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Game Feedback Gets More Intense With Electrodes
ne_ol'schmoe writes "The simple feedback of a Dual Shock is passé - vomit comet simulators will soon be possible without leaving your chair, since those wacky tech-heads at NTT have come up with a way to change people's perception of balance, using electrodes that fit behind your ear. They expect to integrate it with racing and flight games to have users lean into turns, and also to simulate gravity changes for a more realistic experience. Sounds cool, but now games will have to come with barf bags, I guess."
Motion sickness is caused by the lack of sync between what the eyes percieve and what the inner ear reports. By stimulating the sense of motion in sync with the visuals of a game there will in theory be less chance of motion sickness than the current state of the art: visuals are not synced to motion.
Of course inacurate or inproperly synced motion cues will cause obvious problems.
The sensation of balance has absolutly nothing to do with g-forces. They often feel related because it is usually movement that cause g-forces to be experienced other then the one pulling us down. But nothing done with a piece of wire by your ear or even shoved into your brain could make you experience g-forces. All it could do is make you think you are upside down. Or at worst feel a little bit sick if it chances to often or you are susceptible to car sickness.
Red out is cause by the blood being forced into the head usually by pulling negative g's. Such as when you point the nose of an aircraft violently down or go over a hill in a rollercoaster. Fighter pilots never do this as a Red out is very dangerous. Black out is the reverse and less harmfull provided you regain consciousness before the plane reaches the ground.
Sorry about the trollish tone I am catching up on /. stories and I have reached my stupidity tresshold.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Um, it's generally called "(Quake-)motion sickness" actually...
;)
I never heard about it happend in Doom and it really became wide-spread only with Quake.
I only get it by WATCHING long times somebody play FPSs, I never got it (yet) when I played them...
I'm not a medic, but I guess it's linked to the fact that you SEE something that your brain perceives as "motion" yet you don't get the sensation of inertia, and that the action on the screed is a few msecs delayed from the expected game's output your kbd/mouse output... which is of course worse (I guess) if you don't expect any response at all (also, never heard of drivers getting car-sick... only passengers).
I heard though (on Discovery ch. a few days ago) reports about "lag" in older real, big, expensive flight-sims causing the same effect (sickness/quesiness/etc). The "cure" was to reduce the lag of visual/gravific feedback under 50 msec.
So I guess they'll encounter a symillar problem here soon... but much worse (muscles inertia bound to be above 100msec).
So I'm quite eager so see how this turns out AFTER some real-life games tests
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