4 ms·
> These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamenta
by glimcat 13y ago
> These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad.
It's primarily a matching failure between what you see and what your inner ear, proprioception, and sense of pressure are telling you is happening, as well as any other visual input if it's a mixed-vision system. Mostly inner ear, and vision if present.
Also it's mostly rotational motion that triggers it - but you'll easily hit that with just the small motions of your head and the looseness of the headset.
Which is ridiculously hard to compensate for since you have to get extremely precise, low-noise motion & environmental pose tracking, with extremely tight time limits - and then it has to be fed into the rendering engine, which has to react in time to fool the operator.
But the evolutionary rationale is also right. Your brain evolved to freak out in the event of persistent sensory mis-match because it's a pro-survival feature. The naturally occurring causes are things like severe food poisoning.
> I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem.
IIRC, the reason is that VR stimuli are "focused at infinity." It also helps that you're trying to take in the image, not the pixels or other fine details.
Trying to read small text at a distance of ~ 20 cm requires relatively precise focus. A picture of a cat that's taking up your entire field of view does not.
- eludwig 13y agoThanks for the information (and also to the other replies). I do not totally understand the "focused at infinity" thing, but it does make sense. I am just grateful that older eyes will not be excluded from trying this new tech out in a reasonable way. I just read the Abrash PDFs and they are very honest and insightful. It's nice to know that someone (many someones!) is actually doing the science that's needed to get this stuff right. Honestly, given the challenges, it seems reasonable that this will all start the way that the 3D game revolution did. Slowly, on the PC first. One step at a time. I'm in as soon as there is a compelling game to play!