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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.
I know it's not actually VR but I've just been playing Minecraft. Half an hour is the maximum I can put up with.
Watching the hoglet play, I can just about cope with 5 minutes. He flicks it around like an epileptic breakdancer.
Odd thing is I used to play a lot of flight sims and those never bothered me.
I'm also one of those "can't cope with 3d" dinosaurs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I re-watched Ready Player One over the weekend, renting it so I could take a closer look at some of the things stuffed in there...
One thing that occurred to me after watching it again is, I'm not really sure a good VR interface is possible. Just look at the various contraptions used in the movie to try and produce realistic movement in a virtual world. They had 360 treadmills, they had people suspended by against hook in the back (that tried to break your legs when you "died" by pushing you rapidly down into the platform below you), they had people suspended by wires in a van, and at the very highest end of the "immersive" equipment was a Super Lay-Z-Boy, the most comfy recliner ever from which you were somehow supposed to be able to do all kinds of karate moves...
This was a movie with complete freedom to dream up devices that might theoretically work without having to worry about real engineering, yet even the best of them seemed dubious at best as far as letting you experience real movement in VR. Without that movement, it seems like VR use will always be inherently limited because your body is going to be telling your brain something different is going on to what it is experiencing.
I really feel like the HoloLens/Magic Leap approach to virtual content will be the real path forward - augmented/mixed reality makes more sense. It doesn't preclude full VR games since you can simply overlay the whole field of view... but that's what needs to get worked on for AR equipment is a really full field of view.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's been a thing, since the '50s at least.