How To Solve VR Simulation Sickness: Strap People Into Rollercoasters

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.

Comments

The Future of Gaming

[Calydor]

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

Flight simulators don't help/

[sbaker]

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.

Re:Flight simulators don't help/

[sbaker]

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.