operate a vehicle (problem in eyesight or other reasons) there are some who aren't fit to use VR and I really doubt they (we) amount to the mentioned 50%.

sunwooz 10y ago
An interesting anecdote - My friend who absolutely cannot play or even watch someone play an FPS game had no problems with the samsung gear(arguably a device on the lower end). You should give it a try and see how you fair.
- Alphasite_ 10y ago
  I would suggest a positionally tracked headset as the absolute best test case.
drewrv 10y ago
My wife gets sick in 3D movies and she can handle the vive surprisingly well. When the image adjusts to your own movements it's less nausea inducing than viewing lots of motion in a movie while sitting still.
- SolarNet 10y ago
  This actually probably has more to do with the fidelity of rendering in the Vive apps. It's important to remember that due to hunter/gatherer specializations men and women (testosterone and estrogen dominant individuals actually, we tested this with hormone treatment patients that were swapping genders) tend to perceive visual reality differently [0], indeed the eye has the second most (besides genitalia obviously) sex differentiating receptors than anywhere on your body. All of the stuff the OP was talking about with motion sickness and parallax are mostly male concerns (as men use parallax and motion as our primary vision perception systems). Women use shading and lighting as their primary systems; which makes them prone to sickness when those aspects are screwed up (as in older systems) but if rendered with enough fidelity (as we are beginning to be capable of) may not have that problem. At the end of the day, we don't really understand how vision effects different people's brains that well. [0] http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf

fsloth 10y ago

VR for flight sims is a bit different than the designer scenarios that to me seem the most interesting use scenarios of the current fad in VR. An architects experience on hololens: https://youtu.be/70xDCokzAck https://youtu.be/70xDCokzAck Microsoft promo - but I doubt the architect would like to make a total ass of himself. I work in CAD for construction and while not directly involved in Hololens projects people mostly see this as transformational for their clients. So, there might be actual value here but the market has not yet spoken. In previous VR surges designers were not so educated in digital and the workflows were not there. VR was a thing itself - now it's more like a one more view into an established process and dataset - and is actually only an incremental change and not a profound one (and is thus likelier to succeed)

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

The problem with this response is that it's mostly right, but misses enough that it ends up being misguided but for a reason that is unstated. Similar to the author I worked with HMD systems while in the air force, specifically the integrated HUD avionics F35 helmet system. He is correct about the current lack of accommodation (depth perception) and the vestibular mismatch for movement. Other posters discuss vestibular stimulation, without realizing that such stimulation actually induces physical motion. The biological systems are too tightly connected to just simulate physical movement in the brain without a physical reaction. What he misses, which is critical is that certain virtual retinal displays can solve the accommodation and multiple depth object focal lengths. This is the major thing that magic leap has going for it, but while it's hard it's not impossible to do in multiple ways. We have our own multi-depth accommodation vrd patent filing. There is no real solution to the movement problem though... Except to actually work with virtual objects in the real world, AKA augmented reality. So the actual solution to his problem doesn't lie in VR solutions, it's in AR. Until we have sufficient BCI that works around vestibular and ocular pathways we aren't going to see the matrix levels of presence in non AR displays.

coldtea 10y ago
>So the actual solution to his problem doesn't lie in VR solutions, it's in AR. In other words, he's still right that VR headsets won't work with current technology.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Yes-ish. The mixed reality continuum doesn't require different displays to provide different types of systems, so the distinction between AR and VR from a hardware implementation standpoint eventually goes away. If you build a VRD for AR then you are 90% of the way towards a combined system that could also work for VR. The trick then is figuring out how to "render black", arguably the hardest challenge for a combined system or even just hmd AR system. So yes, currently it's an issue with current systems but won't always be the case. In terms of locomotion, i agree that you can't get there (at least for systems with 6DOF) through systems that are ocular input only and not have the vergence problem. The caveat being if you can build a fast enough photon to cortex system.

bitL 10y ago

Perspective projection is the problem. Make the following experiment yourself: Stand in front of a tall building/chimney. Now look at the base of the building. Slowly raise your eyes to go from the bottom to the top. You perceive dimensions of the building as the same all the time. Now do the same on camera. You notice the building changes its dimensions as you raise the view. This effect will make you feel sick when you have it right next to your eyes. Brain simply does much more for our perception to work.

WalterSear 10y ago
That's just because the camera and your eye's focal range differ. It's trivial to fix.
- bitL 10y ago
  Not really. Even if you take FOV 60 degress, the artifacts are still there. It's simply a matter of projection based on similar triangles on a plane. Retina is curved, eyes are also micro-moving all the time amongst other things to estimate depth. Perspective projection is the elephant in the room of CG/VR, there were multiple PhDs on how to perceptually correct this but everybody stays with simple affine matrix because it is convenient and 1/z is linear for quick depth comparison. Remember Wolfenstein 3D? Raycasting there didn't deform dimensions of objects. Doom however deforms them. Just start W3D in front of a wall and look left-right. Wall's dimensions don't change. Now do the same in Doom. Vertigo!
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    I stand corrected :)
jobigoud 10y ago
Solution: capture the light field of the scene using a renderer with a thin-lens camera model and then reconstruct the correct rays to display in the headset in real time. Oh, wait, we already have the software to do it, while I'm again convinced the military units and projects discussed in OP don't.

JackPoach 10y ago

Time will tell.

tempodox 10y ago

I'm wondering why the Oculus developers didn't take those things into account, especially since they are so well known to experts. The most interesting challenges of VR seem, as of yet, unsolved.

drewrv 10y ago
The whole momentum section has been solved. If you take an existing video game where you use a controller to move an avatar that will make you sick, however if you map the games controls 1:1 to the users motion then the problem disappears.

valine 10y ago

> so driving a car while “under the influence” of post-VR disorientation is probably as dangerous as drunk-driving. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. The only evidence cited is that the military issued a warning about driving after exiting a military flight simulator. I'm not questioning that the effects of VR can persist after exiting the simulation, I just don't think they can be compared to the effects of alcohol without significantly more investigation.

45h34jh53k4j 10y ago

One game that seems to work for me in VR is EVE: Valkyrie; An arcade style multiplayer dogfighting in 0G space. As you are in space, the lack of an 'up' feels like you are never at the 'wrong' direction. It took some getting use to doing barrel rolls or adjusting yaw and pitch too quickly. As I improved, the sickness from more complicated manoeuvres subsided. I think that attitudes that VR is somehow dangerous and impossible to be done without sickness are foolish and ignore historical precedent; Many things throughout human development have felt 'unnatural' and required adjustment and training - driving, flying, skydiving, moving pictures; yet humanity has adjusted to these in short course.

serg_chernata 10y ago
I think this is a very valid point. Myself coming from elite dangerous and star citizen. The very first thing I noticed was how I can make a choice that there is no up and down, thus I shouldn't keep trying to right myself and it completely changed my dizziness and perception. Whereas certain people can't even watch space flight on a monitor.

putzdown 10y ago

The proof is in the pudding. I'm kind of amazed that the first response to this article is not either: "Correct. We tried Vive/Oculus on 1,000 subjects and 90% were sick within ten minutes," or "Incorrect. We tried it on 1,000 subjects and 10% were sick after 2 hours." Or some other clear test from real players. How can the viability of VR be this speculative this deep into launching to real customers?

angelbob 10y ago
Some of that is related to the article talking about differing nausea when synthetic imagery was different distances away -- it depends a lot on what you're looking at.
exDM69 10y ago
Yes! This is the kind of research I want to see. And I know that this kind of investigations have been done in private by Oculus and others, and they have honestly admitted in the public that simulator sickness and nausea are issues that need to be worked on. We haven't, however, seen any data in public.
jimrandomh 10y ago
Both major VR headset manufacturers have measurements like that, including data on specific optical features which affect the rates of simulator sickness. But I don't think they're sharing any data that's that raw. Anecdotally, I have a Rift, and do not get sim sickness except in rare circumstances involving at least an accelerating viewpoint, and even then not severely and only briefly.
- yborg 10y ago
  Anecdotally, guy brought his Vive into the office and a half-dozen people including myself tried it out. I mostly tried Into the Blue for about 15 minutes watching the jellyfish. Basically a static perspective and I did not feel any kind of discomfort. The very strange thing was that I felt uncomfortable after I took it off for about 20 min. Another person had more or less the same reaction and was ill enough to actually have to go to the restroom to throw up afterward. Motion sickness tolerance varies a lot of course, I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the percentage who would have this problem with VR, but unlike say, watching a color television, the percentage is not insignificant.

serg_chernata 10y ago

I'm still confused about the price comparison he keeps using. Is that really apples to apples? The Navy may have wanted to sell a dozen of these units at a time whereas oculus and HTC go into true mass production. I was always under the impression that rally limited runs of anything are far more costly per unit.

DoctorBit 10y ago

I don't have a VR headset so I can't speak from direct experience about VR, but I don't buy the author's argument that the disparity between the divergence system and the focusing system makes elimination of nausea impossible. I have two pairs of single-vision prescription glasses: one for walking and driving, and one for looking at computer screens. They have different focusing characteristics, and yet I can switch from one pair to the other without any disabling effects. Hell, I even wear a set of bifocals sometimes and switch back and forth from one second to the next. Some people even like wearing "progressive" lenses that have continuously varying focal lengths from the top of the lens to the bottom of the lens. Lots of people like using reading glasses too; I've never heard of anyone getting sick from that. I think the author is underestimating people's ability to get used to different focal lengths.

4rt 10y ago

i had my only ever car crash the morning after getting my dk2. no excuses, but i'm interested if it might have been related.

TheCoreh 10y ago

He mentioned seasickness as an example, yet people still go on cruises. I think the problem will be "solved" with a combination of improvements in the tech (light field, etc), conditioning (the brain has surprising plasticity, especially if you condition it from a very young age), custom designed applications (to avoid the motion problem), and maybe lots of nausea medication. :-)

hurbledr 10y ago
It's worth noting that the folks in the article reporting simulator sickness and long term disorientation are pilots, meaning they have been screened and selected for their endurance and resistance to motion sickness. On top of that, the symptoms they are reporting go well beyond seasickness. Have a look at rowanH's comment in this thread for a better idea of the effects we are talking about. I'd certainly agree that the brain can adjust to using VR, but at what cost? If using VR means losing your depth perception and sense of balance, so that you are walking around bumping into things (or worse driving), then it's probably not going to be worth it for many people, despite how fun it might be.

dark12222000 10y ago

I've got a vive and at this point I've probably spent around 40 hours in it, including a few multi-hour sessions. Before that I played with an early Rift dev kit for several days. The biggest issue is when the world moves without you - Windlands is a big culprit here. In general standing and using controller locomotion so far has been a recipe for nausea. But outside of that, so far everyone who has used my unit (and that's about 20 some people currently) has had a blast. No cases of simulator sickness (and I've only seen two reports of that in the community as a whole so far) and no nausea other than an initial misattempt with Windlands. Sorry, VR is probably here to stay, though whether it goes mainstream will be about whether or not the price can drop quickly.

super-serial 10y ago
Yeah this military guy can't see past flight simulators and seated experiences in vehicles. No one gets sick as long as your movement in VR is one-to-one with the real world. Just like when mobile apps came out, existing games didn't work on the new platform. No one wanted to play an FPS on mobile. VR is a new platform and developers have to adjust for what works on it. Games like SPT, holopoint and zenblade get it right. They're all simple games inside a room but they are all create amazing experiences. I've been using my Vive almost every night for weeks and this is definitely here to stay.
AgentME 10y ago
I've never had any nausea issues with "room-scale" games where you move around by physically walking and maybe using an instant teleporter wand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7dVaembmgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7dVaembmgc). Everything OP mentions about momentum is a total non-issue in games like this. Can't say I've had any particular problems with judging distances of objects either. I've tried a few different games with controller locomotion (hold the joystick up to move your avatar that you see from forward, etc) and I definitely had some trouble. Part of the trouble was mostly about constantly mixing up whether I should try to use the controller or real movements to move in-game, but also a bit of nausea at times too. >The Google Cardboard VR folks seem to know this and basically suggest that applications make it seem like we’re basically standing still and just turning our heads around (which we really are - so no nausea). That’ll work - but it’s not going to get you an immersive 1st person shooter game…or a car racing game…or…well, pretty much anything immersive. Sure, not all currently-existing game genres will translate well to VR, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing VR is good for.

omarforgotpwd 10y ago

I have a hard time believing that driving after using VR is the same as driving drunk. The problems described are real, but we need to work towards solving them sooner or later so why not now? It will get better and better over time.

jimrandomh 10y ago

This is all just empirically incorrect. VR headsets are already in the hands of consumers, and not causing simulator sickness in the circumstances described. Developers have now had lots of time to experiment and find out what does and doesn't cause it. Accelerating the viewpoint? Yes, that'll affect some people. Placing objects close to the viewpoint? That's completely fine, and the author's idea that this will somehow mess up people's depth perception is flat-out wrong.

putzdown 10y ago
And yet a few comments above yours are people saying that Oculus has publicly admitted that there are sickness problems, and anecdotes of a fairly high proportion of people who do get sick. How can there be such wildly different opinions about something that should be factual: real evidence of how current VR rigs affect people playing them for substantial periods with currently available games?
- agildehaus 10y ago
  The idea is that you can fairly easily, with current hardware, make experiences that don't induce sickness. It's mostly about ensuring the framerate stays high and never moving the viewport for the user. Unfortunately Oculus and HTC/Valve can't stop developers from doing the obvious things that make everyone sick. Dumb developers can and will. Some people get sick simply looking at motion on a 2D monitor. So there will always be people getting sick in these experiences.

tacos 10y ago

In addition to the distance cues the brain derives from eye musculature he mentions, there are also distance cues based on audio perception. This perhaps explains why dramamine has an odd impact on VR motion sickness. The audio tech in this area is pretty weak. Dolby Surround is about "gee whiz" not detailed modeling of environments with customizations for the impulse response of each moviegoer's ear canal. Lots of work to be done.

jobigoud 10y ago
We do have positional audio in modern consumer VR headsets. (And I'd bet the military units mentioned in OP don't have it). This goes way beyond binaural audio.
- tacos 10y ago
  The headphones are pretty bad -- and not isolated. So part of my brain is hearing "living room" while the rest is hearing "wide open space." I posit this contributes to the problem. Also two imperfect immersive sources (video + audio) that each lag is far worse than one. I was glad to see Oculus was tackling the problem... then I got a look at what they were actually doing. Can't say more other than to point out there's a lot more work to be done.

satysin 10y ago

I quite enjoy using the current VR systems, Vive in particular is very impressive although not at all practical for most people. PSVR is impressive and what I think will be the most successful system as it the best value and already has a ~40m user install base where it will "just work". For me the biggest issue is using any of these systems for more than 20-30 minutes is uncomfortable as you have this big unit sat on your face. Whereas when I sit down to game I like to do so for a couple of hours but that just isn't possible (for me) with VR.

aniijbod 10y ago

Using the sweeping assumptions embraced in this article, any 3D games which happen to cause motion sickness (due to the player having 'six degrees of freedom' in zero g) to a non-trivial proportion of players when played on a monitor or TV, such as Descent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(video_game) prove unequivocally that 3D games 'will not work' on TVs or monitors.

mercer 10y ago
I vaguely recall many alarming articles written about Wolfenstein 3D causing motion sickness (even some talking about how it was permanent somehow), and how big of a problem this would be for 3D shooters. I'm sure we'll be fine eventually.

hurbledr 10y ago

I think the real issue here isn't if or how often VR headsets cause simulator sickness. The real issue is that VR can fuck up your proprioception. If pilots, who are using it relatively infrequently, are having issues lasting for several hours to several days, what sort of issues are gamers going to have when they're using these things daily over the course of years? If I recall correctly, this was one of the biggest issues that Sega ran into with Sega VR. They knew that short term exposure to 3d/VR would shut off some of the cues your body uses for depth perception, and they were concerned that prolonged use might have a more permanent effect. Because of this, their lawyers advised them not to release the product for fear of lawsuits if people suffered permanent damage.

RowanH 10y ago
Yes - when you get motion sickness badly it's amazing how bad it is and how long the effects last. I experienced incredibly bad motion sickness at a racetrack once; the ole "vestibular disconnect". I had been gradually improving lap times and went to one circuit which was continual left-right-left-right sequence of corners with very little let up (cornering G's around 1.5). After 3-4 laps I had the cold sweats and had to get out of the car... I tried 3 different sessions to shake it and couldn't. Was dizzy for the remainder of the day wanted to throw up constantly. A good sleep and I came right. The dizziness was horrible - you definitely wouldn't want to have that experience then go on to operate heavy machinery :) In my understanding talking to a scientist friend in that field - everyone has different tolerance levels, but when it happens and your body goes into "caveman mode" the results are horrible. The underlying message in the authors answer (my read) is it's "be careful... you can really mess someone up". After that incident at the track my empathy for motion sickness went up a few notches..

namuol 10y ago

> [the goggles] we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles Dubious. > I believe that the most major problem is with depth perception. We're well on our way to solving this problem. (https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254 https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254) > [The momentum problem] simply cannot be fixed by any means. The laws of physics don’t allow it. The solution is simple. VR experiences would need to be more or less fixed to a small room. AR experiences just don't have this problem.

so_funny 10y ago
>nah >wrong >simple lmao retort
jheriko 10y ago
> Dubious. I would expect, even a fairly incompetent engineer, to not make such elementary mistakes... its pretty easy stuff to measure, and even more trivial to know if you made the thing to start with :P
- namuol 10y ago
  And since it's so easy, you'd expect to be provided with some figures -- not to mention actual evidence -- no?

intrasight 10y ago

The authors points about both ocular and vestibular sources of VR nausea are valid, and both will probably be resolved. There are two solution paths: technical and biological. The author spent a bit of time on the technical solutions but none on the biological solutions. The simplest biological solution is one that we all already possess to varying degrees - neural plasticity. The brain is a plastic organ. In young children it is even more plastic. I doubt that the studies have yet been done, but I'd bet that kids trained with high-quality VR goggles from the age of three would not suffer from either form of nausea. Also I doubt that they would suffer from the after-effects of VR. Old-timers like myself will experience nausea. For my wife, it will be so bad that she just won't do it. I expect that the majority of today's adults will reject VR. But as with all things, the children are the future. AR is a different thing entirely. The Hololens holoportation demo was one of the most amazing tech demos I've ever seen. Watching that, you know where the future lies. The gear manufacturers may not like to admit it, but there will likely be a long "arcade" phase to AR entertainment were we pay a visit to a "holodeck" facility that has the half a million dollars in gear which would be required to make this a great experience. I have no problem with that - I already pay to go see a movie or go bowling or to an amusement park.

JayHost 10y ago

A lot of people are selling their Gear VR on Ebay. The Gear VR was a really cool device despite The Oculus software being crap. (Forcing online connectivity for offline app) The device made me sick for hours after I used it personally. Worth it! It seems like people commenting don't want to take in the point of view that VR is just too early at this point. VR is very cool but you don't want to develop for the hype train unless you have the dedication to get over the hurdles and can take a a financial upset.

Lewton 10y ago
The Gear VR doesn't have positional tracking. It makes lightyears worth of a difference

bhouston 10y ago

My wife tried Google cardboard and immediately felt really bad and it lasted for a while.

agildehaus 10y ago
Cardboard isn't real VR. Honestly. Today's smartphones DO NOT have the proper screens or sensors. You will get sick. Don't force it on others who might not be willing to tolerate that. Google's Daydream is all about creating standards to improve this situation.

noonat 10y ago

I've experienced quite a bit of nausea from goggle only VR products like GearVR. Even the menu was enough to get me sick -- moving my head forward without the menu changing distance with me seemed to make my body think I should feel movement but didn't, or something like that. The nausea in these situations was quite bad and lasted for 30-60 minutes or more after taking off the goggles. But I have to say that the experience was quite a bit different with the room scale VR like the HTC Vive. The only time I experienced any nausea in there was in Hover Junkers. The game has you riding a vehicle with frequent changes in direction at high speeds. This again seemed to be related to the perception of motion without corresponding sensations. But the teleportation used in games like Budget Cuts didn't affect me at all. (There were some disturbing bouts of claustrophobia when I teleported too close to a wall, but that didn't induce any nausea.) At the time that I tried the Vive, I spent about 20 hours total playing with it, spread across probably 4 sessions. I think my longest duration without a break was 6 hours. It was exhausting but not nauseating. The others with me had similar experiences. In fact, one of them normally gets so nauseated by things like this that they have prescription medication for nausea for use while riding in the car -- and they didn't experience any nausea at all.

elliotec 10y ago

Part of me wonders if children are exposed to this technology from a young age, will they experience this type of sickness at all? Like how our parents couldn't figure out a nintendo or can barely open an email, maybe our children will be like "duh dad, you puke after 10 min in VR while I can live here all day!" I think children that grow up on the sea adapt to sea sickness, maybe similar here.

spyder 10y ago
"The peak incidence occurs in children under 12 years, but it is uncommon in infants. ... Children under two years old are highly resistant to motion sickness, as they are often supine and do not use visual cues for spatial orientation. Susceptibility peaks around 10–12 years of age." http://www.australianprescriber.com/magazine/32/3/61/3/ http://www.australianprescriber.com/magazine/32/3/61/3/

ausjke 10y ago

I also felt VR will be ended up like what 3D-TV did, that something sounds great initially but can't be adopted for many people, you got dizzy and sick after a while and that is enough to stop using it.

n-gauge 10y ago

I've yet to blow chunks on a vr headset, however in 2015 I came close via a homemade headset for a nexus 7 with the cardboard app 'Drive City Rollercoster' Dispite nearly falling down the stairs with a nexus 7 strapped to my head, (I broke my fall with my left arm) I'm sure this tech will take off this year.

reddytowns 10y ago

What he neglects to mention is both studies raise concerns about simulations of helicopters. From the abstract of the first study: "The simulators which exhibited the highest incidences of sickness were helicopter simulators with cathode ray tube (CRT) infinity optics and six-degrees-of-freedom moving base systems. Of those studied, fixed-wing, fixed-base, dome displays had relatively low incidence of simulator sickness." If you read the second study, the VR environments tested we're exclusively those of piloting helicopters. Since helicopters have a lot of lateral and rotational acceleration, its plausible that this is why the simulation sickness is so great.

stevefeinstein 10y ago

I used to play Doom, and Quake and would have to lie down and curse the developers. It was almost identical to having been on a sailboat in rough seas below deck. It's terrible. I wonder if the same seasickness remedies used on water would work with VR. Frankly, after what I got from games 20 years ago, I'm really afraid more modern realistic VR will be even worse.

Frenchgeek 10y ago
For some reason, Wolfenstein 3D did that to me. Except when I tried it on a 286... No idea why.

cm2187 10y ago

I find the problem of the pain in the neck of heavy VR headsets a lot worse than nausea. I get nausea after maybe a couple of hours. But for the neck, I have to remove the headset regularly for it to be bearable.

Wintamute 10y ago

Why then is the HTC Vive Reddit filled with post after post of people having a great time playing games for hours, and very few reports of nausea or sickness? I'm not suggesting we ignore health concerns related to VR, but the huge gulf between the anecdotal evidence post-launch and this guys VR sickness apocalypse make me think something is off.

SolarNet 10y ago
Hype, people don't want to up-vote nay-saying (if they even bother to report it), would be my guess (assuming the nausea is actually a serious problem, this would be my explanation).
- Wintamute 10y ago
  I agree, hype could be an explanation, but it seems unlikely. Multiple multinational companies sink many billions of R&D dollars into fundamentally flawed and dangerous consumer technology. Said consumers, not wanting to accept the truth conspire to almost completely suppress any meaningful spread of reports of the flaw. Feels sorta unlikely to me! That's not really how the world works. Surely the simplest explanation is most likely ... that first gen consumer VR is in most cases "good enough", and a significant minority consumers experience some amount of sickness, but not enough to invalidate the industry?
- spb 10y ago
  Here's a video of people using the Vive for two and a half hours with no motion sickness, one of several put out by the developers of Fantastic Contraption, every week: https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 Why on Earth are people in this thread putting so much effort into weighing in with their two cents "assuming nausea is actually a serious problem"? I understand that Hacker News loves playing devil's advocate, but devising theories to explain non-existent phenomena is just being tedious.
rm999 10y ago
People do talk about it a lot; it's often referred to in an optimistic way: "getting your vr legs", instead of a negative manner. That said, the early adopters of VR are self-selecting and probably the least likely to get nausea. I know a few people who are prime candidates for VR (graphics developers, tech nerds, etc) who either sold their devices or refuse to buy one because they know they'll never get over the nausea. I have no real problems with nausea (or motion sickness in general) and I love my Rift. That said, I do get mild headaches if I play it for more than an hour. So yeah, it's a thing.

stcredzero 10y ago

So we’re continually estimating range using the tensions in two sets of muscles - one for focus, the other for convergence. When the brain gets the right signals, these two mechanisms agree perfectly. Just got my HTC Vive. Nausea isn't a problem for me, but age has definitely made me farsighted. Muscles in my eye might strain to let me focus close, but that's just not happening nowadays. Since this has happened gradually over the years, my brain has gotten used to it. Oddly enough, when I tried the Oculus Rift, I found I could focus more clearly on nearby virtual objects than far away ones. Not only is VR an alternate reality where I can play with force fields and laser beams, it's a reality where my eyes aren't old anymore and work correctly.

personjerry 10y ago

Don't we use regular monitor at short ranges too? Why don't we get motion sickness from them to the same degree?

styrophone 10y ago
According to the OP, it's because the distance cues from focal length and disparity are consistent with each other.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I really can't stand most FPS games. So it does happen. Actual ships at sea far much less so.

lhl 10y ago

I can't really this guy too seriously when the bolded "kicker" to his story are citations to studies from 1989. Equipment and research from that time period had latency in the hundreds of milliseconds. (For context, modern studies (2009) show that 5ms latencies are imperceptible in HMDs [1]) I'd be interested to hear what vintage and what specs those $80K headsets really were. Knowing the specs of older $50-100K research HMDs, I have extreme doubts that resolution, latency, or tracking accuracy match today's consumer headsets even (most of the tech stemming from the billions and billions of dollars of investment spent on smartphone development from the past decade). When talking about depth perception, hyperbole like "THAT problem can’t be fixed by any known technological means" (in reference to focal/depth plane projection) is completely inaccurate, and contributes to the feeling of crochety old man ranting. There are multiple VRD and light field solutions being worked on to address the multi/vari-focus issue (my current favorite approach is the micro-lensed near-eye light field displays, although I suspect that barrier-based LFDs will be what gets adopted first). Vection is a big issue, but there's a huge amount of 1:1 motion experiences available, and based on personal/anecdotal experience, most people have no problem spending 15-30m in them w/o having strong adverse effects. Thousands of people have done the 10m+ the Oculus Connect and Vive Experience demos w/ very few issues. Based on that, I believe that for experiences w/o artificial vection, comfort is primarily a software problem at this point, not hardware. Personally, I'm pretty bullish on all the locomotion experiments going on (teleportation, re-orientation, redirection). I'm a bit less convinced on vehicle/cockpit vection w/o linked motion control, but the price is certainly not an issue for high-end military simulators and lots of enthusiasts are making DIY 6DOF simulators. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3095496/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3095496/

wcummings 10y ago

The problem with VR is that it's useless. It's a narcotic distraction.

riprowan 10y ago

As an older consumer I have found that as I age I am more and more sensitive to these sorts of effects. I used to love to play games, now I can only play "unrealistic" games. Anything 1st person makes me sick. This effect gets worse as I age.