Virtual Reality Gets Comfy

Roland Piquepaille writes "If you ever participated to some virtual reality (VR) experiments, you know that the environment is quite expensive and not always user-friendly. In fact, in some immersive environments, it's even possible to feel bad because of motion sickness. This is why researchers from Germany and Sweden have developed a new VR environment where the participants believe they're moving while being seated. This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions, could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future."

Comments

Motion Sickness

[JehCt]

With seasickness, one of the best cures is to sit on deck, feel the wind, see the waves, and watch the horizon. Going below where you feel the motion but don't see it is absolutely the worst thing to do. Perhaps the brain likes all it's sensory inputs to give consistent information. So if you are in VR and your eyes and ears indicate "motion," but your sense of touch (pressure on what supports you) says "standing still," that will probably lead to sickness. I am not sure what to make of this discovery. Maybe they have established better sensory consistency so there is less sickness.

Re:Motion Sickness

[smallfries]

VR sickness is induced differently. That occurs because there is real motion (of your head), but there is a timelag between this motion and the change in picture. Your brain can't handle the lag as your ears and eyes don't match up, and so you feel sick.

The alternative that they are referring to in the article is a motion pod. In a pod you get thrown around alot, which will make you feel sick anyway, but you probably also have a lag between the feeling and motion. Every year we get a bunch of students that write a game on the motion pod as their project. Most are pretty good, but you should see the colour the guys turn when they are debugging them.

The effect that the article is talking about is different. The analogy that the speaker at APGV used last year is when you are sitting on a train. If the train is stationary but another train moves in the opposite direction it feels (physically) as if you are moving. This is a perceptual illusion, and the project uses these types of illusion to make you feel as if you are moving, when in fact you are not.

So what you are calling VR sickness (no motion) isn't actually true of VR, but may be true in this case (if it is installed in a cabinet rather than a headset).