17 ms·

To Reduce VR Sickness, Add a Virtual Nose

181 points by dawkins 11y ago

cfstras 11y ago
I reckon the noses in the examole images are on the wrong side. The images are cross-eyed, e.g. the left image is for the right eye. The nose on the left image should therefore be on the left, and vice-versa for the other eye. You can test that by crossing your eyes so the images match and try focusing (the first try takes a while). If you see a stereoscopic image, the source is cross-eyed. If it were not, The depths in the image would look "weird", because they're inside-out.
- dTal 11y ago
  They are not cross-eyed.
  - cfstras 11y ago
    I just tested it and it seems I can manage fusion and see the effect both if I switch them and if I don't. Now I'm confused. is there something special about these images in particular or has my perception been all wrong?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - jessriedel 11y ago
      When I tested it out, I got the proper sense of depth perception when I looked at it correctly (i.e., looking through the plane of the monitor, with left image for left eye) and got no sense of depth perception when looking cross-eyed (i.e., left image for right eye). It's temping to think you're seeing depth as soon as the two images "snap together" when you're cross-eyed, but when I actually consciously checked I noticed that the images in fact looked flat (except for the nose). As far as why it looked flat rather than inside out, I can only guess that that depth info conflicted with the other depth information you get from vision (parallax, known relative object sizes, perspective lines) and my brain ignored it. EDIT: Actually, after trying the second view (the one with hands, not the roller coaster) cross-eyed, I saw the inside-out depth. It's most noticeable looking out the window.
- tempestn 11y ago
  They're not cross-eyed. You can view them as intended by focusing beyond the plane of the monitor, like a "magic eye" picture.
- clay_to_n 11y ago
  With a VR headset, the left image is shown to your left eye, and the right to your right. Intuitively, it should be clear that they aren't cross-eyed, since your nose is in the middle of your face. And as someone else said - you're crossing your eyes, when you should perhaps be doing the opposite - looking far into the distance until the images overlap.
- frevd 11y ago
  It might appear like that, but it is about distance! Moving the two images over each other will make your brain think the nose that is farest away from the common center is closest. BUT: the nose should ideally be mirrored, so that the shapes match, at least if you want to combine the images directly using cross-eyeing. They are correct if you show each picture to one eye though (what VR glasses are doing), every eye sees what it would see. However, little differences are filtered out anyway from your brain, merely a disturbance.
- drawkbox 11y ago
  Close your right eye, your nose will appear on the right of your left eye. Close your left eye, your nose will appear on the left of your right eye. They have this correct. When you put the goggles on it will seem the same as you currently see, the nose fades because it is on the far side of your vision field of view and on opposite sides. I always wondered after seeing this a bit ago if the addition of a torso might also help. Part of the disorientation might be that it seems like your body is not there. A nose with a torso and eventually LeapMotion like hand controls/arms, may help reduce VR sickness.
Kiro 11y ago
Am I the only one who never experience any VR sickness at all? Regardless of latency. Is it really that big of a problem?
- keerthiko 11y ago
  To not experience any VR sickness with the state of today's technology, you must either be using exclusively the tame applications of the technology -- such as garden walk, home tour, etc, and not trying out any FPS games like TF2 or something -- or you have something biologically off about your linkage between your natural balance sensors and how your brain tries to correlate them with what your eyes see. Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Or they just don't get motion sickness? Why does it have to be a sign of something being "off"?
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      If one doesn't conform to the perceived norm, some believe the nonconformers must be lacking in some respect and take it as a sign of inferiority to their percieved dominate and self-described "natural" culture.
    - laumars 11y ago
      Because motion sickness is a well understood phenomena; the cause of which the previous commenter was discussing. The usage of the term "off" was probably a poor choice of words, but I didn't detect any negativity in his tone despite "off". eg: "Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)" (the last part of this post is also targeted towards jsprogrammer who suggested there was an air of superiority with the former post. Sometimes, it's entirely possibly you can read too much into another persons comment)
      - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- AndrewDucker 11y ago
  Right before that quote is this one: "participants with the nose were able to play the Tuscan villa game for 94.2 seconds longer than those playing without" It seems dishonest to ignore the first half of a sentence while quoting the second half.
  - toxicFork 11y ago
    What if they played it longer because they were interested in looking at the nose, to see how light affects it as you turn around? I for one would definitely do that.
    - frevd 11y ago
      They did not perceive the nose at all :D Funny what all gets filtered out. When I'm wearing my extremely old plastic glasses (real ones, not VR), I do not perceive the myriad of scratches on it either, though it certainly contributes to less resolution of what I see, but I'm not aware. Most people are shocked when they get new glasses/lenses/eyes about the increase in detail they weren't aware of.
      - Filligree 11y ago
        There's a less computational explanation for that. Your glasses sit very close to your face, meaning that any scratches are dramatically out of focus; the degradation gets spread over your entire visual field. Which is not to say that you wouldn't have gotten used to and started ignoring a scratch you could see, because you're right; you would have. But that's not what's actually going on.
        mikeash 11y ago
        How do you know that's not what's actually going on? You may be different, but when I wear glasses, they're sufficiently far from my eyes that imperfections are quite visible as localized phenomena. They're not in focus, but they're nowhere close to spread out over the entire visual field. Specks of dust show up as blobs of dust. Scratches show up as fuzzy lines. I'm going to guess that the person you're replying to is sufficiently familiar with his glasses to know what he actually sees.
shultays 11y ago
shown to reduce the effects of simulator sickness by 13.5 percent. How do you calculate such an exact value?
- stingraycharles 11y ago
  As indicated by other quantifications in the post, I assume it is based on the average amount of time people were able to use the device before they had to stop due to sickness.
- Gounemond 11y ago
  That just comes as a % related on how much (average) time people played the same game with and without the nose. 13.5 percent refers to those ~90 seconds added playtime. This means, on average the Tuscany demo has been played for 697 sec (~11 and half mins) without nose, and 792 sec (~13 mins) with. It would be interesting to know the dynamics of the experiment (the testers were aiming to hold on as long as possible? Or they were simply told "play as much as you want"?), since the Tuscany demo is quite short, and most of people wouldn't play it for more than 10 minutes, besides sickness
- Steuard 11y ago
  My students regularly show me how easy it is to calculate extremely precise results. Now, whether they should trust that precision is a rather different question, and one that even the good ones struggle with for a while. (In other news, I wish that more people paid attention to uncertainty propagation. Or heck, even just some oversimplified heuristics for significant figures.)
iaw 11y ago
I've often wondered if it would help by adding retina tracking and adding the subtle shift in perspective it creates.
runj__ 11y ago
I feel like such an idiot. I read it like noise, as in added digital noise. The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise. "particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there." Yeah, that's me not finding the nose.
- thewarrior 11y ago
  I too read it as noise. This happens to me very often these days , don't know if it's part of some cognitive decline :P EDIT: Another such HN headline misreading was when I read "The contribution of Cheese to western civilization" as "The contribution of Chinese to western civilization" .
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Probably part of the brain going 'wait, that doesn't make much sense, let's look for a word that would fit better in context and looks similar.' I wonder if it is related to optical illusions.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Nope, I did "virtual noise, huh? Interesting. Wait, wasn't there an article the other day that added a nose to get rid of motion sickness as well? Hmm, does it actually say noise? Nope :/"
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        I'm not sure that is different. The perception part is still filling in what fits based on context. It takes your consciousness to tell the perception 'read again while suppressing spellcheck'. Have you ever read the paragraph where every word is misspelled but people tend to be able to read with very little reduction in speed?
awestroke 11y ago
Does that mean that path tracing engines like Brigade[1] fit well with VR? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  This article is about a "NOSE", not "NOISE." And no, the framerate of Brigade makes it unlikely to work well with VR.
wobbleblob 11y ago
Now I'd like to know: do people who have lost their nose irl experience more motion sickness?
- sampo 11y ago
  A Chinese friend once told me she can't see her own nose. And the thought of us whites constantly having our nose in our field of view was funny to her.
leeroyding 11y ago
This is... genius.
nysv 11y ago
Colour me skeptical. You decreased sickess by 13.5% by covering up about that much of the screen.
- rndn 11y ago
  Perhaps one could gradually dissolve the nose over the first X hours of playing without causing sickness.
- ciex 11y ago
  Your real nose always covers some part of your visual field, still it doesn't bother you, because your brain removes certain stimuli that persist over a long period of time.
  - jonmrodriguez 11y ago
    Haha maybe it's just me, but I actually dislike having my real-life nose block part of my view.
  - plorkyeran 11y ago
    Except for when someone reminds me that I can see my nose, and suddenly my brain stops filtering it out for a while.
- Gounemond 11y ago
  Don't be tricked by that "area". I admit I haven't tried it but, from my experience with the Oculus, you will barely able to see that nose (unless you actually try to look at it, like you would in real life). That area is mainly in the peripheral vision.
- appleflaxen 11y ago
  I agree with you. The impact of these findings is greatly overstated by the headline, and you make an excellent suggestion regarding a competing explanation about why it might help. Next study: repeat the study using a "nose" in the outside, or of varying sizes, and see if it helps. This research is interesting, but it's not front-page interesting.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nisdec 11y ago
It's called seasickness and known for thousand of years. You get it or you don't and there is nothing technology could do about it for a long period of time at least. Well someone could take some medicine before playing VR, but that would be a little bit too much, wouldn't it?
51Cards 11y ago
Hopefully I'm not too late to weigh in on this one but I've experienced this personally for years. I am a person that experiences motion sickness from most 3D environments if on a sufficiently large screen. The effect became noticeable once frame rates passed a certain level in the early 2000's and after that I was unable to play most FPS games. Despite this I loved the Need for Speed franchise. Hot Pursuit on the PS3 ate up a lot of my free time. :) I could only use the game in one visual mode though... "Hood view", where the hood of the car remains visible at the bottom of the screen. That provided my brain with a fixed reference point and as a result I could spend hours in there. When a following release of NFS for PS came out (I think it was Most Wanted 2012) they removed the hood view option. Five minutes into the game and I get a strong motion sickness headache. After searching a few other titles I found similar issues with all of them and gave up gaming. I wrote EA and Criterion Games a couple times about this but never heard back. Unfortunately it was a deal breaker for me trying anything further in the franchise. I hope that game developers (especially with immersive VR now) take the time to find and test with someone like myself as tricks like this help a lot.
- phatbyte 11y ago
  I'm on the same boat as you. I feel your pain. The only exception is that in my case only FPS make me motion sickness. Race sims, 3rd person, and such, I can handle them very well...but FPS I can only play for like 15m. I really want to try VR, but if this motion sickness is not fixed it's gonna be a deal(heart) breaker for me :(
- pen2l 11y ago
  I stopped playing games about 10 years ago, but thought I would come out of the break to play Portal... I did, and was very saddened to find that I just couldn't play it because it gave me really bad motion sickness and headaches. The nauseating feelings kick in after just 60 seconds of gameplay (and no, not just when going in and out of portals -- even when I'm simply walking around without making portals the headaches come in). I hope more research is done on this, and some solutions are found, because I really want to finish playing Portal. :)
  - 11y ago
profinger 11y ago
This is something you experience a lot with GoPro sort of footage as well. A trick in that world is to show part of the helmet or bike (or whatever the camera is attached to) to give you a steadying point because, otherwise, the camera appears too shaky and crazy.
smithzvk 11y ago
They should put a blur on the nose. Having it in focus just seems wrong and perhaps distracting from their goal of giving the brain what it expects. Heck, I just tried right now and I'm now old enough that I can't even get my nose into focus at all anymore (pretty sure I could when I was a child, lenses are getting harder to flex I guess).
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  ...based on the position of where it is in your field of view, the digitally rendered nose might not need artificial blur. When you view it with a head-mounted display, your eyes might just see it as blurry anyway...
- alc277 11y ago
  The nose would be blurry as the lenses make everything in that area of the screen blurry (at least on the DK2).
moron4hire 11y ago
Imagine the possibilities! You can now pick your own virtual nose! With virtual avatars in social apps, you can pick your friends' noses, too! Or their hair, or their ears, or their pets. You can make your friends look exactly like you want.
murbard2 11y ago
For a second, I thought this was going to be about adding smells to the experience... which would probably be a very bad idea, as nauseating experiences condition strong smell aversions. I wonder if a nose pincher would decrease motion sickness with VR.
jasonlotito 11y ago
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262743
shmageggy 11y ago
> Whittinghill says this is likely a result of “change blindness,” a perceptual phenomenon that allows our perceptual system to ignore objects that we see over and over again. Uhhh, that's not what change blindness is at all. It sounds more like vanilla sensory adaptation. Our visual system has adapted to the presence of our nose in our visual field (since it's always there), which is why we don't notice our noses in day to day life and don't notice a virtual nose placed at the same location. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation
TrevorJ 11y ago
It reduced motion sickness by about 13% - and appears to cover about that amount of the screen. Are we sure the effects aren't simply because you are effectively covering up part of the screen? What happens if you cover up 50%? 100%?
kazinator 11y ago
Would this still benefit someone of East Asian descent who doesn't see their nose?
kazinator 11y ago
Argh, the stereogram animations on this page are of the "stare into infinity" type rather than "cross your eyes type". The first one is impossible for me due to insufficient interpupillary distance, combined with my inability to diverge my eyes. :)
bitforger 11y ago
Am now conspicuously aware of the nose in the middle of my face.
meej 11y ago
Interesting, this article not only made me more aware of my own nose in my field of view, it increased my awareness of the fact that my left eye is my dominant eye (a bit unusual given that I am right-handed). It takes effort for me to notice my nose from the right and after reading this I have a distinct sense of my nose being off-center to the right side of my face. Weird! I wonder if this trick would work by placing the virtual nose only in view of the dominant eye (I suppose that's more complicated to implement, though).

181 points by dawkins 11y ago

I reckon the noses in the examole images are on the wrong side. The images are cross-eyed, e.g. the left image is for the right eye. The nose on the left image should therefore be on the left, and vice-versa for the other eye. You can test that by crossing your eyes so the images match and try focusing (the first try takes a while). If you see a stereoscopic image, the source is cross-eyed. If it were not, The depths in the image would look "weird", because they're inside-out.

dTal 11y ago
They are not cross-eyed.
- cfstras 11y ago
  I just tested it and it seems I can manage fusion and see the effect both if I switch them and if I don't. Now I'm confused. is there something special about these images in particular or has my perception been all wrong?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    When I tested it out, I got the proper sense of depth perception when I looked at it correctly (i.e., looking through the plane of the monitor, with left image for left eye) and got no sense of depth perception when looking cross-eyed (i.e., left image for right eye). It's temping to think you're seeing depth as soon as the two images "snap together" when you're cross-eyed, but when I actually consciously checked I noticed that the images in fact looked flat (except for the nose). As far as why it looked flat rather than inside out, I can only guess that that depth info conflicted with the other depth information you get from vision (parallax, known relative object sizes, perspective lines) and my brain ignored it. EDIT: Actually, after trying the second view (the one with hands, not the roller coaster) cross-eyed, I saw the inside-out depth. It's most noticeable looking out the window.
tempestn 11y ago
They're not cross-eyed. You can view them as intended by focusing beyond the plane of the monitor, like a "magic eye" picture.
clay_to_n 11y ago
With a VR headset, the left image is shown to your left eye, and the right to your right. Intuitively, it should be clear that they aren't cross-eyed, since your nose is in the middle of your face. And as someone else said - you're crossing your eyes, when you should perhaps be doing the opposite - looking far into the distance until the images overlap.
frevd 11y ago
It might appear like that, but it is about distance! Moving the two images over each other will make your brain think the nose that is farest away from the common center is closest. BUT: the nose should ideally be mirrored, so that the shapes match, at least if you want to combine the images directly using cross-eyeing. They are correct if you show each picture to one eye though (what VR glasses are doing), every eye sees what it would see. However, little differences are filtered out anyway from your brain, merely a disturbance.
drawkbox 11y ago
Close your right eye, your nose will appear on the right of your left eye. Close your left eye, your nose will appear on the left of your right eye. They have this correct. When you put the goggles on it will seem the same as you currently see, the nose fades because it is on the far side of your vision field of view and on opposite sides. I always wondered after seeing this a bit ago if the addition of a torso might also help. Part of the disorientation might be that it seems like your body is not there. A nose with a torso and eventually LeapMotion like hand controls/arms, may help reduce VR sickness.

Kiro 11y ago

Am I the only one who never experience any VR sickness at all? Regardless of latency. Is it really that big of a problem?

keerthiko 11y ago
To not experience any VR sickness with the state of today's technology, you must either be using exclusively the tame applications of the technology -- such as garden walk, home tour, etc, and not trying out any FPS games like TF2 or something -- or you have something biologically off about your linkage between your natural balance sensors and how your brain tries to correlate them with what your eyes see. Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  Or they just don't get motion sickness? Why does it have to be a sign of something being "off"?
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    If one doesn't conform to the perceived norm, some believe the nonconformers must be lacking in some respect and take it as a sign of inferiority to their percieved dominate and self-described "natural" culture.
  - laumars 11y ago
    Because motion sickness is a well understood phenomena; the cause of which the previous commenter was discussing. The usage of the term "off" was probably a poor choice of words, but I didn't detect any negativity in his tone despite "off". eg: "Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)" (the last part of this post is also targeted towards jsprogrammer who suggested there was an air of superiority with the former post. Sometimes, it's entirely possibly you can read too much into another persons comment)
    - 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

AndrewDucker 11y ago
Right before that quote is this one: "participants with the nose were able to play the Tuscan villa game for 94.2 seconds longer than those playing without" It seems dishonest to ignore the first half of a sentence while quoting the second half.
- toxicFork 11y ago
  What if they played it longer because they were interested in looking at the nose, to see how light affects it as you turn around? I for one would definitely do that.
  - frevd 11y ago
    They did not perceive the nose at all :D Funny what all gets filtered out. When I'm wearing my extremely old plastic glasses (real ones, not VR), I do not perceive the myriad of scratches on it either, though it certainly contributes to less resolution of what I see, but I'm not aware. Most people are shocked when they get new glasses/lenses/eyes about the increase in detail they weren't aware of.
    - Filligree 11y ago
      There's a less computational explanation for that. Your glasses sit very close to your face, meaning that any scratches are dramatically out of focus; the degradation gets spread over your entire visual field. Which is not to say that you wouldn't have gotten used to and started ignoring a scratch you could see, because you're right; you would have. But that's not what's actually going on.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        How do you know that's not what's actually going on? You may be different, but when I wear glasses, they're sufficiently far from my eyes that imperfections are quite visible as localized phenomena. They're not in focus, but they're nowhere close to spread out over the entire visual field. Specks of dust show up as blobs of dust. Scratches show up as fuzzy lines. I'm going to guess that the person you're replying to is sufficiently familiar with his glasses to know what he actually sees.

shultays 11y ago

shown to reduce the effects of simulator sickness by 13.5 percent. How do you calculate such an exact value?

stingraycharles 11y ago
As indicated by other quantifications in the post, I assume it is based on the average amount of time people were able to use the device before they had to stop due to sickness.
Gounemond 11y ago
That just comes as a % related on how much (average) time people played the same game with and without the nose. 13.5 percent refers to those ~90 seconds added playtime. This means, on average the Tuscany demo has been played for 697 sec (~11 and half mins) without nose, and 792 sec (~13 mins) with. It would be interesting to know the dynamics of the experiment (the testers were aiming to hold on as long as possible? Or they were simply told "play as much as you want"?), since the Tuscany demo is quite short, and most of people wouldn't play it for more than 10 minutes, besides sickness
Steuard 11y ago
My students regularly show me how easy it is to calculate extremely precise results. Now, whether they should trust that precision is a rather different question, and one that even the good ones struggle with for a while. (In other news, I wish that more people paid attention to uncertainty propagation. Or heck, even just some oversimplified heuristics for significant figures.)

iaw 11y ago

I've often wondered if it would help by adding retina tracking and adding the subtle shift in perspective it creates.

runj__ 11y ago

I feel like such an idiot. I read it like noise, as in added digital noise. The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise. "particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there." Yeah, that's me not finding the nose.

thewarrior 11y ago
I too read it as noise. This happens to me very often these days , don't know if it's part of some cognitive decline :P EDIT: Another such HN headline misreading was when I read "The contribution of Cheese to western civilization" as "The contribution of Chinese to western civilization" .
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Probably part of the brain going 'wait, that doesn't make much sense, let's look for a word that would fit better in context and looks similar.' I wonder if it is related to optical illusions.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Nope, I did "virtual noise, huh? Interesting. Wait, wasn't there an article the other day that added a nose to get rid of motion sickness as well? Hmm, does it actually say noise? Nope :/"
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      I'm not sure that is different. The perception part is still filling in what fits based on context. It takes your consciousness to tell the perception 'read again while suppressing spellcheck'. Have you ever read the paragraph where every word is misspelled but people tend to be able to read with very little reduction in speed?

awestroke 11y ago

Does that mean that path tracing engines like Brigade[1] fit well with VR? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y

VikingCoder 11y ago
This article is about a "NOSE", not "NOISE." And no, the framerate of Brigade makes it unlikely to work well with VR.

wobbleblob 11y ago

Now I'd like to know: do people who have lost their nose irl experience more motion sickness?

sampo 11y ago
A Chinese friend once told me she can't see her own nose. And the thought of us whites constantly having our nose in our field of view was funny to her.

leeroyding 11y ago

This is... genius.

nysv 11y ago

Colour me skeptical. You decreased sickess by 13.5% by covering up about that much of the screen.

rndn 11y ago
Perhaps one could gradually dissolve the nose over the first X hours of playing without causing sickness.
ciex 11y ago
Your real nose always covers some part of your visual field, still it doesn't bother you, because your brain removes certain stimuli that persist over a long period of time.
- jonmrodriguez 11y ago
  Haha maybe it's just me, but I actually dislike having my real-life nose block part of my view.
- plorkyeran 11y ago
  Except for when someone reminds me that I can see my nose, and suddenly my brain stops filtering it out for a while.
Gounemond 11y ago
Don't be tricked by that "area". I admit I haven't tried it but, from my experience with the Oculus, you will barely able to see that nose (unless you actually try to look at it, like you would in real life). That area is mainly in the peripheral vision.
appleflaxen 11y ago
I agree with you. The impact of these findings is greatly overstated by the headline, and you make an excellent suggestion regarding a competing explanation about why it might help. Next study: repeat the study using a "nose" in the outside, or of varying sizes, and see if it helps. This research is interesting, but it's not front-page interesting.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nisdec 11y ago

It's called seasickness and known for thousand of years. You get it or you don't and there is nothing technology could do about it for a long period of time at least. Well someone could take some medicine before playing VR, but that would be a little bit too much, wouldn't it?

51Cards 11y ago

Hopefully I'm not too late to weigh in on this one but I've experienced this personally for years. I am a person that experiences motion sickness from most 3D environments if on a sufficiently large screen. The effect became noticeable once frame rates passed a certain level in the early 2000's and after that I was unable to play most FPS games. Despite this I loved the Need for Speed franchise. Hot Pursuit on the PS3 ate up a lot of my free time. :) I could only use the game in one visual mode though... "Hood view", where the hood of the car remains visible at the bottom of the screen. That provided my brain with a fixed reference point and as a result I could spend hours in there. When a following release of NFS for PS came out (I think it was Most Wanted 2012) they removed the hood view option. Five minutes into the game and I get a strong motion sickness headache. After searching a few other titles I found similar issues with all of them and gave up gaming. I wrote EA and Criterion Games a couple times about this but never heard back. Unfortunately it was a deal breaker for me trying anything further in the franchise. I hope that game developers (especially with immersive VR now) take the time to find and test with someone like myself as tricks like this help a lot.

phatbyte 11y ago
I'm on the same boat as you. I feel your pain. The only exception is that in my case only FPS make me motion sickness. Race sims, 3rd person, and such, I can handle them very well...but FPS I can only play for like 15m. I really want to try VR, but if this motion sickness is not fixed it's gonna be a deal(heart) breaker for me :(
pen2l 11y ago
I stopped playing games about 10 years ago, but thought I would come out of the break to play Portal... I did, and was very saddened to find that I just couldn't play it because it gave me really bad motion sickness and headaches. The nauseating feelings kick in after just 60 seconds of gameplay (and no, not just when going in and out of portals -- even when I'm simply walking around without making portals the headaches come in). I hope more research is done on this, and some solutions are found, because I really want to finish playing Portal. :)
- 11y ago

profinger 11y ago

This is something you experience a lot with GoPro sort of footage as well. A trick in that world is to show part of the helmet or bike (or whatever the camera is attached to) to give you a steadying point because, otherwise, the camera appears too shaky and crazy.

smithzvk 11y ago

They should put a blur on the nose. Having it in focus just seems wrong and perhaps distracting from their goal of giving the brain what it expects. Heck, I just tried right now and I'm now old enough that I can't even get my nose into focus at all anymore (pretty sure I could when I was a child, lenses are getting harder to flex I guess).

VikingCoder 11y ago
...based on the position of where it is in your field of view, the digitally rendered nose might not need artificial blur. When you view it with a head-mounted display, your eyes might just see it as blurry anyway...
alc277 11y ago
The nose would be blurry as the lenses make everything in that area of the screen blurry (at least on the DK2).

moron4hire 11y ago

Imagine the possibilities! You can now pick your own virtual nose! With virtual avatars in social apps, you can pick your friends' noses, too! Or their hair, or their ears, or their pets. You can make your friends look exactly like you want.

murbard2 11y ago

For a second, I thought this was going to be about adding smells to the experience... which would probably be a very bad idea, as nauseating experiences condition strong smell aversions. I wonder if a nose pincher would decrease motion sickness with VR.

jasonlotito 11y ago

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262743

shmageggy 11y ago

> Whittinghill says this is likely a result of “change blindness,” a perceptual phenomenon that allows our perceptual system to ignore objects that we see over and over again. Uhhh, that's not what change blindness is at all. It sounds more like vanilla sensory adaptation. Our visual system has adapted to the presence of our nose in our visual field (since it's always there), which is why we don't notice our noses in day to day life and don't notice a virtual nose placed at the same location. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation

TrevorJ 11y ago

It reduced motion sickness by about 13% - and appears to cover about that amount of the screen. Are we sure the effects aren't simply because you are effectively covering up part of the screen? What happens if you cover up 50%? 100%?

kazinator 11y ago

Would this still benefit someone of East Asian descent who doesn't see their nose?

kazinator 11y ago

Argh, the stereogram animations on this page are of the "stare into infinity" type rather than "cross your eyes type". The first one is impossible for me due to insufficient interpupillary distance, combined with my inability to diverge my eyes. :)

bitforger 11y ago

Am now conspicuously aware of the nose in the middle of my face.

meej 11y ago

Interesting, this article not only made me more aware of my own nose in my field of view, it increased my awareness of the fact that my left eye is my dominant eye (a bit unusual given that I am right-handed). It takes effort for me to notice my nose from the right and after reading this I have a distinct sense of my nose being off-center to the right side of my face. Weird! I wonder if this trick would work by placing the virtual nose only in view of the dominant eye (I suppose that's more complicated to implement, though).