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How To Solve VR Simulation Sickness: Strap People Into Rollercoasters

Posted by timothy on from the any-old-people-will-do dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Theme park owners are trying to breathe new life into old rides by adding VR headsets, according to IEEE Spectrum. In the latest such ride from the UK's Alton Towers, sensors in the seats allow the virtual action to be synched with the rollercoaster's movements on a per-headset basis. As a side effect, this also eliminates the simulation sickness some VR users suffer from when making rapid movements through a virtual space, because the user's body is actually experiencing those movements. Is this cheating or the future of action VR? Counterexample: I haven't (yet!) gotten sick from VR, and generally love roller coasters, but had trouble keeping down my lunch (and then felt bad for for hours) after a vigorous flight simulator at the -- highly recommended! -- Strategic Air & Space Museum, near Omaha, Nebraska.

36 comments

  1. Close your eyes and think of england by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    best VR experience I ever had.

  2. More proof... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    VR is a scam.

  3. Motion Sickness IRL or in VR by kenwd0elq · · Score: 1

    Having been "in the bag" for most of the flight on my one-and-only ACM (Air Combat Maneuvering) flight at VT10 in Pensacola, I can say with some certainty that having the visual experience match the physical one is no guarantee of a steady stomach. Nor is standing on the rail of a rolling ship even when you can SEE the ship moving exactly the way you can FEEL the ship moving.

    VR for roller coasters sounds like a great idea.

    1. Re:Motion Sickness IRL or in VR by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1
      From the summary

      Counterexample: I haven't (yet!) gotten sick from VR, and generally love roller coasters, but had trouble keeping down my lunch (and then felt bad for for hours) after a vigorous flight simulator at the -- highly recommended! -- Strategic Air & Space Museum, near Omaha, Nebraska.

      Flight simulators often use spinning to get the G forces. Spinning is the thing that gets to my stomach, not side to side or up and down shifts.

    2. Re:Motion Sickness IRL or in VR by swb · · Score: 1

      Yes, it's the spinning. The first time I rode "Mission to Mars" I picked the "intense" flavor of the ride and the spinning very nearly had me losing my lunch. Fortunately I paid attention to the instructions that said to focus on the display, but for the half-second or so I drifted away from it I nearly puked.

    3. Re:Motion Sickness IRL or in VR by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I did Mission to Mars as well, my head hurt for a few hours. I'll pick the 'wimp' line next time.

  4. The Future of Gaming by Calydor · · Score: 2

    This has got to be the next natural step of On-Rails gameplay.

    --
    -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
  5. Fix the lag by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    .. and the sickness goes away. Despite the massive hype the companies, and their paid shills, are putting into this potentially interesting repackaging of technology (that's been around since the 1980s), those that aren't kids or easily impressed by $NEW_THING, will honestly tell you all headsets + current software = horrendous lag. The lag isn't a problem for standard screens because your body isn't being fooled while you start at the monitor from your chair, or the 70" TV from a sofa.

    The vastly improved image quality is what we want you to focus on, but it's the same delay problem from movement to our vision you have to consider. It confuses our senses and causes the unpleasant sensations which often lead to uneasiness through to blowing of chunks.

    Jobe Smith will have to wait a little longer for companions.

    AC: left the field having worked for you_know_who on this due to terminal sickness with a sibling. A dose of reality bring one's priorities into focus very fast.

    1. Re:Fix the lag by sbaker · · Score: 1

      I've worked decades in the flight simulation business. We cut the latency down to the bearest minimum possible (running headsets with 120Hz video rates, etc, etc) - and that's NOT the problem. The inability of the headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another problem - physical body motion is another.

      --
      www.sjbaker.org
  6. You can get used to it. by Falconhell · · Score: 1

    Motion sickness can be overcome, I used to get airsick in gliders for the first year or so, particularly after negative G.
    After 150 hours, no problem, and doing aerobatics with glee.

    1. Re:You can get used to it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's the rolling itself, especially under (or shortly after being under) some G. But indeed, it simply goes away, much faster than 150 hours. The ear still senses something unusual, but the brain simply stops to care, and switches to relying on visual cues exclusively instead.
      I wouldn't bet on this being transferrable to VR-sickness caused by the latency. The one single rock solid input the brain can use in an aircraft is visual cues (while the ear stops working well under extreme conditions). On VR with too much latency even this input isn't available. Head movements are under some closed-loop control, which won't work. So the body will need to learn fully pre-controlled head-movements. Unfortunately, following a moving target without the closed loop won't work.
      Getting adjusted to this will be much harder and take longer than aerobatics-sickness. But then, VR-time is much much cheaper, and single-use bags can be replaced by reusable buckets...

    2. Re:You can get used to it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It doesn't apply to all people. It's good that you managed to train yourself out of motion sickness, but this isn't the same as it works for everybody. Some people are more prone to motion sickness than others and not all motion sickness is triggered by the same "devices" in the body. Getting carsick repeatably isn't a cure for carsickness. It might be for some, but several parents have the problem with a child, who vomits quite often if they go anywhere by car. If getting used to driving would solve it, it would not be an ongoing problem for years.

      The most extreme case of not being able to adapt to motion sickness is seasickness. Back in the days with sails and wooden ships, the small hull made seasickness worse than it is with modern big hulls (hull size > wavelength is good against seasickness). Back then it was common practice to drop people off at the nearest port if they got seasick unless it was considered minor. It also seems to be a well known and proven fact back then that if the ship failed to reach port within reasonable time, then the seasick people could die and they were actually very worried about it since it seems to strike at random and could kill otherwise strong and healthy men.

      While it is perfectly valid to post that some people can train themselves out of motion sickness, I see the danger towards claiming "it's your own fault" at anybody, who can't train himself/herself out of being prone to motion sickness.

    3. Re:You can get used to it. by Solandri · · Score: 1

      There's a large psychological component. The more you think about getting/being sick, the greater your chances of getting sick. Every time I've gotten seasick while deep sea fishing, it went away if we started catching lots of fish and my mind got distracted from being seasick.

      For that reason, I don't say anything to discourage the people who use things like those acupressure wrist beads to ward off seasickness. If the peace of mind they get from believing those things help keeps their mind off seasickness, they're less likely to get sick.

    4. Re: You can get used to it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Getting carsick repeatably [sic] isn't a cure for carsickness." Sure it is. Eventually you run out of people who will let you ride in their car.

  7. We'll see more AR, not so much VR by LongearedBat · · Score: 1

    I don't think that VR will take off as hoped... because of motion sickness. Impatient business critics might even claim it an expensive flop. (Pity, 'cos my experiences of VR have mostly been quite fun, when I don't feel ill.)

    I have not tried AR, but I expect much less motion sickness with AR. Also, I can think of more uses for AR than VR.

  8. Better idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    VR failed in the '80s because humans don't really enjoy it after the initial excitement is over.
    VR failed in the '90s because humans don't really enjoy it after the initial excitement is over.
    VR failed in the 2000s because humans don't really enjoy it after the initial excitement is over.
    VR will fail in the 2010s because humans don't really enjoy it after the initial excitement is over.

    If you want a physical world, it's out there. A simulated world doesn't have to mimic the experience of traditional physical reality - a computer /is/ part of our reality already.

    1. Re:Better idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > VR failed... VR failed... VR failed... VR will fail
      > If you want a physical world, it's out there. A simulated world doesn't have to mimic the experience of traditional physical reality - a computer /is/ part of our reality already.

      Sorry, but you're wrong IMHO. The simple reason is that the physical reality, as you put it, is a small subset of _my_ imaginary world... and there must be someone somewhere who has an even bigger imagination than mine.

      Even after the "failures" you point out, the mere fact that VR is still a subject should be a hint that it has come to stay.

      The idea of simulating worlds which are more complex than our own is a powerful motivator, me thinks.

    2. Re:Better idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Even after the "failures" you point out, the mere fact that VR is still a subject should be a hint that it has come to stay.

      It's a hint that history repeats itself - even the failures.

      > The idea of simulating worlds which are more complex than our own

      Not technically possible. Think about it.

  9. Virtual nose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wasn't there some research showing that adding a virtual nose helps with motion sickness? Wouldn't that be cheaper and safer?

  10. Lurch them about! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pay a Thai guy to stand behind them, wrap their arms around their chest, and lurch them left and right in time with the action.

    Saw just that in Pattaya. Some enterprising locals had set up a stall with a couple Oc Rifts and some demos and was charging 100 baht a pop for a run!

  11. No.. by Lumpy · · Score: 1

    You solve it by solving the freaking LAG issue. Sorry but the lag from the time I move my head to when the video moves is still huge and the the biggest problem.

    Get it down to 10ms and the sickness mostly goes away. the problem is that takes either lower resolutions or an epic buttload of processing and graphics card power. Insane amount of graphics memory to store all the textures in ram, for your location but at a full 360 view.

    This is why I laugh like hell that sony is going to sell a VR system for the PS4. It doesnt have a 10th of the Horsepower needed for VR.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:No.. by PPH · · Score: 1

      that takes either lower resolutions

      Not going to happen that way. Because VR is being sold to the gamer set and they obsess over things like resolution.

      I vaguely recall an incident at least a decade ago related to the release of a new graphic card. It was state of the art at the time, offering a major increase in frame rates from something like 60 fps to 90 (my recollection might be wrong). The gamers loved it, posting how it eliminated flicker and, stopped triggering their migraines. Almost a year after the card's release, a bug was discovered in the Windows driver. Although the resolution setting offered the higher frame rate, apparently the card was still set to a slower speed. Suddenly, everyone noticed the poor performance of the card. Migraines reappeared and the same graphics that looked great the week before were judged to be shit. It had nothing to do with actual performance, but everything to do with suggestibility.

      I've worked with VR simulation software that was driven by low lag, low resolution graphics systems years ago. They work fine, if you are willing to accept walking through a 'cartoon' world little better then a wire frame. Some interesting work was done to develop sensors and a technique to detect a viewer's direction of vision and selectively increase resolution nearer the focus of attention. But there are users who will obsess over resolution and frame rate and your VR product will not survive the bad publicity if it is revealed that your system is 'cheating' with lower res. in their visual periphery.

      This might be a reason that Occulus isn't supporting open source platforms. Too many people digging around in the source code are liable to find these compression and speed-up tricks. With Windows, you can hide them in proprietary drivers, report any performance you want and the gamers will buy it.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
  12. Alternative Reality and Gamification by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Virtual reality becomes alternative reality by transforming a laborious, dull reality into gamified and overtly entertaining experience. In the future, there will be no boring jobs.

  13. Not enough sensory input by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 1

    Having tried all manner of VR attempts going back to the early 1990s, there are a number of things that developers keep missing. They mainly can be attributed to not engaging all the senses. No wind is a big one. No proper G forces is another. The first would be fairly easy to do and Disney did it in Soaring along with smell. Accurate G forces just can't be accomplished with your standard hydraulic motion table base. But there is another one that IMHO causes VR and 3D in general to fall apart and that is the fact that humans like to look around as opposed to being force to focus on what the director wants you to look at. Trouble is that because film has depth of field, you can't focus on what you want to. If you shot the thing with a light-field camera and then tracked what the viewer was looking at and focused the image there, that might solve the problem.

  14. Flight simulators don't help/ by sbaker · · Score: 2

    I'm not surprised that adding motion from a flight simulator wouldn't help the VR sickness effect. The flight sim only produces a very limited range of motion...I used to work on them and we called it "cartoon motion". It has as many of the real effects as is possible with a machine that can only move a few feet in each direction and only tilt by maybe 60 degrees in each axis - but it suffers from those limitations.

    Besides, there are many causes of VR sickness - and lack of physical motion is only one of them.

    The inability of the 3D objects in a VR headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another rather fundamental one.

    There is a classic paper on this subject produced by the US Navy about 15 to 20 years ago - using VR helmets that were considerably better than the current generation of devices. They concluded that no only do a significant proportion of people get sick and disoriented after more than a few minutes of use - but also that this disorientation was still noticeable 24 hours after a session using them. US Navy pilots are not allowed to fly real aircraft for 24 hours after using one of these contraptions - and they are strongly advised not to drive cars either.

    Honestly - I think the same rules should be applied to driving after VR use in civilians too.

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
    1. Re:Flight simulators don't help/ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The inability of the 3D objects in a VR headset to drive the eye's focussing mechanism is another rather fundamental one.

      Two solutions come to mind: Avoid any object close by, focus should become less of an issue a few yards out, or simply measure where the eyes are looking, determine the distance of the object, and pull the focus of the glasses accordingly. Of course, with 10ms latency to avoid further issues from that.

    2. Re:Flight simulators don't help/ by sbaker · · Score: 2

      You can't do that because you don't know where the person is concentrating their gaze.

      Try this experiment. Hold your finger 18 inches from your nose - notice that you can shift your attention from the tip of your finger to the world behind your finger without moving your eyeballs. When you concentrate on your finger, the background goes blurry - and when you concentrate on the background, your finger goes blurry. There is no possible way for the VR system to know which object you're concentrating on...so even if you had instantly variable focal length lenses, you can't make some of the scene be in focus, while the rest isn't - and the computer has literally no way to know what you want to have in focus and what you don't. Losing your ability to choose what to focus on is one of the major causes of nausea in maybe half of all users.

      Short of reconstructing the light field with holographic techniques - there is no fixing this problem.

      --
      www.sjbaker.org
    3. Re:Flight simulators don't help/ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree on the last sentence; I don't want VR until that can be accomplished. Until then I am more than satisfied with head-tracking and simulated-VR such as found with systems like the TrackIR (and many other commercial and hacked off-the-shelf solutions).

      Give me several 8k monitors around the room to handle the display and I'll make do with the fact that it's still stuck to a 2d projection.

      As for the beginning of your comment... no, if I close 1 eye I can carry out your experiment, but with both eyes open there is always a cue because the finger splits in two when I focus on the background. Thus, the eyes are in fact moving relative to one another. In the single-eye experiment, the only motion is spherical distortion afaik (though I am not an optometrist nor do I know that much about optics). A sufficiently sophisticated detector should still be able to observe this motion of the eyeball.

    4. Re:Flight simulators don't help/ by sbaker · · Score: 1

      The experiment works for me with one eye closed. I can concentrate on either the background behind the finger - or on the finger itself - one comes into focus, the other blurs out - I can decide which, even with one eye closed. Try bringing the finger closer to your eye - 12 inches maybe.

      --
      www.sjbaker.org
    5. Re:Flight simulators don't help/ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They concluded that no only do a significant proportion of people get sick and disoriented after more than a few minutes of use - but also that this disorientation was still noticeable 24 hours after a session using them. US Navy pilots are not allowed to fly real aircraft for 24 hours after using one of these contraptions - and they are strongly advised not to drive cars either.

      Huh, so that is a thing.
      I'd noticed it happening to me after using a little Cardboard set with my phone, where I felt weird after using the headset for an extended period of time (like, 3 hours) and then taking it off. Felt super dizzy, but only once I started looking around with the headset off, which lasted quite into the next morning.

      The weird bit is how fine I felt when I had the headset on, I only took it off because my phone battery died.

  15. If you ignore expense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm sure it would be an awesome experience.... for the few minutes you are on the ride. Roller coasters are expensive so either it would be a very expensive experience or done on a volume level like most theme parks meaning ridiculously short rides. This is a concept that simply can't scale down to be the "future" if you are talking about bringing it to the masses though i'm sure it's likely to be added to visual theme rides as they are already almost like that with the 3d glasses rides though such a setup seems more costly/fragile compared to giving everyone cheapo 3d glasses.

  16. overlooking the obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem with solving the motion sickness by problem by putting someone into a rollercoaster is that you're putting someone into a rollercoaster
    This is like solving someone's arachnophobia by pouring a bucket of spiders over their head

  17. Useless! by antdude · · Score: 1

    What if the person gets motion sickness in the rollercoasters like me? I even get carsickness like if I try to read and watch stuff. :(

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  18. This is such old "news", by ffkom · · Score: 1

    VR roller-coasters have been in operation at least since September 2015, see e.g. this advertisement from Europapark in Germany. The linked article doesn't reveal anything new about such rides, the surprisingly low motion-sickness effect of such VR rides was also described 6 months ago.

  19. One of my coworkers has one by p51d007 · · Score: 0

    Brought it into work. Had a "roller coaster" running on it. Couple people tried it standing up, One of them about got sick to his stomach. I scared the crap out of one of the ladies in our office. She was sitting in a rolling chair. After it got going, I pulled back on the chair and moved it. You could hear her scream through the entire office. Then they thought they would try me on it. I stood up. Didn't bother me one bit. I thought it was pretty funny. Then they had me sit in a chair and moved me around. Still didn't bother me. Why? Couple reasons. One, I KNEW it was fake. Same like hypnotizing. I've had several "experts" try and they've never been successful. Two...I use to climb 100-200 foot radio towers in my 20's & 30's. Heights don't bother me, nor do roller coasters. Even the loopy loop, curves, drops, heights...I find them boring. If I know something isn't REAL, haunted houses, things like that, they don't bother me at all, because I know it's fake.

  20. VR sickness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the VR sickness is the most great problem of this technologie

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