Simulator Sickness Cures?

jensend asks: "Two years ago, Ask Slashdot posted a question about 'simulator sickness'. Since then, games have become much more realistic, causing (in many cases, my own included) more severe nausea. any updated tips on avoiding this problem?"

Comments

When I started playing quake3 again

[jpt.d]

When I started playing quake3 again I had a problem with getting extremely dizzy. The problem was the bobbing, turning that off fixed it perfectly.

Ya gotta play through it.

[Billy]

This was the only thing I found when I got violently ill from Q2/Q3. Play time increased day after day and eventually you get through it--no fun though to be hurling after a frag fest for this reason...

solutions

[farnsworth]

games have become much more realistic, causing ... severe nausea. any updated tips on avoiding this problem?

you have two options:

1. throw up
2. stop playing games that make you nauseated

Try this.

[Domini]

On some games (using Quake 3 as an example) it is possible to minimise or totally remove the 'bobbing' and 'weaving' effects of the game. There are also settings for extra visual features which can be disabled.

like so:

seta cg_bobroll "0"
seta cg_bobpitch "0"
seta cg_bobup "0"
seta cg_runroll "0"
seta cg_runpitch "0"

The problem will still be there, however, but only to a lesser degree, as it is the insconsistency between what the eye sees, and the ear feels. Which will still be prevelant.

One can also play around with refresh rates and field-of-view settings to lessen certain side-effects.

Re:Doc, it hurts when I do this

[Sauron23]

These are probably the same people who try and look around corners in FPS's by moving their heads. I used to get sick playing flight sims, the rolls would screw with my inner ear. I'd find myself rotating my head with the roll, flipping back and forth in my chair like I was having a seizure. The answer for me was to quit playing flight sims. shrug, maybe this will work for you too.

Motion sickness.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

I find the I get motion sickness when I get hot in a moving car/truck/plane etc..etc. Most of the time this also only happends when I am the one that is not in controll of the said object.

Hence when I started to play games as a kid I noticed that I also started to have the same issues. Ironicly enough the cure to both turned out to be the same. Keep cool! I don't mean this in a "Hey baby, check out my package" kind of way I mean cold like your nipples could cut glass cold.

Also found that if I used things that helped with sea sickness fixed my problems as well. The bands with the buttons on the inside fore pressure points don't work as well but they did offer me some relief.

Over all the only thing that really really helped and cures me to this day is keeping your body cold and having a little break every 29 minutes or so to re-orient.(spelling?)

I wish you the best of luck and turn that air down low, get a nice cold drink, and launch a scud.

Cheers,

Re:LEGO Quake

[sporktoast]

You are on the right track, but not exactly for the correct reason.

Motion sickness typically results from too great a psychoperceptual difference between the messages the brain gets from the eyes and what comes in from the inner ears. We are biologically tuned for the sorts of skills that are also useful in FPS games (spacial acuity, tracking moving objects, tuning in visual abberations in an open field). The problem is that the FPSs don't simulate *enough* of the sensory inputs. The biggest problem is that there is no actual feeling of movement detected by the inner ear. (Ride simulators that pitch and sway have their own problems. They usually don't match the physical movement to the visual clues well enough.)

So what's to do?

Some over-the-counter motion sickness med, like Dramamine may help. Consuming some ginger helps a bit, but only for about 30-60 minutes. Those things really just calm the stomach, so you'd still need Tylenol/Advil for the headache (skip the aspirin, it'll make the stomache worse). But these things only treat the symptoms.

Most people who get motion sickness have better-than-average visual acuity. Their ocular muscles have a great response reflex to movements and their brains are used to a high accuracy in tracking. Give them a book to read in a car, and they get nausea from the subtle jumping and bumping of the text that wont stay still. And their eye muscles will get fatigued from all that correcting and recorrecting. People with more relaxed eye muscles have brains that are used to a "lower resolution" input, and apply a greater degree of persistence of vision to everything already.

So what does this mean in practice for treating the cause? "Don't do that" has been mentioned already. Reducing the resolution to LEGO quality gives the ocular muscles and visual acquity/tracking reflexes a lot less to spaz out about. Another solution is, believe it or not, alcohol (or other depressants). Of course, your trigger reflexes will also be blunted, so your game may not necessarily improve. (-:

Until an inner-ear stimulation system with an accurate enough response time is developed, that's probably it.