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Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to try it, so a bunch of us gathered i

by donatj 2y ago

Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to try it, so a bunch of us gathered in his attic to give it a go. We were playing this tech demo where you would swing around on ropes to get between flying islands. Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue. I have a lazy eye. It's fine most of the time but when I get tired it just drifts off into the outer corner and makes me look scary. My guess at the time was that my brain was just used to getting signals from my eyes that didn't make sense. To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know.

tomashubelbauer 2y ago
If you have an iPhone, check out vehicle motion cues in the accessibility settings. It helped me be able to use my phone as a passenger in a car.
- nottorp 2y ago
  Whoa! Where's that! Why do they have to advertise the latest Product Green or whatever skin and countless emoji and not useful features like this one!
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA You can add it to control center, either as its own toggle or via accessibility shortcuts menu
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Found it and set it to "automatic" for now. It wasn't there last time i went into accessibility to enable reduce motion. That one not because it gave me motion sickness but because the background parallax scrolling is pointless and annoying.
      - wlesieutre 2y ago
        It's new in iOS 18, sometime last fall
imzadi 2y ago
I had some motion sickness when I first started VR. I made a little thing that I found on reddit that helped. It's just a vibration disk hooked to a battery and attached to a headband. You position it behind your ear on the mastoid bone. I don't know why it works, but it does. I eventually got my VR legs and can play for hours without motion sickness, most of the time. Some games still eff me up, though; like The Break In, which I love, but can only play for an hour before I get sick.
fatnoah 2y ago
> To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know. I find this fascinating. Reading in cars, riding in boats in heavy waves, and anything like that does not give me motion sickness. I made it through 45 years of life without even knowing what that was. However, ten minutes of Minecraft in VR was enough to make me sick to my stomach. (It was also amazing, BTW)
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  I believe (as a layman) that motion sickness in vehicles is caused by a mismatch between what the vestibular system perceives and what the eyes do. However, headset-based VR systems have an additional issue called vergence-accommodation conflict, which is where the focus of each individual eye isn't at the same distance as the stereoscopic vision of both eyes together. My prediction is that one day (in twenty years, perhaps) we'll have miniature holograms for displays and thus get a proper match between accommodation and vergence! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...
GuB-42 2y ago
In VR, some games make me sick, though most of them don't. One of the worst was a roller-coaster simulator. What really did it, I think was the lack of g-forces. If you have ever ridden a roller coaster, you are probably familiar with the crushing feeling after the drop as you go back up again, I was, and braced myself for it. Except... nothing happened, of course, but it felt really weird. Even weirder when looking to the side, the acceleration is all wrong! I lasted about two minutes before getting sick. I took some time to recover then tried again. Now, I did much better. I wouldn't say it was comfortable, but it wasn't to the point of wanting to stop immediately. But also, the immersion was broken, I went from "I am in a roller coaster" to "I am watching a 3D movie", which made for a pretty boring experience. To be honest, I enjoyed the first two minutes where I had to call stop more than the half hour or so that followed. I am sure the same thing happen with the rope swings. Like a roller coaster, rope swings alternate between weightlessness and high g-forces, which VR obviously cannot transcribe. But if for some reason, your brain didn't expect these sensations, then no problem. That's the reason I think motion sickness is a real problem for VR, even if you can deal with it. Because the way you deal with it is essentially by breaking immersion, but immersion is the whole point of VR. It also applies to non-VR immersive games to a lesser extent. So, yes, I think it is something we should take very seriously, first by fixing the "bugs": low framerates, unnatural camera movements, etc..., by adjusting gameplay to avoid unnecessary motion sickness, and finally by providing accessibility features. It is a bit of a controversial take, as it may seem "woke" or something, as if caring about motion sickness will make the experience worse for those who aren't motion sick. But it is actually the opposite! Fighting against motion sickness breaks immersion, even at a subconscious level. The general idea is that motion sickness appears when the sensory experience is inconsistent, try to make the sensory experience as consistent as possible, both against motion sickness and for better immersion.
mystified5016 2y ago
With a lazy eye, the brain tends to just outright ignore the conflicting signals and you end up only seeing out of one eye. My guess is that the IPD was the primary problem for everyone else. That's real easy to get wrong and it can cause massive eye strain as your brain tries to force your eyes to focus on an image that is geometrically impossible to focus. In your case, you probably ended up just using one eye and your brain filled in the missing data. That way you sidestep the focusing problem.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  I too have lazy eye. I get wicked motion sickness from most FPS games. So I would not equate too much to that hypothesis.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    They were talking specifically about the VR mechanics though, not gaming in general.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
A while back I had worse eyesight on one eye than the other, and the result was that if I closed just my good eye, after a few seconds, I'd see nothing with both eyes, because even though my bad eye was still seeing the world, my brain was so used to the opposite being true it sketched in the darkness from the closed eye. What seems to happen is your brain learns to ignore the signal from one of the eyes if the other is "malfunctioning" somehow.

by donatj 2y ago

tomashubelbauer 2y ago

If you have an iPhone, check out vehicle motion cues in the accessibility settings. It helped me be able to use my phone as a passenger in a car.

nottorp 2y ago
Whoa! Where's that! Why do they have to advertise the latest Product Green or whatever skin and countless emoji and not useful features like this one!
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA You can add it to control center, either as its own toggle or via accessibility shortcuts menu
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Found it and set it to "automatic" for now. It wasn't there last time i went into accessibility to enable reduce motion. That one not because it gave me motion sickness but because the background parallax scrolling is pointless and annoying.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      It's new in iOS 18, sometime last fall

imzadi 2y ago

I had some motion sickness when I first started VR. I made a little thing that I found on reddit that helped. It's just a vibration disk hooked to a battery and attached to a headband. You position it behind your ear on the mastoid bone. I don't know why it works, but it does. I eventually got my VR legs and can play for hours without motion sickness, most of the time. Some games still eff me up, though; like The Break In, which I love, but can only play for an hour before I get sick.

fatnoah 2y ago

> To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know. I find this fascinating. Reading in cars, riding in boats in heavy waves, and anything like that does not give me motion sickness. I made it through 45 years of life without even knowing what that was. However, ten minutes of Minecraft in VR was enough to make me sick to my stomach. (It was also amazing, BTW)

seabass-labrax 2y ago
I believe (as a layman) that motion sickness in vehicles is caused by a mismatch between what the vestibular system perceives and what the eyes do. However, headset-based VR systems have an additional issue called vergence-accommodation conflict, which is where the focus of each individual eye isn't at the same distance as the stereoscopic vision of both eyes together. My prediction is that one day (in twenty years, perhaps) we'll have miniature holograms for displays and thus get a proper match between accommodation and vergence! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...

GuB-42 2y ago

In VR, some games make me sick, though most of them don't. One of the worst was a roller-coaster simulator. What really did it, I think was the lack of g-forces. If you have ever ridden a roller coaster, you are probably familiar with the crushing feeling after the drop as you go back up again, I was, and braced myself for it. Except... nothing happened, of course, but it felt really weird. Even weirder when looking to the side, the acceleration is all wrong! I lasted about two minutes before getting sick. I took some time to recover then tried again. Now, I did much better. I wouldn't say it was comfortable, but it wasn't to the point of wanting to stop immediately. But also, the immersion was broken, I went from "I am in a roller coaster" to "I am watching a 3D movie", which made for a pretty boring experience. To be honest, I enjoyed the first two minutes where I had to call stop more than the half hour or so that followed. I am sure the same thing happen with the rope swings. Like a roller coaster, rope swings alternate between weightlessness and high g-forces, which VR obviously cannot transcribe. But if for some reason, your brain didn't expect these sensations, then no problem. That's the reason I think motion sickness is a real problem for VR, even if you can deal with it. Because the way you deal with it is essentially by breaking immersion, but immersion is the whole point of VR. It also applies to non-VR immersive games to a lesser extent. So, yes, I think it is something we should take very seriously, first by fixing the "bugs": low framerates, unnatural camera movements, etc..., by adjusting gameplay to avoid unnecessary motion sickness, and finally by providing accessibility features. It is a bit of a controversial take, as it may seem "woke" or something, as if caring about motion sickness will make the experience worse for those who aren't motion sick. But it is actually the opposite! Fighting against motion sickness breaks immersion, even at a subconscious level. The general idea is that motion sickness appears when the sensory experience is inconsistent, try to make the sensory experience as consistent as possible, both against motion sickness and for better immersion.

mystified5016 2y ago

With a lazy eye, the brain tends to just outright ignore the conflicting signals and you end up only seeing out of one eye. My guess is that the IPD was the primary problem for everyone else. That's real easy to get wrong and it can cause massive eye strain as your brain tries to force your eyes to focus on an image that is geometrically impossible to focus. In your case, you probably ended up just using one eye and your brain filled in the missing data. That way you sidestep the focusing problem.

sumtechguy 2y ago
I too have lazy eye. I get wicked motion sickness from most FPS games. So I would not equate too much to that hypothesis.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  They were talking specifically about the VR mechanics though, not gaming in general.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

A while back I had worse eyesight on one eye than the other, and the result was that if I closed just my good eye, after a few seconds, I'd see nothing with both eyes, because even though my bad eye was still seeing the world, my brain was so used to the opposite being true it sketched in the darkness from the closed eye. What seems to happen is your brain learns to ignore the signal from one of the eyes if the other is "malfunctioning" somehow.