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When Working in Virtual Reality Makes You Sick (medium.com)
Virtual reality is a modern-day beacon of escapism -- a way to fully immerse yourself in other worlds -- and it's seeing unprecedented applications. The market, no surprise, is exploding, with some industry groups estimating a $60 billion global market by 2022. As business booms, however, people who are using the tech are reporting a growing number of physical side effects -- like VR arm, but worse: eye strain, dizziness, headaches, nausea, and even dissociative experiences. From a report: VR companies recommend that people take frequent breaks and moderate their VR time when they're first starting out. "As you become accustomed to the virtual reality experience, you can begin increasing the amount of time you use Daydream View," reads one line of the health and safety information included with Google's VR platform. But what happens when it's your job to build these escapist technologies? The potential health risks for everyday consumers are compounded for those who make VR products for a living.
When VR bigwig Jeremy Bailenson founded Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in 2003, two items were even more important than the VR equipment he was using: "We had to keep a bucket in the lab and a mop nearby," Bailenson says. Today, he institutes a strict 20-minute limit on headset time for people in his lab. These health effects produce unique challenges for VR developers. "We have to understand not just the good but also the downsides of this technology. There a lot of questions we need to answer," Bailenson says. "The whole point of VR is it takes you out of your space, but you can't be doing that for many hours a day."
[...] Suddenly rotating around a virtual environment using handled controllers or quickly looking left and right in the VR space without any concomitant physical movement in the real world tend to physically affect Jonathan Yomayuza, VR technical director at the Emblematic Group, a creative firm based in Southern California. [...] The feeling Yomayuza describes is common among people who work with or use VR.
When VR bigwig Jeremy Bailenson founded Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in 2003, two items were even more important than the VR equipment he was using: "We had to keep a bucket in the lab and a mop nearby," Bailenson says. Today, he institutes a strict 20-minute limit on headset time for people in his lab. These health effects produce unique challenges for VR developers. "We have to understand not just the good but also the downsides of this technology. There a lot of questions we need to answer," Bailenson says. "The whole point of VR is it takes you out of your space, but you can't be doing that for many hours a day."
[...] Suddenly rotating around a virtual environment using handled controllers or quickly looking left and right in the VR space without any concomitant physical movement in the real world tend to physically affect Jonathan Yomayuza, VR technical director at the Emblematic Group, a creative firm based in Southern California. [...] The feeling Yomayuza describes is common among people who work with or use VR.
Hi there. I'm a professional VR developer, I teach a VR development course, and I made a fun little game-jam indie game which I sell on Steam. I'll happily talk about this kind of stuff all day. While I don't get motion sickness of any kind (car, boat, desktop gaming), I do occasionally feel ill in VR, especially in a poorly designed experience. If you have to keep a bucket nearby, you're applying the wrong design principles (either by accident or on purpose).
For the vast majority of users, it all comes down to design:
If the eyes are seeing movement that the body didn't initiate, then discomfort happens.
If the environment does not honor the players' physical body, then discomfort happens.
This is why flying around in Google Earth can make you ill, while making things in Google Blocks negatively affects very few people. Comfortable locomotion is still a difficult/unsolved problem, which is why a lot of games have teleportation mechanisms.
The stimuli that make a person feel ill are VERY personal. For example, I have no problem moving up in VR, but I feel a little queasy any time a game moves me down in VR. The precise stimulus and degree of impact is different for every individual.
There are a lot of camera things (such as shaky cam) that have to be avoided outright completely. Even traditional cinematic techniques such as panning over an environment should be done with care (open the scene at speed instead of accelerating/decelerating, provide audio cues such as rushing air before you fade-in to a aerial pan). Flying about in Google Earth is made somewhat more comfortable by reducing the field of view to just the foveated region, which is generally more tolerant of motion than the periphery.
Other forms of discomfort include when objects pass through where the operators' physical body would be, and the use of inverse kinematics which often shows player limbs in orientations that don't match up with the operators' actual position (and thus proprioceptive system). These often "feel weird", but don't generally make people ill. (Interestingly, often the best solution to this is to not include arms or legs at all, and only show hands, like in Job Simulator)
Honor and respect your players' body. They'll thank you.
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You're absolutely right. As examples I love to play Just Dance... for about 20 minutes before my fat ass is too tired to continue. Then there's Rocksmith which I can only play for about an hour or two before my shoulders are too tired. Then I retreat, assuming I have the time, to play Factorio for something like 11 hours.
I think it's the augmented reality that will work. Since you can still see your surroundings the "3D effect" won't happen. It won't be the Ready Player One environment many envision. I don't want to say it will never happen, but i don't see it happening and becoming main stream for a very long time.
Imagine playing a top down shooter but it's in 3D on a tabletop? Or you're looking at a wall but the augmented reality make it look like you're looking through the windshield of a mechwarrior and everything "though the portal" is in 3D but computer generated. I think this would help reduce that 3D sickness because your surroundings would align with what your inner ear was detecting.