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.

[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.

[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.

[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

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."

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.

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

[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.

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.

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?"

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.

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....

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

[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.

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.

Are you sure?

[SuperKendall]

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

I'm not.

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.