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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.
Excerpt from an interview with a dev who knows how to deal with this problem:
Neo: Do you always look at it encoded?
Cypher: Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. II don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head. Hey, you uh want a drink?
If you are particularly sensitive to motion sickness, devs will use you as a guinea pig in order to test how nauseating their work is.
I mean, we are not equal when it comes to motion sickness, and it is in best interest for everyone that everything is done to make VR accessible to everyone, possibly through the use of comfort options. But in order to know which parts cause problems and which countermeasure are effective, it has to be tested by someone with a low tolerance, because others won't notice.
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.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Well, the sickness can at least be treated by building a resistance.
What I learned from flying, and it seemed to transfer to VR:
Participate until you feel the motion sickness, maybe even until you feel very sick, but under no circumstances should you play until you vomit. That will set you back. Over time, you will be able to participate for longer periods of time, until eventually you don't even think about it anymore.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
At VirZOOM we make exercise games that move you around in VR from your pedaling and leaning on a bike. Solving VR sickness has been our top goal, so anyone in a gym can step up and feel exhilarated by VR rather than the opposite. Sorry for the long post but hope to benefit other VR devs and show non-devs all that's involved.
Virtual reality is experienced through a headset which draws two images of the game, from the precise location of each of your eyes to create a stereo effect, in the direction your head is facing. VR has been around for a long time, but the release of the Oculus DK1 marked the first time it was performant enough for a mass audience.
VR before Oculus was released could cause sickness because of insufficient framerate to draw two wide-field images fast and sharp enough, and the latency of measuring your head direction and position. Since Oculus was released these have been solved by having more powerful computers, VR-optimized graphics drivers and rendering techniques, low-persistence LED screens, and better and faster sensors.
Quality VR requires updating and rendering two 100 degree images at least 60 fps, ideally 90 fps, on a screen that flashes its pixels quickly on/off at 1:3 ratio to not look blurry or flickery from the short distance to your eyeballs, with less than 15 ms of sensor latency combined with reprojection that mostly hides the game rendering time. And it has to account for lens distortion which is different for the red, green, and blue components of each pixel, and be antialiased because different jaggies between eyes will make you crazy.
This all takes up to 10x the horsepower of regular videogames, which are single image, usually 30 fps, and undistorted with a smaller FOV. This is why most VR games look a generation or two old. Fortunately GPU and engine makers have been hard at work optimizing drivers and techniques to leverage commonality between eyes and fact that you perceive the most resolution in the center of your field of view, to bring that multiplier down to 2-3x.
Even with the best hardware and rendering, VR can still cause sickness if games move your virtual head much differently from your real head. The difference between the acceleration your inner ears feel and the acceleration your eyes see is the cause of VR sickness. It turns out the pretty much every 3D game requires your virtual head to move around, which is why existing games have been astoundingly difficult to bring to VR.
From all our playtesting and feedback, we believe people have different levels of sensitivity which can trigger their simulation sickness, and they will only feel it 10 minutes after a game has crossed that threshold. Most people will incorrectly attribute their feeling to whatever they are doing at that moment rather than 10 minutes ago. This delay time is also why it's difficult for someone to "discover their limit" and "auto-tune" a game for it. It's true that repeated VR experience can acclimate users, but the amount and degree is again unpredictable, and a mass market product can't rely solely on that.
So games have to be redesigned with VR motion in mind. The most successful but also most limiting way to do this is "room-scale", whereby your virtual head moves the exact same way as your real head. In these games you are only allowed to play from a single location or in a little area, as far as the VR position tracking and your furniture allows.
One common way to allow you to move in virtual space is to put you in a "cockpit" where you can only see out windows. This approach evolved from the idea that you don't generally get sick playing 3D games on your home TV, because your brain can perceive your whole room which is not moving, and accepts that the TV portion is just an image. But that is also what makes this approach less good and immersive for VR. Because VR images aren't as wide as your real eye (100 vs 180 degrees), you have to draw the cockpit right in front of the user, and to the extent that its works make
The difference between AR and VR is the opacity of the visor.
That is part of it, but the other part of a device being AR is sensors that register objects around you so virtual content can either react to it or realistically skin it. That's a big reason of why HoloLens and Magic Leap have such expensive headsets for now, because they are generating a real-time and very accurate internal 3D map of everything around you.
A device without sensors for the external world that projects partially onto your field of view is just VR with holes...
What I think would be an awesome feature of a real AR headset, is 360 degree sensors for everything around you - including up and down. So that you could get collision warnings if you got too close to a table or wall behind you, or your arms would potentially hit the ceiling (which I did once with a Vive controller).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You should also consider the dangers of driving in the real world (and maybe using machinery) after a long VR session.
Decades ago I read that UK military pilots recorded a higher number of traffic accidents after doing a long session in a flight simulator, presumably because it screwed up their perception of motion and distance. When this was discovered the pilots were subsequently given a driver or a taxi voucher to get home.after one of these sessions. I wouldn't be surprised if the same effect occurred with the current, relatively crude VR environments.
My own experience has been that I played a number of VR short films, worked on a number of them, and then eventually set up a Vive at home (when the price of a used Vive dropped to within my budget -- I already had the fast GPU for other work). At the VR post facility at which I freelanced, I don't recall hearing of anyone (man, woman, child) getting sick while using a headset –and we had every variety of headset on hand. I used them all, no mop no limit.
There were a few general rules that seemed to help make VR videos that didn't cause unease -- it's ok for cameras to dolly forward or fly the camera forward on a drone but flying backward tends to give some people the willies. Not a lot of fast cuts, etc. My favorite shorts often disregarded these rules.
At home I've played VR games for hours (Holopoint, Echo Arena, Rec Room), and have also spent lots of time in Quill. The only thing that's given me any uneasy sensations was Google Earth when flying around (and even then, it wasn't that bad). As others have stated, as long as movement is connected to your body movement, the brain seems to have little issues just going with it. Even Echo Arena, in which you do a lot of floating around in large chambers, you initiate those movements with fairly realistic pull and throw motions and it all feels physically-based.
I've put many people in the headset to look at shorts, play games, and sketch in Quill --of all genders and from age 8 to 72 and have never had anyone get sick. I left my Dad in the headset perusing Google Earth for hours.
I find this strict 20-minute limit, in 2018, very hard to believe. How does anyone in the lab get any work done? Maybe they're doing some super-advanced experimental stuff that blows minds and has no connection to head movement. Or maybe this is all about applications that include movement of the camera but are viewed on headsets that don't support room-scale? There's gotta be something making the VR mentioned in this article much worse on people than average, as it does not sound at all like a realistic appraisal of the experience I've seen people have in VR.
If the VR really catches on this time, someone will write a virus that makes the user throw up.
We'll see AV programs especially boasting that they block "tilt-a-hurl" and "Mary-go-ralph". Some kids will deliberately infect a copy of a game so they can try for a day out of school.