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Background: 100+ hours in Vive, hobbyist VR dev, and 20 demos or so I see two kinds of VR "sickness". 1. There is sickness caused by locomotion implementation

Background: 100+ hours in Vive, hobbyist VR dev, and 20 demos or so I see two kinds of VR "sickness". 1. There is sickness caused by locomotion implementations. Testing seems to indicate there are some people who will just never adjust to these. I really don't think FOV and eye tracking will fix it. I've experienced locomotion sickness in some games, and in all of them I've been able to completely adjust in 1 to 2 hours. That adjustment seems to be relatively permanent as well. I don't think it is a rare trait, but it seems that not everyone can do that. 2. There is this sort of initial "VR Fatigue" where the eye tracking issues might fit in. I've noticed a trend the first or second time people use VR for a real session (1 hour +), it is somewhat common (50%?) they get a little nauseous. I've really just been chalking that up to "new stuff is weird" and the heat the headset puts out. This sort of sickness seems to universally fade quite quickly for people, and could have to do with the head on a pivot thing. From what I've seen, most people find the sweet spot/head pivoting natural almost immediately. TL;DR I spend a lot of time in VR and with people in VR. Eye tracking or larger sweet spots is near the bottom of the list of problems/discomforts.

joshuak 10y ago
Nausea inducing incongruous locomotion is of course an absolute fail. But that is not a problem unique to VR, and for the most part you know it going in if you're likely to get motion sickness. The actual issues with VR of eye fatigue are more subtle, and often hard for users to identify. They simply get an increasingly negative attitude towards the experience over time, and over repeated use. This is why an entire industry can spin up and have what seems like a great product, but have an odd lack of audience. The exact same thing happened with stereo in movies. The technology existed for a long time, but lost favor because it was a subtly unpleasant experience. Avatar and the modern resurgence of stereo has been more successful because of the decision to always converge the subject. Even now many supposedly expert "stereographers" try to emphasis the "stereo" effect by pushing the subject into a different depth from the screen by not converging on the subject. Watch a stereo version of Avatar without 3d glasses. You'll find that 95% of the film is completely watchable without glasses because the subject is always converged, or the shot isn't even stereo.
stephengillie 10y ago
I get motion sick in some games, notably the Half-Life series, unless mouse input smoothing is enabled. I also get motion sick in cars sometimes. Would this be the former type of motion sickness?

joshuak 10y ago

Nausea inducing incongruous locomotion is of course an absolute fail. But that is not a problem unique to VR, and for the most part you know it going in if you're likely to get motion sickness. The actual issues with VR of eye fatigue are more subtle, and often hard for users to identify. They simply get an increasingly negative attitude towards the experience over time, and over repeated use. This is why an entire industry can spin up and have what seems like a great product, but have an odd lack of audience. The exact same thing happened with stereo in movies. The technology existed for a long time, but lost favor because it was a subtly unpleasant experience. Avatar and the modern resurgence of stereo has been more successful because of the decision to always converge the subject. Even now many supposedly expert "stereographers" try to emphasis the "stereo" effect by pushing the subject into a different depth from the screen by not converging on the subject. Watch a stereo version of Avatar without 3d glasses. You'll find that 95% of the film is completely watchable without glasses because the subject is always converged, or the shot isn't even stereo.

stephengillie 10y ago

I get motion sick in some games, notably the Half-Life series, unless mouse input smoothing is enabled. I also get motion sick in cars sometimes. Would this be the former type of motion sickness?