Developers Race To Develop VR Headsets That Won't Make Users Nauseous

HughPickens.com writes Nick Wingfield reports at the NYT that for the last couple of years, the companies building virtual reality headsets have begged the public for patience as they strive to create virtual environments that don't make people physically sick. "We're going to hang ourselves out there and be judged," says John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus, describing what he calls a "nightmare scenario" that has worried him and other Oculus executives. "People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up," says Carmack. "The fear is if a really bad V.R. product comes out, it could send the industry back to the '90s." In that era, virtual reality headsets flopped, disappointing investors and consumers. "It left a huge, smoking crater in the landscape," says Carmack, who is considered an important game designer for his work on Doom and Quake. "We've had people afraid to touch V.R. for 20 years." This time around, the backing for virtual reality is of a different magnitude. Facebook paid $2 billion last year to acquire Oculus. Microsoft is developing its own headset, HoloLens, that mixes elements of virtual reality with augmented reality, a different medium that overlays virtual images on a view of the real world. Google has invested more than $500 million in Magic Leap, a company developing an augmented reality headset. "The challenge is there is so much expectation and anticipation that that could fall away quite quickly if you don't get the type of traction you had hoped," says Neil Young. (More, below.) At least one company, Valve, believes it has solved the discomfort problem with headsets. Gabe Newell says Valve has worked hard on its virtual reality technology to eliminate the discomfort, saying that "zero percent of people get motion sick" when they try its system. According to Newell, the reason why no one has gotten sick yet is thanks to Valve's Lighthouse motion-tracking system, a precise motion-tracking system that is capable of accurately tracking users as they move around a space. In the meantime the next challenge will be convincing media and tech companies to create lots of content to keep users entertained. "Virtual reality has been around for 20 years, and the one thing that has been consistent throughout this is that the technology is not mature enough," says Brian Blau,. "Today there's the possibility for that to change, but it's going to take a while for these app developers to get it right."

Comments

Nauseated.

[icejai]

... That Won't Make Users Nauseated.

Well, I guess VR headsets *could* make users nauseous...

Re:Nauseated.

[HughPickens.com]

http://www.merriam-webster.com...

Full Definition of NAUSEOUS

1
: causing nausea or disgust : nauseating
2
: affected with nausea or disgust

Usage Discussion of NAUSEOUS
Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only in sense 1 and that in sense 2 it is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous in sense 1 is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous in sense 2.
Examples of NAUSEOUS

The smell of gasoline makes me nauseous.
I began to feel nauseous.
Instead what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. Nobody does anything as nauseous as try to make everybody all pray together or pray aloud or anything, but you can tell what they're doing. â"David Foster Wallace, Rolling Stone, 25 Oct. 2001

Re:Nauseated.

[sycodon]

Getting motion sickness in a VR environment is caused by the same thing as getting seasick or airsick...a conflict between what your eyes see and your inner ear feels. That's why being on deck and looking at the horizon makes you feel better or looking out the car window makes you feel better.

So I don't know what the VR headset manufacturers can do about it.

Re:Nauseated.

[Dins]

So I don't know what the VR headset manufacturers can do about it.

Include a half ounce of weed in every box?

Re:Nauseated.

[mothlos]

English dictionaries are not prescriptive, but descriptive of the useage of words. All this is saying is that this is how people are using this word so if you hear someone use it you should consider this definition in trying to understand what has been said.

Also, while I agree on a technical level that words have no intrinsic meaning and are simply tools of communication, I don't think this conflicts with the idea that we should care about language in order to improve its utility and accessibility. It is completely legitimate to prefer that people use nauseated over nauseous as the expanded definition of the latter to include the former can hinder communication and cause confusion.

We certainly should care about our language and quoting dictionaries at people who do so is a high form of anti-thinking which just discourages people from caring.

Re:Nauseated.

[jeffmflanagan]

Doom is darker than Quake, so that could be it. It could also be a lag between input and motion in Doom on your system.

Re:Nauseated.

[oldsak]

Usage note The two literal senses of nauseous, “causing nausea” ( a nauseous smell) and “affected with nausea” ( to feel nauseous), appear in English at almost the same time in the early 17th century, and both senses are in standard use at the present time. Nauseous is more common than nauseated in the sense “affected with nausea,” despite recent objections by those who imagine the sense to be new. In the sense “causing nausea,” either literally or figuratively, nauseating has become more common than nauseous : a nauseating smell."

http://dictionary.reference.co...

Re:Nauseated.

[jeffmflanagan]

They can't do anything about that. If that's your issue with VR, you're out of luck. It's not for you.

They've been working on the head tracking and latency to solve the problem for people who are sensitive to delay or errors in head tracking. Fortunately I'm not sensitive to either issue, and could enjoy head-tracking VR much more primitive than the upcoming devices. Playing F.E.A.R. on an emagin z800 years ago was an excellent experience that actually induced fear while playing.

Re:Nauseated.

[ubrgeek]

I share your pain - I can't play them either. The condition is real and has been documented and researched by the army. Easy-to-read article here

Re:Nauseated.

[MaskedSlacker]

I love posts like this about language where someone thinks they're being "more correct" and in reality they just have no fucking clue what they're talking about.

Next he'll be telling us that splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions are modern corruptions.

Re:Nauseated.

[ArcadeMan]

The smell of farts makes me nauseous.

Re:Nauseated.

[Half-pint HAL]

I believe Doom's specific problem was the head wave. I seem to recall it feeling like your head was trapped on an infinity-shaped Scalextric track...

Re:Nauseated.

[TWX]

Especially if they're your own, and those around you become nauseated because of them, right?

Re:Nauseated.

[TWX]

I think the problem was the way the sprite for the gun bobbed and weaved in front of you.

Compared to playing any of the Wolfenstein-based games it was nice to my eyes, as it was not nearly as unrealistically still as even Rise of the Triad...

Re:Nauseated.

[Half-pint HAL]

It is completely legitimate to prefer that people use nauseated over nauseous as the expanded definition of the latter to include the former can hinder communication and cause confusion.

How can it be "expanded" if it has always been that way? Besides, the verb "nauseate" is so rare as to be negligible, and without the verb form to support it, the past-participle-derived adjectival form is non-intuitive.

We certainly should care about our language and quoting dictionaries at people who do so is a high form of anti-thinking which just discourages people from caring.

We should be selective about what we care about, or we risk wiping out good changes, such as when teachers reversed the death of person conjugations -- see restoration comedies for invariant "was" in the past tense, for example.

Re:Nauseated.

[Half-pint HAL]

Or my favorite: Don't use commas, which aren't needed. But I haven't seen such lists of bogus definitions.

I'm against artificial rules, but at the same time, I recognise that all writing is artificial. We need to have sensible conventions, and I wish we spent more time teaching punctuation conventions at school, because nonsensical commas split sentences badly. The basic rule is simple: never use a comma where you wouldn't naturally pause in speech -- this shouldn't really be contentious. The contentious cases are where there is a pause but the word after implies a pause/The contentious cases are where there is a pause, but the word after implies a pause.

Re:Nauseated.

[labnet]

Reminds me of the Myth-busters episode where Tory, Jamie, Kari wouldn't hurl on the spinning motion sickness chair; but Adam and Grant would. It seemed ginger & motion sickness tablets worked really well for those of us susceptible to motion sickness. Maybe some people will just need to resort to medication.

Re:Nauseated.

[aaronb1138]

They might get head tracking latency, accuracy, and precision down in this generation of VR. It will be another 20 years at least before they conquer depth of field / focus / light field projection in a meaningful way that works with the biology of the eye. Entirely new, non-planar display technologies will be required.

Re:Nauseated.

[icejai]

These two meanings may have "appeared at the same time", but it was definitely more understood to mean "causing nausea" at the time. And it really is only through decades of misuse that the current definition of "affected with nausea" is accepted "at the present time".

For some careful English speakers, nauseous means causing nausea, and nauseated is the term for experiencing nausea. These are the traditional meanings (though nauseous initially meant inclined to nausea before gaining the sense we now consider traditional), and they’re still the ones put forth by some English reference books and usage authorities. In actual usage, though, nauseous has supplanted nauseated in the experiencing nausea sense, and nauseated is reserved for a few specific uses.

http://grammarist.com/usage/na...

https://books.google.com/ngram...

Re:Nauseated.

[Prune]

We prototyped those years ago: retinal projection (laser raster scan across the retina). It's just that it's not very practical. But with ultra high resolution displays, the microlens array approach to light fields is becoming practical (you'd have a decent system with even 8x8 pixel patches behind each microlens, so a 16K panel is sufficient for a first generation lightfield display).

Re:Nauseated.

[DNS-and-BIND]

"The Beginning of Wisdom is Calling Things by Their Right Names"

-- Chinese saying attributed to Confucius

Re:Nauseated.

[Threni]

Whippersnapper! If only he'd listened to his elders he wouldn't have gone done that wrong path. "All phenomena are impermanent", said the Buddha. Although, had he known he was going to have to deal with the Web 2, post MTV generation he'd have probably gone for something a little more pithy; "you say potato, I saw potato", perhaps.

Re:Nauseated.

[AmiMoJo]

It's a bit more complex than just needing a mis-match between inner-ear and eyes to make you feel sick. Most people can tolerate their eyes seeing movement but their inner-ear saying they are stationary, unless they are also experiencing vertigo. Vertigo is caused by things like sudden variations in frame rate.

For a VR headset it is therefore important to keep frame rate up, but also to track both the direction that the user is looking and the position of their head. For example, when you look down you lean your head forwards and rotate it. If the simulation just rotates it doesn't match your inner-ear, it has to match the leaning forwards and movement of the head downwards.

castAR

[DeBattell]

Technical Illusions product doesn't have nausea problems. Jerri Ellisworth is a genius. I first found her when I googled "how to make a transistor at home."

Re:castAR

[sbaker]

AR is much easier than VR...but even so, I'd be surprised if everyone could hold onto their lunch with it.

It doesn't contain anything to specifically fix the problems.

    -- Steve

Also patents...

[Kaenneth]

Over the last 20 years a lot of patents in the area have expired as well, making them cheaper to produce and sell.

Sick

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so sick of these VR products I could throw up.

I might be one

[war4peace]

I think I might be one of the people who are getting sick from using VR. It's also one reason why I don't drive.
What happens is that I have nausea symptoms if I am in a moving car and look at my cellphone screen, for example. I can't look at my cellphone or tablet for more than 30 seconds before I start to get sick and feel like throwing up.
My doctor says it's because I am stationary (my body doesn't move), I'm also looking at a stationary object (e.g. cellphone screen) but the environment I'm in moves with high speed.
Strangely enough, I don't get sick while travelling by train or plane, only car and bus. I played and watched movies on my tablet for 8 hours straight while in a moving train and haven't had any symptoms.

Re:I might be one

[ralphsiegler]

I have an even worse problem where I get these huge lumps on my head. I'll be driving along, texting or using a tablet, when there will be this huge deaccelerating feeling coupled with pain in forehead and aural impressions like breaking glass and bending metal, usually near traffic lights or backed up ramps during rush hour. I hope the graphical rendering devs can iron out these problems.

Re:I might be one

[war4peace]

I solved that issue since birth by not getting a driver's license.

Re:I might be one

[ArsonSmith]

I find that a problem too, if I'm watching a youtube video while driving it causes me to spew into my cup holder. Almost ran over some kids the other day. It's part of my new diet plan though, so I do it as much as i can after every meal.

Re:I might be one

[war4peace]

Let me rephrase:
I am aware that I get motion sickness so I avoid driving because that might impact me while I am looking at speedometer, rear view or other stationary objects in my car. I prefer not to put myself or any passengers in danger, therefore I avoid driving completely.

Overdoing safety? Maybe. But I care about living :)

what about depth of field

[i_ate_god]

with all the focus on motion sickness, what about depth of field?

Re:what about depth of field

[ralphsiegler]

To do correctly would have to sense the aperture and lens thickness of eye, then adjust picture accordingly

Re:what about depth of field

[Half-pint HAL]

Very good eyeball tracking should be enough -- if you can triangulate what distance the eyes are focusing on, depth of field would be a breeze in a binocular headset.

Re:what about depth of field

[dave562]

I am curious about this as well. What are the potential risks of maintaining focus on a point a few inches away from the eye for hours upon hours?

Re:what about depth of field

[ArsonSmith]

you don't, there is a lens that pushes that focus to a relaxed level.

Re:what about depth of field

[sbaker]

...or refocus the image at every pixel on the screen.

Re:what about depth of field

[f3rret]

It isn't motion sickness, it is much deeper than that. Motion sickness is part of VR sickness. But VR sickness includes all sorts of mismatched input that your brain can't cope with. It isn't just nausea, it is a headache and feeling of illness. I've spent many hours in the Rift and still get decompression sickness with VR..

The Occulus Rift makes nitrogen bubbles form in your soft tissue?

Re:what about depth of field

[ralphsiegler]

that will only work to about 43 feet apparent distance, and if person has normal equal load balancing for their stereoscopic vision.

Language nazi here

[Anonymous Coward]

Nauseated, not nauseous. A thing that is nauseous makes people sick. Nauseated is the state of being you mean.

And yes, I worked for the German army in WWII as a proofreader for Hitler's various public missives.

Re:Language nazi here

[friesofdoom]

nauseous
nôSHs,nôzs/
adjective
adjective: nauseous


1.
affected with nausea; inclined to vomit.
"a rancid, cloying odor that made him nauseous"
synonyms: sick, nauseated, queasy, bilious, green around the gills, ill, unwell; More
seasick, carsick, airsick, travel-sick;
informalbarfy;
rarequalmish
"the food made her feel nauseous"
2.
causing nausea; offensive to the taste or smell.
"the smell was nauseous"
disgusting, repellent, or offensive.
"this nauseous account of a court case"

Who is Brian Blau

[neo-mkrey]

and why should I care what his opinion is?

Nonsense.

[HornWumpus]

Of course any VR helmet will be capable of making the user sick. Even if perfected with inner ear stimulation. All they have to do is put them through virtual motions that would make them sick IRL.

If they haven't been making anybody sick, it has nothing to do with motion tracking. The one on my VFX1 was 'good enough' 20 years ago.

It's down to software. It was down to software 20 years ago. 20 years ago nobody would write a VR only game though, so we ran hacks. Even then some games would not make most users sick. Comanche 2 was not very pukey at all, once you got the frame rate high enough.

Re:Nonsense.

[HornWumpus]

Which was not too bad 20 years ago. 200fps on a 60Hz display didn't necessarily make you puke, if the software kept your reasonably oriented.

It is about the content. You can say it isn't till you are blue in the face. With a perfected VR environment you could still fuck it up with pukey content.

Re:Nonsense.

[Half-pint HAL]

Which was not too bad 20 years ago. 200fps on a 60Hz display didn't necessarily make you puke, if the software kept your reasonably oriented.

It is about the content. You can say it isn't till you are blue in the face. With a perfected VR environment you could still fuck it up with pukey content.

No, seriously, it's about the tech. First up, you can't get 200fps on a 60Hz display -- it maxes out at 60fps, aka 60Hz.

Secondly, when you're looking at a screen, you're looking at a screen. When your head moves, the screen doesn't. The image might not react optimally to your fingers, but it certainly reacts to your head.

But once the screen is strapped to your head, you are pretty much immersed. You have no physical real-world point of reference, and your brain does get confused. I once piloted a ship at night, and sadly the AC generator on board has a tendency to run slow (about 45Hz, I think). There was visible flicker in your peripheral vision below decks. But the worst bit was the compass-card on the helm. You couldn't see the flicker, but persistence of vision coupled with the motion of the boat left it floating around in front of my vision like a circular ghost with numbers around its edge. I got so sick that I couldn't leave the deck for the next 8 hours, and had to be excused from my next watch.

Re:Nonsense.

[HornWumpus]

You absolutely can change images on a display faster then the display refresh. You just never see all of any images and you typically see some on screen flicker from memory conflicts. Enabling VSynch is the setting that limits frame rate to display refresh rate.

You remain just flat wrong about tech being _capable_ of making VR not pukey. Imagine an experience that would make you puke in real life (say kissing Rosie ODonnell). A perfected VR experience of the same would make you puke.

The key is content. Today the tech is still weak, but content will always be potentially pukey. Don't make a kissing Rosie VR demo.

Re:Nonsense.

[Half-pint HAL]

That's a trivial point. Yes, you can make any screen do pukey stuff if you want. But as it stands, people find VR pukey not because of trippy psychadelia and whatnot, but because the world goes all wobbly on them due to the lag between head movement and change of picture. That is inherently pukey.

Re:Nonsense.

[HornWumpus]

Lag has been a solved problem for 20 years. VR is still pukey if the content is not carefully built to not be pukey.

Re:Nonsense.

[Half-pint HAL]

The reason the Occulus Rift still isn't available as a consumer device is that they still have problems with lag. If you know the solution, maybe you should offer them your services as a well-paid consultant.

Re:Nonsense.

[HornWumpus]

It's not a solvable problem without completely standard hardware.

You just have to tune each games settings until you get the needed frame rate. Which is admittedly beyond the average end user.

As the eco system matures they will have standard configurations and hopefully a game profile manager (with 2 or 3 sets per game for various strength machines). The problem is that many games mix controller settings with display, so you can't just load the 'rift' settings off the web. You have to load or figure out rift settings, then load controller settings.

Managing lag is among the reasons they aren't shipping a consumer product yet.

Re:Nonsense.

[Half-pint HAL]

It is not just about frame rate. It's about the lag between moving the head and the image changing.

Re:Nonsense.

[HornWumpus]

I'm going out on a limb and boldly assert those to not be independent variables. Lag being (at worst) (PipeLength * (1 / framerate)). Occulus improves that by not showing any invalid frames in the pipe and blanking the current image on head motion.

It's not like anybody wants a long video rendering pipe. Position capture has been relatively fast vs. render for decades. Even with crappy capacitive orientation sensors you were talking thousands of samples/sec.

This sounds really useful

[Krishnoid]

"People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up."

"I notice that by your increased heartrate and labored breathing that you have been poisoned. Would you like me to start up Starfox 3d pre-alpha?"

Re:This sounds really useful

[ckatko]

>Would you like me to start up Starfox 3d pre-alpha?"

Don't you dare joke about that!

Eyes wide open

[allcoolnameswheretak]

I for one am looking forward to my future, virtual, bikini-clad room mates.

Re:Eyes wide open

[Tyler Durden]

Best to wait until they have the whole nausea problem settled. This is one case where you don't want to fall victim to the Ludovico technique.

Re:Eyes wide open

[ArcadeMan]

I think you'll have to wait for Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 69.

Re:Eyes wide open

[ArsonSmith]

It is pretty well known how to make sure there isn't any nausea. Most of the things that cause this now are half ports of non-VR games.

General motion sickness.

[jellomizer]

From my understanding, General motion sickness happens when your eyes tell you something that the fluid in your ears doesn't
Sure with some VR headsets they do not work well because the images that they show may not be timed or aligned correctly so your 3d perspective is kinda off. But you still have the issue of your ears saying you are not moving, or you are moving in a way that is different from what your eyes are saying.

That and some people have much different levels of tolerance so for some people you can cause motion sickness by just moving an object back and forth across their field of vision. While others it takes a lot more....

Re:General motion sickness.

[allcoolnameswheretak]

If its just the fluids on the ears, people should be able to get accustomed to the change. Astronauts do.

Re:General motion sickness.

[HornWumpus]

How it usually works.

They have an idea for 'making it better', they work on their idea while be desensitized, it works.

Re:General motion sickness.

[ckatko]

What do they do when they're training for those trips? Does the vomit comet last 30 days in a single dive?

Re:General motion sickness.

[ckatko]

Let's assume the inner ear thing is a real problem, and it's the only problem.

There's two sides to that:

1) Sure, if you can desensitize yourself, that's certainly easier than changing people's ears, or finding hardware to do it.
2) Most people won't try new technology that also makes them sick. People don't like to work for entertainment. Astronauts are heroes going into space. Grandma would already rather read a book. So until they solve that issue, they'll need a hugely disproportionate amount of PR/cultural draw to get people involved. They'll have to target kids who don't mind puking to learn something new. Even then, they won't get everyone on-board because puking is a line most people won't cross for anything. Think of how many people never ride roller-coasters. That's untappable money. So solving that issue is extremely important for the future of their business.

Re:General motion sickness.

[wonkey_monkey]

If its just the fluids on the ears, people should be able to get accustomed to the change. Astronauts do.

Uh huh. So, how many hours, days, or weeks of continuous uninterrupted VR usage is required to acclimatise?

Re:General motion sickness.

[Half-pint HAL]

If its just the fluids on the ears, people should be able to get accustomed to the change. Astronauts do.

Given the ratio of applicants to vacancies, space programmes can afford to be selective. I seriously doubt anyone with serious motion sickness would ever be accepted for astronaut training.

We've had hundreds of years of sailing the seas, and the observation is that people's capacity to get over seasickness is minimal. Sailors adjust by compensation strategies (breathing techniques, moving about more/less etc), not by becoming more accustomed.

feature

[lactose99]

Just call the vomit-inducing situation a "feature" and be done with it. In fact, I can see this ushering in a whole new wave of quick-weight-loss VR!

"Stereoscopic 3D" vs "VR"

[squiggleslash]

Other than being able to sense head movements and thus providing another means to control the camera, this is just ordinary stereoscopic 3D, not "VR". I understand why everyone wants it to be, but this is the umpteenth time something is being touted as VR when it's not even trying to be close. Before that it was Second Life. Before that Doom.

At the very least, you should have a full range of sensory perceptions, and physical actions by your body should reflect in the simulated world.

Re:"Stereoscopic 3D" vs "VR"

[Half-pint HAL]

When the term VR entered the popular imagination, it meant stereoscopic 3D.

Weed cures nausea

[towermac]

They are going to have to recommend users get plenty of weed in them before use.

I didn't care much about VR before, but maybe I should jump on the bandwagon...

Re:Weed cures nausea

[MrNiceguy_KS]

So you're saying VR companies should concentrate their US marketing efforts in Colorado and Washington?

Re:Weed cures nausea

[Half-pint HAL]

Weed makes people vomit. Where I grew up, it was called a "whitey" (because first you went white as a sheet, then you threw up).

Sim Sickness

[ShakaUVM]

Source: I worked in VR 20 years ago for a defense contractor.

Sim Sickness is caused by a disconnect between what your eyes see and what your inner ear is telling you is happening. Your eyes are extremely sensitive to latency. If you snap your head quickly, even a small lag will cause a certain percentage of people to get nauseous. Having a fast and accurate motion tracking system is crucial, but you also need to have an extremely fast rendering engine and a headset capable of updating quickly as well. Motion prediction helps, also, but does not eliminate the problem. As does making sure your program doesn't require you to spin around a lot.

We can only put up with the horribly slow latencies on flat screen displays because they're not attached to our heads.

Re:Sim Sickness

[N3x)(]

That's why the current focus is on low persistence screens. They never "hold" the frame while they wait for the next. so the effect is a lowered brightness but the image is only shown while its actually correct leaving the brain to fill in the gaps. I haven't experienced it myself but apparently it solves many of the nausea problems. You need to get up to above 90 fps though,

Re:Sim Sickness

[jettoblack]

In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.

Games where your avatar remains seated in a cockpit, like a fighter sim, were no problem. You can crane your neck to look around the cockpit from different positions and angles without any nausea (provided the head tracking works well enough), because both your avatar and your real body are seated and not moving. The lack of G forces from the motion of the craft were apparently not a problem.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that even a perfect head tracking VR helmet will ever work for FPS-type games where your avatar is walking around while your real body sits still.

Re: Sim Sickness

[Half-pint HAL]

But the downside of that is that your viewport render is going to need to have a heck of a lot of pixels (tilt will get very blurry if you don't supersample the viewport) which means a high render time, which is another potential source of lag.

The secret to success may actually be to step back several generations in terms of graphical quality so that the 3D render time is negligible. Get a lagless Wolfenstein or Doom going, then build forward from there.

Re:Sim Sickness

[Prune]

The required refresh rate is too fast to re-render. The only way to do this is with hardware pixel reprojection, and competent ways of handling the problems that come with it (disocclusion and view-dependent effects -- specular reflections and refractions).

Re:Sim Sickness

[ArsonSmith]

Actually most of what you describe is solved. the head tracking latency is a solved problem, or at least well understood what is required to remove it as a cause for sickness. The main problem now is that porting games that were not designed for VR is what everyone really wants, yet it's what makes everyone sick.

Playing the games that were designed from the beginning to be VR games, that are held to the requirements for movement speeds and frames per second then few people will get simsick from them.

Re:Sim Sickness

[Dutch Gun]

I agree with your assessment about how FPS games may not be the best choice for VR headsets. Personally, I also think vehicular-based games are the killer apps for VR. I used to love playing flight sims, but they always suffered from an inability to crane your neck around and track your targets, for instance. I'd love to try both flight sims and other mech/vehicular combat games with this new tech, especially when using a proper HOTAS input system. Years ago, I used a set of flightstick, throttle, and petals from CH Products, and it was an absolute joy to fly simulated planes with these, except for having to peer through a relatively tiny screen as a viewport.

In order for FPS games to work, I suspect we may need to see dedicated peripherals designed specifically for moving, and other peripherals for aiming and firing guns or other devices - sort of a purpose-built HOTAS system for FPS/VR games - something like a simple one-handed analog thumbstick for the off/movement hand, and a motion-tracked aiming device for the dominant/aiming hand.

If the motion-sickness issue isn't solidly resolved, then these games may be simply limited to the smaller demographic who is a bit more tolerant to motion-sickness. I tend to find it hard to believe the statement claiming "0 percent" motion sickness, because the world is a pretty big place, and some people are going to barf no matter how perfectly it's engineered. Hopefully I'm wrong, because I'd like to see this tech really take off.

Re: Sim Sickness

[HornWumpus]

You typically turn down your graphics and spend a few bucks on your video card. No such thing as lagless.

Re:Sim Sickness

[HornWumpus]

I loved Janes ATF on my VFX1 headset. I should see if the machine still boots.

I found that having good solid controls in your hands makes me less likely to get sick. G27 wheel, DK2 and Asseto Corsa are my current favorite.

Re:Sim Sickness

[ShakaUVM]

>In your experience would you say that people can adapt to sickness caused by VR over time? Does it vary?

For some people, yes. They get used to it.

For me, I actually got more nauseous over time. But we also moved between software products and switched the prediction software, which was also part of it.

The interesting thing is that the people who are most in tune with their bodies get the most sick. My boss had a friend who was a pole vaulter who put it on and got instantly sick. Whereas people who aren't really physical have an easier time with it on average.

Re:Sim Sickness

[ShakaUVM]

>Actually most of what you describe is solved. the head tracking latency is a solved problem, or at least well understood what is required to remove it as a cause for sickness

Well. A problem can be (and is) well understood without necessarily having a good solution for it.

I recall talking to Michael Abrash about how we quasi-solved it back in the day when he asked about it a couple years ago. And he was working on VR for Valve. So maybe, yeah, they solved it. But at the time he thought it was pretty much impossible to do right.

Re:Sim Sickness

[ShakaUVM]

>In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.

Well. You shouldn't be seeing your own avatar. Other than that, there's nothing inherently sim sickness-causing about moving around a world. You could be a tank or an airplane or a person as far as your inner ear is concerned. What *does* cause a massive amount of nausea is when you are in a FPS and you're constantly snapping your neck around to see if someone is behind you, above you, besides you, etc. But that's not necessarily sim sickness - you'll get nausea in real life if you made the same head movements. You'll also wear our your neck muscles, which is another big issue... once VR headsets weigh past a certain amount, they cause neck problems.

Re:Sim Sickness

[ArsonSmith]

By understood, I mean there is a list of do's and don't's to go with VR. While it does limit some of the capabilities to hack in head tracking to current FPSes and drop them into a VR helmet and say go without making someone puke, there is plenty of new content coming out that follows the rules and makes for very pleasant experiences.

I love my Oculus Rift DK2

[Anonymous Coward]

.....but I get physically ill at just thinking about putting the thing on. It's a love/hate relationship. It's amazing how real the thing feels with good demo or a game. Unfortunately so many demos and many of the games I've played just make me sick to my stomach. I typically can't use it for longer than an hour with Assetto Corsa which is the game I find works best with the Rift. I want to love the thing because it can be really immersive but they really need to figure out how to fix the motion sickness.

Re:I love my Oculus Rift DK2

[jeffmflanagan]

The fix needs to happen inside your brain. They can't fix it because they're not allowed to issue medication. Try Dramamine.

Re:I love my Oculus Rift DK2

[HornWumpus]

I can't do the hill climb even once. Too many tight turns.

An hour at a time is all I expect from VR. You should let your eyes focus to infinity that often anyhow.

This is my second headset. 20 years ago the issues were the same. Some games worked OK, others (Descent) were bazooka barf inducing.

Re:I love my Oculus Rift DK2

[jma05]

In that case, the product will just flop. There is no way you can tell the mass market to "Try Dramamine". A small enthusiast community will put up with a lot, but that will hardly provide the critical mass it needs.

Re:I love my Oculus Rift DK2

[N.73SL4]

I had the same thing going on with my DK1. I loved it, but to look at it made me sick. While I think I was getting slightly more resilient to the nausea over time, taking sea sickness tablets (Kwells) did the trick. I could use the DK1 literally for hours on end and not feel sick once. Also, what I found helps with FPS style games is to move my legs as if I'm walking, in effect walking on the spot. This seems to trick my brain enough that I don't feel sick. Probably looks even more ridiculous, but it works for me. Strangely, I get serious VR sickness from driving games like Assetto Corsa. The fact that I'm 'in a car' that's turning, but I know I'm stationary really messes with my brain.

Re:I love my Oculus Rift DK2

[twokay]

I'm not so sure, you can reduce travel sickness to almost zero by gradual exposure. For instance, many years ago I went without watching TV or even looking at an electronic screen for 2 weeks or more. When I returned TV made me feel distinctly travel sick for about 1 hour. I expect the VR effect will be worse, but with enough exposure i believe you can train your brain to stop the sickness.

"zero percent of people get motion sick"

[ubrgeek]

Must be one of the new versions. I tried one six or seven months ago and lasted less than a minute before getting hit by motion sickness. Granted, I get it pretty quickly from FPS (I can play for about five minutes and then I'm laid-up for hours) so I might be overly sensitive to the experience.

Re: "zero percent of people get motion sick"

[N3x)(]

I have been forced to chew car-sickness gum in order to play some fps games. It made me feel weird but it was worth it.

Virus

[sjames]

I'm just waiting for the first computer virus that makes the user sick. M.D.s will have to get used to diagnosing patients with a bout of BarfOrama 2.6.

Shit!

[Greyfox]

That means the window's closing on me making a 3D wingsuit video with the intent of making an Occulus Rift wearer vomit! I'd better get cracking!

Are you sure?

[SuperKendall]

I for one am looking forward to my future, virtual, bikini-clad room mates.

I'm not.

Re: Stoner bullshit.

[Type44Q]

Your "reaction" says a lot more about you than it does about the drug...

Re:Your friendly neighborhood word pedant here

[Half-pint HAL]

Ah, I think I get it now. You are sanctimonious, so I am sanctimoniated. That's how it works, right?

Not old enough, apparently.

[tlambert]

I know you're right. It's the fairly-contemporary definition of the word "nauseous" now, due to the length of time it has been used improperly.

I'm just being an old fart.

Not old enough, apparently. If you were a pre-2007 revisionist history "old fart", you'd have two spaces after your period, like the older version of the Chicago Manual of Style demanded, before they pretended that we have always had proportional fonts.

Re:Your friendly neighborhood word pedant here

[hey!]

Exactly. My being sanctimonious would make you hypocritically self-righteous.

Remember....

[Chris Mattern]

Feeling nausea is "nauseated". Causing nausea is "nauseous." Do not say "I feel nauseous" unless you are sure you have this effect on others.

Begging the public?

[Mr. Freeman]

How about you make a product that I want to buy and then I'll give you money for it. There's no "patience" involved here, it's just the free market working like it should for once. Whoever releases a product that doesn't make users sick first will probably get a crapload of money.

Buses do not operate on Sundays

[tepples]

Without a driver's license, how does one get to and from work on a Sunday, when public transportation has the day off?

Re:Buses do not operate on Sundays

[war4peace]

What kind of shitty country do you live in with no public transport on Sundays?

Romania reporting in -- trains, underground, buses trams all run. Have a nice day.

Re:Buses do not operate on Sundays

[tepples]

What kind of shitty country do you live in with no public transport on Sundays?

Some parts of the United States. (Source)

Until

[Ol Olsoc]

The VR people figure out away to stimulate the inner ear the same way as they show the imagery. Puking will be a integral part of the VR experience.

Try looking down and reading a book on a long car trip.

Easy to understand - impossible to solve.

[sbaker]

I've worked with VR helmets since the 1980's in flight simulation.

The problem is simple: Your eyes use two mechanisms to figure out distance - the degree to which your eyes have to point in different directions in order to fuse two images into one - and the degree to which the lens has to be stretched or squished to pull things into focus. Every VR helmet ever made gets the first thing right - and completely fails at the second thing. No matter what optics are used, no matter anything - you're focussing at the same distance over the entire visual field, regardless of virtual distance.

When our brains look at two inputs that should yield the same results - but they don't - we assume that something is malfunctioning, and we get sick.

Same deal with seasickness when the inner ear says one thing about the motion and our eyes tell us something different.

So - you need some kind of insane computer-driven lenticular display where every pixel has a lens that focuses that light at an appropriate depth for the 3D content at that point. Such things don't exist...and that's the only thing that'll make this problem go away.

All of the recent people to try to fix this are amateurs who just started looking at it - look back at the research done by the old flight simulation companies like Link, Singer and Rediffusion - and the decades of research on this subject done by AFRL (the Air Force Research Labs), the US Navy and NASA.

WIthout solving the focus problem, we're doomed to another cycle of dizzy, puking customers.

Worst of all - US Navy research shows that after a protracted time in one of these VR rigs, it's dangerous to go out and drive a car or fly a plane - their pilots aren't allowed to fly within 24 hours of being in a simulator.

    -- Steve

Re:Easy to understand - impossible to solve.

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Would it help if the VR headset allowed for some Actual Reality to seep through in some controlled way? Couple of ideas come to mind --

1. Have a faint overlay of "AR" with the VR image. Could be that the physical screen is partly transparent somehow so you can see the outside, with a controllable (manual or automatic) transparency.

2. Have a small square patch of AR in your field of view, say in the upper right corner, that your eyes can dart back to when your brain needs some grounding. Kind of like a little plug in the headset that when you remove physically with your hands, you see a hole through which the real world shines through. When it's plugged back, you see a black square in its place. Actually it would be more like a camera shutter -- touch the headset on the side and it opens/closes.

3. Time-shared -- at certain times, auto-deduced or manual, the entire VR quickly fades in into your entire field of view. That would be best if optical and not rendered, so it may be a form of (1) -- unless rendered is fast enough (maybe with direct circuitry from the headset camera to the screen, without going through the PC).

The idea is the very moment you feel uncomfortable you touch the headset (perhaps even command it via EEG) and you see the real world immediately -- without worrying about taking off the headset.

Re:Easy to understand - impossible to solve.

[HornWumpus]

We're both old enough to have fixed focus eyes at this point. So problem solved for us.

You could fix it with pupal tracking, finding focus object, adjusting single very rapid zoom lens to correct focal distance and rendering depth of field blur.

but.....

[SuperDre]

Why is it that I have no motion sickness with my old Forte VFX-1, but get it pretty fast with the DK2 (which I also own)?
So it's definitly not tracking only that's causing the problem..

Re:but.....

[HornWumpus]

Well met fellow VFX1 owner. Does yours still run?

I get tons of motion sickness from the VFX1 in descent and am fine with my DK2 in Asseto Corsa. Devil is in the details.

Re:Your friendly neighborhood word pedant here

[Half-pint HAL]

Are you feeling suitable self-righteated now?

Re:Your friendly neighborhood word pedant here

[Half-pint HAL]

The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example.

Except it doesn't mean that at all. It means possessing a particular property. This, of course, was my point with "sanctimonious". It's a very broad suffix and is sometimes used for a thing that causes something, but not only.

The antonym of "nauseated" is "nauseating" -- compare with "tired" and "tiring".

The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.

The problem with pedantry is that it's almost always wrong.