4 ms·

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%

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.
  - agildehaus 10y ago
    No joke. Some people get sick after playing or watching games on a regular 2D monitor. As for your discomfort after taking the headset off, this is mostly because current VR tech strains the eyes a bit due to everything always being in perfect focus. Here's an optometrist having his first experience with VR and talking about what he thinks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf478Xe9sL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf478Xe9sL8
    - duskwuff 10y ago
      > Some people get sick after playing or watching games on a regular 2D monitor. Yes. It's highly dependent on the game, too; certain games seem very prone to issues. For example, The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game, causes nausea in enough players -- including me! -- that there's a whole section in the configuration for "motion sickness options", like changing the field of view or disabling head bobbing. (FWIW, I was able to play through the game comfortably after switching it to a third-person viewpoint.)
      - jimrandomh 10y ago
        Eek, head bobbing? Having that on by default is a major error for a VR game.
        duskwuff 10y ago
        To be clear this isn't specifically a VR game I'm talking about; it's a (somewhat) mainstream FPS-style game on the PC. Head bob isn't uncommon in these games, but it doesn't usually bother people.
    - smnscu 10y ago
      My wife gets motion sickness by watching even a couple of seconds of a game/video, if the camera is moving e.g. FPS games.
PeterisP 10y ago
The point is that the same VR that doesn't work for a bunch of situations because of nausea can work very well for content created with those limitations in mind. All entertainment works within some constraints of the medium, and things that are great on one medium often are impossible or just bad on other medium. An expert saying "VR won't work for vehicle/racing sims because of acceleration/vestibular issues" is perfectly compatible with VR working great for real customers - if you look at the provided content, then they manage to provide quite a lot of fun and variety while simply avoiding any vehicle/racing sims, probably because of the same issues.
pmoriarty 10y ago
I've personally demoed the Gear VR (via the Iceland flyby demo) to about 80 people. Only two experienced significant nausea. Two or three more reported feeling a little queasy. The rest didn't have any nausea-related problems. A few people reported vertigo, one desperately gripping the chair they were sitting on when they looked down. One literally threw the headset off when some VR dolphins in another demo got too close. These are unusual reactions. I'd say about 90% of the people don't have any problems at all. The consumer Rift should be even more acceptable. Still, these devices are all in their infancy. Expect devices a few generations in to be far, far better than the ones that mostly target early-adopters today. I expect the main challenge to overcome for most users will be comfort. Few people will want to wear these things for long, once the novelty wears off. A lot of people don't even like wearing regular glasses. Wearing these bulky, hot, uncomfortable headsets for extended periods of time will not be worth the trouble for most people, once they get over the gee-whiz factor.
- jhayward 10y ago
  I suspect this is a biased sample. Those of us who have motion sickness susceptibility just won't volunteer for the experience.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
spb 10y ago
I know, right? The skepticism people are putting up toward something that's right there in front of them in the world right now, the amount of back-and-forth that's being treated as justified, is kind of mind-blowing. (I've actually found that seeing the confidence people have in their self-assured dismissals of VR's feasibility has altered the way I perceive the attitudes I encounter in other fields, particularly politics.) Since (nearly) everybody in this thread seems to be under the impression that it's impossible that the vast majority of people who've used the Vive are actually telling the truth about the lack of nausea it incurs, here's one of several weekly videos put out by the developers of Fantastic Contraption, showing people playing their game unimpeded for two and a half hours: https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 In hours and hours and hours of real usage, the only thing about the headset you ever see anybody people in these videos complain about with the headset is sweat.

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.
- agildehaus 10y ago
  No joke. Some people get sick after playing or watching games on a regular 2D monitor. As for your discomfort after taking the headset off, this is mostly because current VR tech strains the eyes a bit due to everything always being in perfect focus. Here's an optometrist having his first experience with VR and talking about what he thinks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf478Xe9sL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf478Xe9sL8
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    > Some people get sick after playing or watching games on a regular 2D monitor. Yes. It's highly dependent on the game, too; certain games seem very prone to issues. For example, The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game, causes nausea in enough players -- including me! -- that there's a whole section in the configuration for "motion sickness options", like changing the field of view or disabling head bobbing. (FWIW, I was able to play through the game comfortably after switching it to a third-person viewpoint.)
    - jimrandomh 10y ago
      Eek, head bobbing? Having that on by default is a major error for a VR game.
      - duskwuff 10y ago
        To be clear this isn't specifically a VR game I'm talking about; it's a (somewhat) mainstream FPS-style game on the PC. Head bob isn't uncommon in these games, but it doesn't usually bother people.
  - smnscu 10y ago
    My wife gets motion sickness by watching even a couple of seconds of a game/video, if the camera is moving e.g. FPS games.

PeterisP 10y ago

The point is that the same VR that doesn't work for a bunch of situations because of nausea can work very well for content created with those limitations in mind. All entertainment works within some constraints of the medium, and things that are great on one medium often are impossible or just bad on other medium. An expert saying "VR won't work for vehicle/racing sims because of acceleration/vestibular issues" is perfectly compatible with VR working great for real customers - if you look at the provided content, then they manage to provide quite a lot of fun and variety while simply avoiding any vehicle/racing sims, probably because of the same issues.

pmoriarty 10y ago

I've personally demoed the Gear VR (via the Iceland flyby demo) to about 80 people. Only two experienced significant nausea. Two or three more reported feeling a little queasy. The rest didn't have any nausea-related problems. A few people reported vertigo, one desperately gripping the chair they were sitting on when they looked down. One literally threw the headset off when some VR dolphins in another demo got too close. These are unusual reactions. I'd say about 90% of the people don't have any problems at all. The consumer Rift should be even more acceptable. Still, these devices are all in their infancy. Expect devices a few generations in to be far, far better than the ones that mostly target early-adopters today. I expect the main challenge to overcome for most users will be comfort. Few people will want to wear these things for long, once the novelty wears off. A lot of people don't even like wearing regular glasses. Wearing these bulky, hot, uncomfortable headsets for extended periods of time will not be worth the trouble for most people, once they get over the gee-whiz factor.

jhayward 10y ago
I suspect this is a biased sample. Those of us who have motion sickness susceptibility just won't volunteer for the experience.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

spb 10y ago

I know, right? The skepticism people are putting up toward something that's right there in front of them in the world right now, the amount of back-and-forth that's being treated as justified, is kind of mind-blowing. (I've actually found that seeing the confidence people have in their self-assured dismissals of VR's feasibility has altered the way I perceive the attitudes I encounter in other fields, particularly politics.) Since (nearly) everybody in this thread seems to be under the impression that it's impossible that the vast majority of people who've used the Vive are actually telling the truth about the lack of nausea it incurs, here's one of several weekly videos put out by the developers of Fantastic Contraption, showing people playing their game unimpeded for two and a half hours: https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623 In hours and hours and hours of real usage, the only thing about the headset you ever see anybody people in these videos complain about with the headset is sweat.