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Cybersickness Could Spell an Early Death for the Metaverse

60 points by bubblehack3r 4y ago

Lapsa 4y ago
some metaverse classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kGoO1fLCU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kGoO1fLCU0
MengerSponge 4y ago
Oh no who could have seen this coming
Ian_Macharia 4y ago
Reminds me of cyberpsychosis in Cyberpunk when you have excessive cybernetics/chrome
lowlevel 4y ago
This surprises me that rather than the absurd notion of living in a metaverse, that the main concern the author is citing is motion sickness. For what it's worth, and this may not apply to everyone but I've been absolutely unable to play any 3D games since Wolfenstein came out as I get extremely sick and disoriented in under 10 minutes. I've had nothing but a good time with VR however and experience no problems at all even after a couple of hours. That being said I will not be visiting this metaverse.
- flockonus 4y ago
  fww no fast paced 3D game (eg Doom, Battlefield) got me sick, but playing VR got me some sort of deeply disturbing motion sickness after 1h of use and it lasted over 12h, so in my experience those are not comparable.
  - tsujamin 4y ago
    this was me an hour after I dropped $500 on my PSVR a few years ago
    - kbrkbr 4y ago
      This. Except for Eagle Flight for some reason.
      - flockonus 4y ago
        I find flying games, or anything that motions on the height axis - really really sickening. I don't think we'll have the solution anytime before brain interfaces like Neuralink being well advanced
  - bsaul 4y ago
    Same here. i had to lie down for 30 min after having played half life 2 with an occulus for an hour. That was to me the major pb with VR adoption, i'm really amazed people don't mention it more anytime Meta is discussed.
    - throw827474737 4y ago
      VR motion sickness is really the norm for most, getting sick by ego-perpective on screen AND not having motion-VR is the surprise...
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      It is a common problem the first time you play a VR game with smooth locomotion. The good thing is that as long as you take breaks and come back to it you will (usually) get over it. It happened to me when playing Boneworks for the first couple of times but now I don't get it even in the most extreme, fast moving games. The only thing that will make me sick is if the display freezes or stutters really badly which is quite rare. For games without smooth locomotion, VR sickness usually isn't a problem unless it's a crap game that stutters or has other problems.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      > i had to lie down for 30 min after having played half life 2 with an occulus for an hour. Honestly, this sort of game is probably a worst-case scenario for motion sickness. Like most FPS games, it's designed around unrealistically fast player movement, which is a recipe for nausea -- and the janky physics and low-resolution models and textures of a nearly 20-year-old game don't help, either.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  I would say your experience is highly unusual.
- PierceJoy 4y ago
  I’ve also had lifelong problems playing 3d games. What I noticed with VR is that if my virtual body and field of view moves with my real body, then I’m generally ok. But if my virtual field of view moves and my real head stays still, then I experience almost immediate vertigo, with motion sickness soon following.
- grumbel 4y ago
  Motion sickness in VR is essentially a solved problem for stationary experiences. The headsets framerate and tracking is good to create a believable simulation of a 3D virtual space and walking around that space feels no different than walking around a real space. Where VR still has issues with motion sickness is whenever you move away from that stationary experience. Most normal games want you to run around, dodge, jump, etc. That doesn't translate well for VR and that's where the motion sickness comes in. When the visuals move around, but your body does not, that creates a disconnect and motion sickness. Games playing on a TV can get away with it, since the TV is only a small rectangle in your field of view, but VR is all encompassing, so that doesn't work that well. There is a good chance that will never be fully solved, but that's not a VR specific problem, but a problem that the real world has just the same, boats and cars still make lots of people sick. The solution is to simply not play those games that require more motion than you can take. And for getting around without visual motion, we already have teleport locomotion in VR, that just zaps you right to where you want to go without having to slowly travel there.
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    >Motion sickness in VR is essentially a solved problem for stationary experiences. Oh really? I have a couple friends who didn't get the memo, apparently.
    - grumbel 4y ago
      Are you sure they are playing the right games (standing/sitting in place, teleport-only, modern headset that isn't a Google Cardboard)? I haven't seen or heard of anybody getting seriously sick after headset went 90Hz and the 6DOF tracking started getting really solid. Back in Oculus DK1 days that was still a serious problem still (3DOF, 60Hz), but once we got the Rift that pretty much disappeared. The wrong games will of course still make people sick, but so will a roller coaster in the real world. That's a game design issue at that point, not a hardware limitation.
phh 4y ago
Even though the subject is real, and has good reasons that it might not be fixable, the article feels very loosely based: The whole experience is based on a precise bespoke VR app. There is no information about it, or the used headset. To be fair that info might be available in the paper, but that's still bespoke app we can't know the quality of. This quote makes me doubt even more: > “If my iPhone doesn’t load a page instantly, I might grumble about it, but that’s the end of it,” Ringgenberg told The Daily Beast. “If my VR app stutters on me, I might physically get sick. That does keep people away from this technology.” This is perfectly true! When it happens on my oculus quest 2, I immediately feel dizzy. BUT I can count the number of times it happened to me over a hundred hours of play on my fingers. (Notably I can reproduce one IO related freeze in Synthriderz' Lindsey Stirling Experience) Also, this article doesn't mention brain rewiring: if we hand over modern smartphones to the average 2002 computer person, they would have no idea how to use it "where's the cursor", " how do I move windows", "why is my screen getting junk on its top without my will", " why isn't there a button to switch programs"? We just upgraded our brains to handle that. Same could happen with VR. I'm definitely not a metaverse advocate, I still fail to see it immersive enough and cheap enough to work, and it requires a huge shift back to actually giving attention (which is ironic considering Facebook killed that attention). But I think the Oculus Quest 2 is an excellent game console (which implies it is not for everyone and that's fine)
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > and it requires a huge shift back to actually giving attention Good point, I hadn't thought about it this way. Will people prefer fake living in the Bahamas over watching other people really living in the Bahamas? It's an interesting question. It'll also require actual interaction without displaying your physical appearance, which Instagram, TikTok and Snap seem to have killed. I do like the idea of digital gatherings though. Being able to chill and interact with a distant family member like they're right next to you is pretty cool.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Interestingly, I just saw someone making an argument on Twitter with respect to VR in education that one of its benefits might be that it would force kids to pay attention and be involved. Not sure I buy it but it's interesting. This of course is also one of the reasons that I wouldn't want it for most business settings. I either don't need immersion that goes beyond video or even just audio for most conversations. Or I actively want to just be partially engaged--most big meetings I'm in.
zelos 4y ago
> "...indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness, and more than one-third of these people experienced severe symptoms." That sounds about right from my anecdata. I enjoy VR, but I have to treat it like drinking: I know it'll make me feel crappy afterwards.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  It does not comport with my experience at all. I run a VR lab at work. I've put hundreds of people through 2 to 3 hour sessions. We interview them before and after and only 10% experience symptoms, with only 10% of those being severe. 90% go through our app, using the Oculus Quest 2, with no problems.
  - zelos 4y ago
    Interesting. Is that (effectively) randomly selected people, or is it opt-in?
  - dagw 4y ago
    In my experience (both professionally and personally) the exact nature of the app matters more than anything else. I can use most VR apps/games no problem, but there are a couple where I have to bail after 2 minutes.
  - Guillaume86 4y ago
    I feel like the number 1 factor is the app locomotion method, and people relating their experience without specifying what method they were experiencing is pretty useless. The commonly called "smooth locomotion" method, aka moving in VR with a joystick like we do in 2d games is the worst to get used to. Natural locomotion (walking in reality to walk in VR) or teleportation does not get people so sick so fast.
    - moron4hire 4y ago
      That's exactly right. And the article mentions that was the method (smooth locomotion) that they used in the study, but then the researcher made some kind of crazy claim that it shouldn't matter.
qwerty456127 4y ago
I think we don't really need a metaVERSE but extensive non-mandatory (so attendants would always be given an alternative) meaningful use of VR in education and art still is a thing I feel enthusiastic about.
ungawatkt 4y ago
I didn't know "motion sickness" needed a new catchy name, but here we are. That said, yeah, there's gonna be a motion sick crowd, it's gonna be notably large, and membership at the moment is effectively random (having done a sport with seasickness, sailing, you'd be surprised who is susceptible to motion sickness despite doing the thing _all the time_). VR is gonna be a tough sell to the masses until this is sorted out more, is my rather non-informed opinion. Complete physical disorientation isn't something that happens often day-to-day.
- deleted 4y ago
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- moron4hire 4y ago
  This is the first time I'm hearing the term "cybersickness". For the last 8 years I've been in this field, everyone has called out "simulator sickness".
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Perhaps we can start calling it metasickness, or meta for short.
- ghaff 4y ago
  To the degree that VR inherently has a significant motion sick crowd that would seem to rule it out for any sort of routine business or educational use.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    The motion sickness happens when moving around in VR without physically moving. In a business scenario you can work around this. There's no need to walk around too much an he teleporting works as a good alternative.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Possibly. To be honest, I'm pretty skeptical of most business uses for VR outside of maybe some training, the ability to walk through designs, etc. I have trouble seeing it for collaboration/meetings in most cases. In a lot of situations I don't really want immersion.
waste_monk 4y ago
There have been various incidents such as [1] where epileptic folk have been targeted with media designed to induce seizures. And I understand there are medical conditions that can cause similar seizures with audio stimulus. I wonder if there are any classes of attack that only become possible using VR? that is, some combination of visual/audio/kinaesthetic inputs that do not occur in the natural world and that would harm a human brain more than a normal induced seizure attack, or affect people who would not normally be susceptible. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-assault-epilepsy-patients-via-computer/ https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-assault-epilepsy-patie...
- grumbel 4y ago
  > I wonder if there are any classes of attack that only become possible using VR? Plenty. All you have to do is let the system slowly drift. Humans aren't very good at keeping track of their orientation and position without visual or tactile reference, so you can basically remote control the human wearing VR. You can move them closer to a wall and than the game can instruct them to punch, broken bones will be the results. Happens plenty of times already simply because people aren't careful enough with setting up the playspace for enough away from obstacles. If you would slowly tilt the VR playspace people would start falling over. Again, happens plenty of times already, even without overly malicious games, just having the game world accelerate (e.g. virtual rollercoaster) will throw people out of balance. For a real world example, see "Richie's Plank Experience", which is famous for causing numerous injuries. The game isn't doing anything too special or trying to be malicious (walk over a virtual plank hanging out of a skyscraper), but due to being targeted at VR first-timers as well as encouraging moving around in the real world, you end up with people jumping head first into TVs. All VR system on the market right now do allow you to setup a dedicated play area, that will automatically show and alert you when leaving it. Games can't override that by normal means, but a malicious game would probably not have that hard of a time to work around that.
JoachimS 4y ago
The article in a short sentence seems to lump AR and VR together. But has there been any studies on motiion sickess related to AR? I naively think that the fact that the user actually (mostly) see the surroundings would make a difference in this regard.
- FieryTransition 4y ago
  I think it depends on the amount of information you shove into a users eyes. The body balances by using the contours of objects seen through the eyes mixed with sensory input of the balancing nerve and touch. So to much overlay might make you sick as well I think.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    Sounds like a failed UI for AR. If you cover up things, not work together with the real word view (including moving, adapting to how the user move the head and match the balance input), you basically would have crappy VR.
    - FieryTransition 4y ago
      I totally agree, though I think it would be interesting to measure/study the amount of interference from an overlay needed to cause sickness. Imagine you have a simplified model which shows the countour of perspective lines and significant objects of a scene, how many of these lines can then be interrupted, overlayed or rerouted before you introduce too much noise in the visual perception and get sick. It would differ from person to person, but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of normal distribution. I don't think there's been many public studies trying to quantify this.
- croon 4y ago
  It depends on whether the "reality" you see is via video a la Quest - and if so, at what responsiveness - or actual reality like with the Hololens.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
I will definitely not be a VR user. The few times I've tried it has always left me wanting to throw up. I suffer from motion sickness, but not massively in real life. Cars can make me feel a bit sick. Boats definitely. VR was the worst.
moron4hire 4y ago
By "sick", the worst cases are feelings of headache, nausea, and dizziness. I've never seen or heard of someone actually throwing up. The most severe cases happen in about 1% of people. It takes actively ignoring growing symptoms and forcing yourself through the experience to get that far. 90% of people have no problem at all. The last 9% of people will feel a mild dizziness. If they take it slow, don't spend more than 15 minutes in their first time, and ramp up usage, they'll be fine. And mostly, this isn't a VR problem. The hardware and OS-level features have eliminated large swaths of the causes of sim sickness. The one they can't solve is application design. The thing that causes sim sickness in people today is artificial locomotion, moving the virtual view without moving the physical body. Moving users without user input, or accelerated linear movement from joystick input. And the article calls out that the test app used joystick movement. This is well known in the industry to cause issues for a large number of people. Yet the author lets the researcher claim "our environment doesn't do anything to cause [simsickness]" without pushback.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I think there's much more chance of an anti-Meta article from The Daily Beast than a pro-Meta one. Or at least the former will receive much less editorial scrutiny, as it's pushing at an open door. Not that I'm a fan of Meta. I'm just also not a fan of articles like this.
meltyness 4y ago
I've been on-board with the tech since oculus was still presenting a prototype with masking tape all over it. There's still a few experiences that will set me off, but it's not like there's no precedent for flushing this out of the ecosystem, Meta publishes and enforces a long list of detailed software guidelines, all of which are a requirement for being published. The worst is when you're facelocked into motion, linear path interpolation into a hard stop without any other cues, that's never pleasant. I suspect height dislocations could be odd for some people, and certainly disregarding scale. These are all forms of lack of detail in environments. Trying to manage the "guardian" is likely another source of complication, once you ram your hand into a doorknob, suddenly you have to manage two worlds, a complicated spinning mess, and a real world that can hurt you, that's disorienting. I would say their model of sensitivity needs to know how you're playing the game. I've driven HL2's "Water Hazard" in full, played VR zero-G 6DOF disc soccer, been dropped down an elevator shaft, none of that batted an eyebrow -- even standing up. (well more than the sickness one would deal with sprinting to end a zombie apocalypse, fun sick)
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Meta publishes and enforces a long list of detailed software guidelines, all of which are a requirement for being published. Isn't this the part where we're all supposed to jump up and down and shout "walled garden!" and "monopoly!" so we can pretend to be all HN counter-culture?
  - meltyness 4y ago
    They're in more of a collude and hope to remain solvent kind of phase I think. I think that crowd only comes around when FAANG unleashes cyberhornets to meet quarterly targets, not when a player pledges on a (presumably serious) seismic shift.
horsestaple 4y ago
I've had many people try my VR headset and people experiencing motion sickness is pretty common. However you can easily train yourself to delay the onset substantially, or even completely cure it. The best thing to do is immediately take off the headset, and orient yourself in the real world until the feeling subsides. Wait at least 10-15 minutes, or even better a full day before trying again, repeat until satisfied with the amount of time you can spend in VR. I've had friends who felt like throwing up after 5 minutes be able to enjoy the experience for hours after a week of this technique. Trying to push through it just makes it worse, and you will develop a psychological barrier or fear which can be very hard to break.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  I thought vestibular vibration was going to fix this problem? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29590147/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29590147/
- netsharc 4y ago
  I was thinking I'd have a problem with it, but actually I tried VR in a hostel in Iceland, and I don't recall feeling sick. Looking back now, I had impacted earwax the whole time I was there, which was also affecting my sense of balance and causing a lot of discomfort...
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I love the illustration. Here's a suggested solution: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/06/29/the-regurgistation https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/06/29/the-regurgista...
jlokier 4y ago
Something I've really disliked in VR is when near a bush or tree full of leaves which are made of polygons hovering in space, or anything else with similarly zero-thickness objects. It feels like being near a bush of razor blades, and if I have to walk through it, especially with polygons clipping near my face, it feels unpleasantly like close to being cut. I can ignore the feeling but it's quite unpleasant. I don't get that (much) when looking at the same thing on a screen. Only when it's through a headset.
disruptiveink 4y ago
Metaverse's biggest adoption issue is simply going to be its association with Meta/Facebook and, to add insult to injury, with Zuckerberg itself. Both the general public and the media have a severe dislike of both Facebook as an institution and Zuckerberg as a person. Honestly bewildering to see Meta push Zuckerberg as the main PR person for the metaverse, do they honestly not know Zuck is extremely uncharismatic and universally hated these days? Or is it simply a "can't say no to the boss" situation? They should have just used Instagram/Whatsapp's branding, get celebrities/influencers for PR, ensure Zuck is never seen anywhere close to a VR headset and it could have been a success. Like this, it's doomed to be another Google Glass, even if it might be cool in theory/practice, no one wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. By associating it with Zuck, they ensured it'll get pooed on for easy Twitter dunks regardless of how good/bad it actually is.
- sunpazed 4y ago
  I can’t help but recall this Cheyenne Dialysis satire whenever I watch Zuck lead a keynote; https://youtu.be/E4jQe9h5v5E https://youtu.be/E4jQe9h5v5E
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oneoff786 4y ago
  You make it seem like Zuck is not the one making the decisions
- peteradio 4y ago
  Doubt this take very much. If the technology is there then the PR won't matter. If the technology is fundamentally unworkable then it's dead in water. It hinges on the technology not the PR.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    The biggest problem here is leadership. The technology is "there" and has been for a while. The problem is that that "there" is not where Zuckerberg wants it to be. Zuckerberg wants to carve his own very specific niche of VR and goes completely tunnel vision on everything else. So instead of exploring the weird and wonderful things VR can do, we end up with those generic legless Facebook avatars that nobody likes. His announcement of legs coming to the Metaverse even had to be faked with a mo-cap suit, not actual in-headset tracking, since that's hard. Meanwhile back in the PCVR space we had full body tracking for years and people running around with it VRChat all the time with their complete custom avatars. Lots of those PR problems wouldn't even happen with better leadership. The requirement for Facebook accounts on Quest2 for example not only caused tons of problems, both practically and in terms of PR, it was also completely unnecessary, as Quest2 didn't have any Facebook specific features worth talking about. And now it's all getting rolled back to how it was before anyway. So many of the problems that Meta is facing wouldn't even exist when they didn't create them in the first place.
oneoff786 4y ago
I feel like they made up this silly term to click bait off of the recent cyberpunk anime’s cyberpsychosis.
tunap 4y ago
I wonder if this could be used to train astronauts for 0g induced motion sickness...?
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
The first iteration of what will eventually turn into Cyberbrain Sclerosis.
dncornholio 4y ago
I really think VR is not the right medium for this kind of 'game'. Movement in VR is still being done with teleportation, it's just not a natural thing to do. VR is best enjoyed sitting, in cockpit games like racing and flying, that's where VR really shines. VR is the reason which got me completely hooked to simracing, which I just couldn't enjoy enough doing on a monitor. I did experience some sickness, but it was very brief. Driving in reverse took me some more time to get used to, but eventually all motion sickness dissapeared.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  For me it's the games that involve your whole body. Dancing games, rhythm games, FPSs. Those are the ones that actually give me that holodeck feeling where you forget it's not real. Racing and flying are rather meh for me since it feels like I'm just sitting in front of a large screen and using a game controller, I can have more fun with that by just sitting in front of my PC. I think it's just different for everyone, just like with regular games everyone has their preferred genres.
  - dncornholio 4y ago
    Agree! I don't have controllers, but yes standing still games also work well. FPS's not so much.
- grumbel 4y ago
  > Movement in VR is still being done with teleportation, it's just not a natural thing to do. It might not be natural, but it's essentially a super power. No need to walk where you want to be, you just point & zap over there instantly. If you play around with it for a while, you start missing that ability in the real world. Now in multiplayer it does get a bit awkward, as other people zapping around does not look natural. Meanwhile introducing a delay into the teleport such that the avatar can play a walk animation feels really unnatural for the teleporting person (VRChat has that option). But that said, I don't really consider it an issue for the social experiences Meta is aiming for, as those social experience aren't happening while zooming around at 50mph, they happen while sitting at a table or a couch. A lot of VRChat social interaction happens with people sitting in front of a mirror, locomotion isn't really that big of a deal there and can largely be done via roomscale movement in the real world.
jleyank 4y ago
But people might not want to face life with a tablet strapped to their face hiding the real world. AR, like the annotations on various sci-fi movies, strikes me as useful. I can see the world and have various levels of detail and explanation overlaid as desired. Miniaturization and micro networking can/will result in glasses that are no more clunky than some styles. This assumes people can properly focus at short range, or that graphics tricks can “fix” the problems of the astigmatic or far-sighted.
cwkoss 4y ago
stop putting cyber in front of words

60 points by bubblehack3r 4y ago

Lapsa 4y ago

some metaverse classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kGoO1fLCU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kGoO1fLCU0

MengerSponge 4y ago

Oh no who could have seen this coming

Ian_Macharia 4y ago

Reminds me of cyberpsychosis in Cyberpunk when you have excessive cybernetics/chrome

lowlevel 4y ago

This surprises me that rather than the absurd notion of living in a metaverse, that the main concern the author is citing is motion sickness. For what it's worth, and this may not apply to everyone but I've been absolutely unable to play any 3D games since Wolfenstein came out as I get extremely sick and disoriented in under 10 minutes. I've had nothing but a good time with VR however and experience no problems at all even after a couple of hours. That being said I will not be visiting this metaverse.

flockonus 4y ago
fww no fast paced 3D game (eg Doom, Battlefield) got me sick, but playing VR got me some sort of deeply disturbing motion sickness after 1h of use and it lasted over 12h, so in my experience those are not comparable.
- tsujamin 4y ago
  this was me an hour after I dropped $500 on my PSVR a few years ago
  - kbrkbr 4y ago
    This. Except for Eagle Flight for some reason.
    - flockonus 4y ago
      I find flying games, or anything that motions on the height axis - really really sickening. I don't think we'll have the solution anytime before brain interfaces like Neuralink being well advanced
- bsaul 4y ago
  Same here. i had to lie down for 30 min after having played half life 2 with an occulus for an hour. That was to me the major pb with VR adoption, i'm really amazed people don't mention it more anytime Meta is discussed.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    VR motion sickness is really the norm for most, getting sick by ego-perpective on screen AND not having motion-VR is the surprise...
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    It is a common problem the first time you play a VR game with smooth locomotion. The good thing is that as long as you take breaks and come back to it you will (usually) get over it. It happened to me when playing Boneworks for the first couple of times but now I don't get it even in the most extreme, fast moving games. The only thing that will make me sick is if the display freezes or stutters really badly which is quite rare. For games without smooth locomotion, VR sickness usually isn't a problem unless it's a crap game that stutters or has other problems.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > i had to lie down for 30 min after having played half life 2 with an occulus for an hour. Honestly, this sort of game is probably a worst-case scenario for motion sickness. Like most FPS games, it's designed around unrealistically fast player movement, which is a recipe for nausea -- and the janky physics and low-resolution models and textures of a nearly 20-year-old game don't help, either.
HyperSane 4y ago
I would say your experience is highly unusual.
PierceJoy 4y ago
I’ve also had lifelong problems playing 3d games. What I noticed with VR is that if my virtual body and field of view moves with my real body, then I’m generally ok. But if my virtual field of view moves and my real head stays still, then I experience almost immediate vertigo, with motion sickness soon following.
grumbel 4y ago
Motion sickness in VR is essentially a solved problem for stationary experiences. The headsets framerate and tracking is good to create a believable simulation of a 3D virtual space and walking around that space feels no different than walking around a real space. Where VR still has issues with motion sickness is whenever you move away from that stationary experience. Most normal games want you to run around, dodge, jump, etc. That doesn't translate well for VR and that's where the motion sickness comes in. When the visuals move around, but your body does not, that creates a disconnect and motion sickness. Games playing on a TV can get away with it, since the TV is only a small rectangle in your field of view, but VR is all encompassing, so that doesn't work that well. There is a good chance that will never be fully solved, but that's not a VR specific problem, but a problem that the real world has just the same, boats and cars still make lots of people sick. The solution is to simply not play those games that require more motion than you can take. And for getting around without visual motion, we already have teleport locomotion in VR, that just zaps you right to where you want to go without having to slowly travel there.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  >Motion sickness in VR is essentially a solved problem for stationary experiences. Oh really? I have a couple friends who didn't get the memo, apparently.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    Are you sure they are playing the right games (standing/sitting in place, teleport-only, modern headset that isn't a Google Cardboard)? I haven't seen or heard of anybody getting seriously sick after headset went 90Hz and the 6DOF tracking started getting really solid. Back in Oculus DK1 days that was still a serious problem still (3DOF, 60Hz), but once we got the Rift that pretty much disappeared. The wrong games will of course still make people sick, but so will a roller coaster in the real world. That's a game design issue at that point, not a hardware limitation.

phh 4y ago

Even though the subject is real, and has good reasons that it might not be fixable, the article feels very loosely based: The whole experience is based on a precise bespoke VR app. There is no information about it, or the used headset. To be fair that info might be available in the paper, but that's still bespoke app we can't know the quality of. This quote makes me doubt even more: > “If my iPhone doesn’t load a page instantly, I might grumble about it, but that’s the end of it,” Ringgenberg told The Daily Beast. “If my VR app stutters on me, I might physically get sick. That does keep people away from this technology.” This is perfectly true! When it happens on my oculus quest 2, I immediately feel dizzy. BUT I can count the number of times it happened to me over a hundred hours of play on my fingers. (Notably I can reproduce one IO related freeze in Synthriderz' Lindsey Stirling Experience) Also, this article doesn't mention brain rewiring: if we hand over modern smartphones to the average 2002 computer person, they would have no idea how to use it "where's the cursor", " how do I move windows", "why is my screen getting junk on its top without my will", " why isn't there a button to switch programs"? We just upgraded our brains to handle that. Same could happen with VR. I'm definitely not a metaverse advocate, I still fail to see it immersive enough and cheap enough to work, and it requires a huge shift back to actually giving attention (which is ironic considering Facebook killed that attention). But I think the Oculus Quest 2 is an excellent game console (which implies it is not for everyone and that's fine)

donkeyd 4y ago
> and it requires a huge shift back to actually giving attention Good point, I hadn't thought about it this way. Will people prefer fake living in the Bahamas over watching other people really living in the Bahamas? It's an interesting question. It'll also require actual interaction without displaying your physical appearance, which Instagram, TikTok and Snap seem to have killed. I do like the idea of digital gatherings though. Being able to chill and interact with a distant family member like they're right next to you is pretty cool.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Interestingly, I just saw someone making an argument on Twitter with respect to VR in education that one of its benefits might be that it would force kids to pay attention and be involved. Not sure I buy it but it's interesting. This of course is also one of the reasons that I wouldn't want it for most business settings. I either don't need immersion that goes beyond video or even just audio for most conversations. Or I actively want to just be partially engaged--most big meetings I'm in.

zelos 4y ago

> "...indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness, and more than one-third of these people experienced severe symptoms." That sounds about right from my anecdata. I enjoy VR, but I have to treat it like drinking: I know it'll make me feel crappy afterwards.

moron4hire 4y ago
It does not comport with my experience at all. I run a VR lab at work. I've put hundreds of people through 2 to 3 hour sessions. We interview them before and after and only 10% experience symptoms, with only 10% of those being severe. 90% go through our app, using the Oculus Quest 2, with no problems.
- zelos 4y ago
  Interesting. Is that (effectively) randomly selected people, or is it opt-in?
- dagw 4y ago
  In my experience (both professionally and personally) the exact nature of the app matters more than anything else. I can use most VR apps/games no problem, but there are a couple where I have to bail after 2 minutes.
- Guillaume86 4y ago
  I feel like the number 1 factor is the app locomotion method, and people relating their experience without specifying what method they were experiencing is pretty useless. The commonly called "smooth locomotion" method, aka moving in VR with a joystick like we do in 2d games is the worst to get used to. Natural locomotion (walking in reality to walk in VR) or teleportation does not get people so sick so fast.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    That's exactly right. And the article mentions that was the method (smooth locomotion) that they used in the study, but then the researcher made some kind of crazy claim that it shouldn't matter.

qwerty456127 4y ago

I think we don't really need a metaVERSE but extensive non-mandatory (so attendants would always be given an alternative) meaningful use of VR in education and art still is a thing I feel enthusiastic about.

ungawatkt 4y ago

I didn't know "motion sickness" needed a new catchy name, but here we are. That said, yeah, there's gonna be a motion sick crowd, it's gonna be notably large, and membership at the moment is effectively random (having done a sport with seasickness, sailing, you'd be surprised who is susceptible to motion sickness despite doing the thing _all the time_). VR is gonna be a tough sell to the masses until this is sorted out more, is my rather non-informed opinion. Complete physical disorientation isn't something that happens often day-to-day.

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moron4hire 4y ago
This is the first time I'm hearing the term "cybersickness". For the last 8 years I've been in this field, everyone has called out "simulator sickness".
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Perhaps we can start calling it metasickness, or meta for short.
ghaff 4y ago
To the degree that VR inherently has a significant motion sick crowd that would seem to rule it out for any sort of routine business or educational use.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  The motion sickness happens when moving around in VR without physically moving. In a business scenario you can work around this. There's no need to walk around too much an he teleporting works as a good alternative.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Possibly. To be honest, I'm pretty skeptical of most business uses for VR outside of maybe some training, the ability to walk through designs, etc. I have trouble seeing it for collaboration/meetings in most cases. In a lot of situations I don't really want immersion.

waste_monk 4y ago

There have been various incidents such as [1] where epileptic folk have been targeted with media designed to induce seizures. And I understand there are medical conditions that can cause similar seizures with audio stimulus. I wonder if there are any classes of attack that only become possible using VR? that is, some combination of visual/audio/kinaesthetic inputs that do not occur in the natural world and that would harm a human brain more than a normal induced seizure attack, or affect people who would not normally be susceptible. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-assault-epilepsy-patients-via-computer/ https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-assault-epilepsy-patie...

grumbel 4y ago
> I wonder if there are any classes of attack that only become possible using VR? Plenty. All you have to do is let the system slowly drift. Humans aren't very good at keeping track of their orientation and position without visual or tactile reference, so you can basically remote control the human wearing VR. You can move them closer to a wall and than the game can instruct them to punch, broken bones will be the results. Happens plenty of times already simply because people aren't careful enough with setting up the playspace for enough away from obstacles. If you would slowly tilt the VR playspace people would start falling over. Again, happens plenty of times already, even without overly malicious games, just having the game world accelerate (e.g. virtual rollercoaster) will throw people out of balance. For a real world example, see "Richie's Plank Experience", which is famous for causing numerous injuries. The game isn't doing anything too special or trying to be malicious (walk over a virtual plank hanging out of a skyscraper), but due to being targeted at VR first-timers as well as encouraging moving around in the real world, you end up with people jumping head first into TVs. All VR system on the market right now do allow you to setup a dedicated play area, that will automatically show and alert you when leaving it. Games can't override that by normal means, but a malicious game would probably not have that hard of a time to work around that.

JoachimS 4y ago

The article in a short sentence seems to lump AR and VR together. But has there been any studies on motiion sickess related to AR? I naively think that the fact that the user actually (mostly) see the surroundings would make a difference in this regard.

FieryTransition 4y ago
I think it depends on the amount of information you shove into a users eyes. The body balances by using the contours of objects seen through the eyes mixed with sensory input of the balancing nerve and touch. So to much overlay might make you sick as well I think.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  Sounds like a failed UI for AR. If you cover up things, not work together with the real word view (including moving, adapting to how the user move the head and match the balance input), you basically would have crappy VR.
  - FieryTransition 4y ago
    I totally agree, though I think it would be interesting to measure/study the amount of interference from an overlay needed to cause sickness. Imagine you have a simplified model which shows the countour of perspective lines and significant objects of a scene, how many of these lines can then be interrupted, overlayed or rerouted before you introduce too much noise in the visual perception and get sick. It would differ from person to person, but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of normal distribution. I don't think there's been many public studies trying to quantify this.
croon 4y ago
It depends on whether the "reality" you see is via video a la Quest - and if so, at what responsiveness - or actual reality like with the Hololens.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

I will definitely not be a VR user. The few times I've tried it has always left me wanting to throw up. I suffer from motion sickness, but not massively in real life. Cars can make me feel a bit sick. Boats definitely. VR was the worst.

moron4hire 4y ago

By "sick", the worst cases are feelings of headache, nausea, and dizziness. I've never seen or heard of someone actually throwing up. The most severe cases happen in about 1% of people. It takes actively ignoring growing symptoms and forcing yourself through the experience to get that far. 90% of people have no problem at all. The last 9% of people will feel a mild dizziness. If they take it slow, don't spend more than 15 minutes in their first time, and ramp up usage, they'll be fine. And mostly, this isn't a VR problem. The hardware and OS-level features have eliminated large swaths of the causes of sim sickness. The one they can't solve is application design. The thing that causes sim sickness in people today is artificial locomotion, moving the virtual view without moving the physical body. Moving users without user input, or accelerated linear movement from joystick input. And the article calls out that the test app used joystick movement. This is well known in the industry to cause issues for a large number of people. Yet the author lets the researcher claim "our environment doesn't do anything to cause [simsickness]" without pushback.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I think there's much more chance of an anti-Meta article from The Daily Beast than a pro-Meta one. Or at least the former will receive much less editorial scrutiny, as it's pushing at an open door. Not that I'm a fan of Meta. I'm just also not a fan of articles like this.

meltyness 4y ago

I've been on-board with the tech since oculus was still presenting a prototype with masking tape all over it. There's still a few experiences that will set me off, but it's not like there's no precedent for flushing this out of the ecosystem, Meta publishes and enforces a long list of detailed software guidelines, all of which are a requirement for being published. The worst is when you're facelocked into motion, linear path interpolation into a hard stop without any other cues, that's never pleasant. I suspect height dislocations could be odd for some people, and certainly disregarding scale. These are all forms of lack of detail in environments. Trying to manage the "guardian" is likely another source of complication, once you ram your hand into a doorknob, suddenly you have to manage two worlds, a complicated spinning mess, and a real world that can hurt you, that's disorienting. I would say their model of sensitivity needs to know how you're playing the game. I've driven HL2's "Water Hazard" in full, played VR zero-G 6DOF disc soccer, been dropped down an elevator shaft, none of that batted an eyebrow -- even standing up. (well more than the sickness one would deal with sprinting to end a zombie apocalypse, fun sick)

reaperducer 4y ago
Meta publishes and enforces a long list of detailed software guidelines, all of which are a requirement for being published. Isn't this the part where we're all supposed to jump up and down and shout "walled garden!" and "monopoly!" so we can pretend to be all HN counter-culture?
- meltyness 4y ago
  They're in more of a collude and hope to remain solvent kind of phase I think. I think that crowd only comes around when FAANG unleashes cyberhornets to meet quarterly targets, not when a player pledges on a (presumably serious) seismic shift.

horsestaple 4y ago

I've had many people try my VR headset and people experiencing motion sickness is pretty common. However you can easily train yourself to delay the onset substantially, or even completely cure it. The best thing to do is immediately take off the headset, and orient yourself in the real world until the feeling subsides. Wait at least 10-15 minutes, or even better a full day before trying again, repeat until satisfied with the amount of time you can spend in VR. I've had friends who felt like throwing up after 5 minutes be able to enjoy the experience for hours after a week of this technique. Trying to push through it just makes it worse, and you will develop a psychological barrier or fear which can be very hard to break.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
I thought vestibular vibration was going to fix this problem? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29590147/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29590147/
netsharc 4y ago
I was thinking I'd have a problem with it, but actually I tried VR in a hostel in Iceland, and I don't recall feeling sick. Looking back now, I had impacted earwax the whole time I was there, which was also affecting my sense of balance and causing a lot of discomfort...

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I love the illustration. Here's a suggested solution: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/06/29/the-regurgistation https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/06/29/the-regurgista...

jlokier 4y ago

Something I've really disliked in VR is when near a bush or tree full of leaves which are made of polygons hovering in space, or anything else with similarly zero-thickness objects. It feels like being near a bush of razor blades, and if I have to walk through it, especially with polygons clipping near my face, it feels unpleasantly like close to being cut. I can ignore the feeling but it's quite unpleasant. I don't get that (much) when looking at the same thing on a screen. Only when it's through a headset.

disruptiveink 4y ago

Metaverse's biggest adoption issue is simply going to be its association with Meta/Facebook and, to add insult to injury, with Zuckerberg itself. Both the general public and the media have a severe dislike of both Facebook as an institution and Zuckerberg as a person. Honestly bewildering to see Meta push Zuckerberg as the main PR person for the metaverse, do they honestly not know Zuck is extremely uncharismatic and universally hated these days? Or is it simply a "can't say no to the boss" situation? They should have just used Instagram/Whatsapp's branding, get celebrities/influencers for PR, ensure Zuck is never seen anywhere close to a VR headset and it could have been a success. Like this, it's doomed to be another Google Glass, even if it might be cool in theory/practice, no one wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. By associating it with Zuck, they ensured it'll get pooed on for easy Twitter dunks regardless of how good/bad it actually is.

sunpazed 4y ago
I can’t help but recall this Cheyenne Dialysis satire whenever I watch Zuck lead a keynote; https://youtu.be/E4jQe9h5v5E https://youtu.be/E4jQe9h5v5E
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oneoff786 4y ago
You make it seem like Zuck is not the one making the decisions
peteradio 4y ago
Doubt this take very much. If the technology is there then the PR won't matter. If the technology is fundamentally unworkable then it's dead in water. It hinges on the technology not the PR.
- grumbel 4y ago
  The biggest problem here is leadership. The technology is "there" and has been for a while. The problem is that that "there" is not where Zuckerberg wants it to be. Zuckerberg wants to carve his own very specific niche of VR and goes completely tunnel vision on everything else. So instead of exploring the weird and wonderful things VR can do, we end up with those generic legless Facebook avatars that nobody likes. His announcement of legs coming to the Metaverse even had to be faked with a mo-cap suit, not actual in-headset tracking, since that's hard. Meanwhile back in the PCVR space we had full body tracking for years and people running around with it VRChat all the time with their complete custom avatars. Lots of those PR problems wouldn't even happen with better leadership. The requirement for Facebook accounts on Quest2 for example not only caused tons of problems, both practically and in terms of PR, it was also completely unnecessary, as Quest2 didn't have any Facebook specific features worth talking about. And now it's all getting rolled back to how it was before anyway. So many of the problems that Meta is facing wouldn't even exist when they didn't create them in the first place.

oneoff786 4y ago

I feel like they made up this silly term to click bait off of the recent cyberpunk anime’s cyberpsychosis.

tunap 4y ago

I wonder if this could be used to train astronauts for 0g induced motion sickness...?

BLKNSLVR 4y ago

The first iteration of what will eventually turn into Cyberbrain Sclerosis.

dncornholio 4y ago

I really think VR is not the right medium for this kind of 'game'. Movement in VR is still being done with teleportation, it's just not a natural thing to do. VR is best enjoyed sitting, in cockpit games like racing and flying, that's where VR really shines. VR is the reason which got me completely hooked to simracing, which I just couldn't enjoy enough doing on a monitor. I did experience some sickness, but it was very brief. Driving in reverse took me some more time to get used to, but eventually all motion sickness dissapeared.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
For me it's the games that involve your whole body. Dancing games, rhythm games, FPSs. Those are the ones that actually give me that holodeck feeling where you forget it's not real. Racing and flying are rather meh for me since it feels like I'm just sitting in front of a large screen and using a game controller, I can have more fun with that by just sitting in front of my PC. I think it's just different for everyone, just like with regular games everyone has their preferred genres.
- dncornholio 4y ago
  Agree! I don't have controllers, but yes standing still games also work well. FPS's not so much.
grumbel 4y ago
> Movement in VR is still being done with teleportation, it's just not a natural thing to do. It might not be natural, but it's essentially a super power. No need to walk where you want to be, you just point & zap over there instantly. If you play around with it for a while, you start missing that ability in the real world. Now in multiplayer it does get a bit awkward, as other people zapping around does not look natural. Meanwhile introducing a delay into the teleport such that the avatar can play a walk animation feels really unnatural for the teleporting person (VRChat has that option). But that said, I don't really consider it an issue for the social experiences Meta is aiming for, as those social experience aren't happening while zooming around at 50mph, they happen while sitting at a table or a couch. A lot of VRChat social interaction happens with people sitting in front of a mirror, locomotion isn't really that big of a deal there and can largely be done via roomscale movement in the real world.

jleyank 4y ago

But people might not want to face life with a tablet strapped to their face hiding the real world. AR, like the annotations on various sci-fi movies, strikes me as useful. I can see the world and have various levels of detail and explanation overlaid as desired. Miniaturization and micro networking can/will result in glasses that are no more clunky than some styles. This assumes people can properly focus at short range, or that graphics tricks can “fix” the problems of the astigmatic or far-sighted.

cwkoss 4y ago

stop putting cyber in front of words