Submitted 1 year ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world
Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.
I'm in the other camp. The first time I squeezed my 155m spaceship through the tiny mouth of a rotating space station in VR, I wept like a baby. (An Anaconda in Elite: Dangerous)
First time I logged into the corvette and looked down the ship, it completely changed the game.
Just wish headsets weren’t so heavy.
I put a counterweight on the backstrap of mine, now it feels much less lopsided on my head
Absolutely, ED in VR is indescribably breath taking. Basically an entirely different game
I’m usually fine with motion sickness while playing VR, but Elite man…
I feel like all I see in the VR space is endless articles on new hardware and basically nothing on quality VR games. I always thought I’d upgrade my Vive to an Index or something better one day, but so far the only compelling reason is HL: Alyx and I’m not spending that kind of money on a single game.
Ms flight simulator is quite clunky and hard to get good frame rates, but damn if you can put up with that it’s an awesome experience in VR. Also beat saber.
For quite awhile now those have been the reasons for VR. Sad really. Still these two things are compelling.
Beat saber is fun, but you definitely don’t need anything fancy to play that game
Racing games in VR are excellent. It’s all I’ve played in vr for quite some time now.
there are quite a few games out there that aren’t specifically VR games but are still very well suited for it because they put you in the cockpit of a vehicle. I haven’t really used my VR headset much for VR specific games, but I’ve been putting a lot of hours in Assetto Corsa Competizione because with VR and a wheel, I’m completely immersed. Same goes for people who like flight or space simulators
I had the same thought when I had a Vive. I ended up just buying the Index Knuckles controllers so I could play HL: Alyx. It really is the only AAA game available that makes it worth it IMO.
Because If you were going to spend 1 Million to make a game. Do you make a game that only a select few users can buy? Or do you make it so all gamers can buy it?
I see your point and I agree with it but the “opposite” is also true.
“If you have 1 million to make a game, do you make one in a system that is incredibly saturated with other games or do you do in a a system completely starved of good games?”
So it’s a compromise. I still agree that your point has a bigger weight but there is something on the other side of the scale even if lighter
Idk about 40-70% that seems ludicrously high. I play all the time, mild motion sickness when I could not run the game well, otherwise no issues.
That seems high to me as well. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I’ve introduced probably 20 friends/family members to VR and none of them have had issues with motion sickness.
Simulation sickness is real, and more common than most gamers (a population that tends to self-select for people without that trait) think. This prevalence doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s not severe for everyone. You might not notice if a friend had it, except that they might play fewer video games with you. (They might not, some people are fine unless in full VR.) People aren’t generally keen on going “You know that thing that you like doing and that I’ve seen 5-year-olds do on the internet? I can’t do it, it makes me vom.” It doesn’t exactly feel cool.
The majority of VR games avoid simulating motion; usually having the player stand in once place or have movement handled in a cutscene where the player chooses where to go and the character traverses there without any further player interaction exactly to get around these issues.
All those who get sick obviously stop playing. So if you ask the users, basically no one gets sick. Because those who get sick are not users any more.
The statistic quoted is “users”, so presumably the statistic was measured against randomly selected individuals of the population (though the frustratingly article fails to cite a source). This is important because the effect is not evenly distributed among demographics, per the article:
What’s more, we don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others, but we know that there are numerous markers that make us more likely to experience it. Women, as mentioned previously, are more likely than men to get VR sick. Asian people are more likely than other ethnicities to experience motion sickness in general. Age is another factor—we’re more likely to experience it between the ages of 12 and 21 than in our adulthood… until we reach our 50s, upon which the likelihood increases again.
I started by playing while standing and moving smoothly in game and I couldn’t last long before getting sick. Now I play seated with snapping in game movement and I can play for hours without issue. Depending on how you define it, I don’t think it’s surprising to see so many people say VR makes them sick.
Nah, it’s quite real and quite accurate (even though the range is high).
40-70% seems reasonable if it includes the people who eventually get used to it.
I haven’t touched my VR headset and over a year. VR games just are not good and have very little contents and very little replayability. What I’m trying to say is it’s still very much a gimmick.
It’s well suited for anything where you’re seated, eg racing sims, flight sims, euro truck sim etc.
If you’ve got any interest at all in those genres give it another try and it’ll be hard if not possible to go back. Digital Combat Sim in VR is a whole nother game.
People get very stuck on this part, and I genuinely don't think it's the issue.
Look, l have very decent "VR legs" at this point, but I'm still not a likely spender and I don't play long games in VR or crack out my headsets very often at all.
The issue is not motion sickness or space or tracking stations. The issue is having to put something on my face and not being comfortably on my couch, free to go pee or get a snack without removing a thing from my face.
And yeah, it's uncomfortable. That's part of it. A version of it that looks and feels like glasses would be less of a problem. But the thing is, those aren't a thing that exists, they are not even an incremental step that we can get to at any point, and also TVs and monitors look just fine.
VR is a neat trick, and I gladly keep my headsets around for any time when something actually interesting pops up. But it was never going to be the next big thing.
VR continues to make more sense as an arcade-like attraction than as a consumer product.
Except for the part where I would have to wear a headset that 5000 other people have also worn. (And except for the VR sickness that, it turns out, I'm very sensitive to).
Having gone to a VR gaming business (the kind where you book a time slot, not an open arcade) I wasn’t impressed. The hardware isn’t really rugged enough for that kind of commercial use, so it was clear they were struggling to keep the gear in decent condition.
But besides that, the limited time nature of the setup meant that the game options needed to be significantly dumbed down so that anyone could pick it up in a few minutes. And there isn’t enough of a demand to create any interesting experiences, most of what was on offer was neutered VR games I’d already tried on my personal VR setup.
It makes a bit of sense for that, and there are HMDs built for that purpose that are... eh... less gross? I guess?
But mostly it's a secondary device. A toy you keep on the side and pop out for parties or when something reignites the novelty.
VR is Guitar Hero. Does that make sense? I think that makes sense.
COVID killed [The Void](en.wikipedia.org/…/The_Void_(virtual_reality\)), that was the one company that was building high end VR-arcades. Everything else so far looks quite lackluster, just using just regular consumer VR headsets and uninteresting mini-games. VR arcades are also expensive and with $300 headsets around, you might as well just buy one yourself instead of wasting money at the arcade.
But there are people who think VR is worthwhile. If 40% of those people get sick from it, then that’s 40% of the users gone
free to go pee
That’s solvable with good pass through, I am speaking from experience. It’s kind of surprising how little focus that aspect got, even most modern headsets still lack proper stereo-correct passthrough and instead just fudge something together via tracking cameras (e.g. Pico4 looks like a butchered photogrammetry scan due to having only a single RGB camera).
A version of it that looks and feels like glasses would be less of a problem.
BigScreenBeyond gets pretty close. Some AR headsets like Xreal Air get even closer, though those come with tiny FOV.
To be fair, with good enough passthrough you can get your pee wherever it needs to be.
I genuinely can't believe how quickly you glossed past the mental image of yourself peeing with a headset on. I feel I can rest my case right at that point, honestly.
Bigscreen Beyond is a new vr headset that is a little bigger than pool goggles. It’s manufactured based off of a lidar scan of your face, and is supposed to be very comfortable.
Additionally full color passthrough is becoming more of a common feature so you can see the real world in good definition while wearing the headset. Also some models hinge the display upwards off of your face.
We are getting there. Personally I play for hours a day. Sometimes multiple 4 hour sessions if it’s a free weekend for me. I agree we need more experiences. But it will come.
See? No, this is what I mean. It's not this. It's not even Apples insane thing.
It's not an incremental progression that will take us there. I will not pop out a headset of any kind and put it on my face as my default mode of engagement. Won't happen. Not a thing.
It could be shaped like pool goggles, it could have color passthrough, it could have perfect resolution and field of view, it could solve the nausea problem, it won't matter. Because the reality is that anything that straps to my face and substitutes my normal free field of view is by definition and by design a secondary device.
It's cool that you like what they offer, and hey, unlike the weird people out there mourning Stadia you can still use all of these things.
But a replacement for PCs, TVs or consoles they are not.
Yeah I’ve been interested in replacing my index eventually, this headset looks pretty promising:
store.bigscreenvr.com/products/bigscreen-beyond
Each one is custom to your face, and it’s extremely light. I’m sure the future will bring more headsets like this
Summed up my feelings 100%. I love VR and almost every experience I’ve had with it have been great, but I’ve touched my Index probably 5 times in the past two years (and probably 3 of them were to watch VR porn). There’s just a big setup and time commitment required to VR game that a lot of people don’t have time for.
I enjoy VR gaming and I get motion sickness.
The trick is to slowly acclimate, which takes patience and body awareness. Play for a short amount of time, pause the game when you start to feel slightly warm (or ideally just before that point), and go do something else for 20 minutes or so. With time, the play periods will get longer and the rest breaks will get shorter. Eventually you may stop needing the rest breaks.
A couple caveats: my sample size is 1, a hiatus of more than two weeks means retraining again, and you have to be firm with yourself about stopping on time.
I’m just trying to chill out with a game though, not slowly build up tolerance to cyberspace
Fair enough, and I didn’t mean to imply that everyone should. It’s totally understandable to decide the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
That is understandable in the moment, it’s alot of the only pay off is one game. But I would argue it is very worth it overall. It’s a small price to pay to permanently be able to handle it and have no qualms about future VR games/uses.
Plus most games and experiences don’t even cause VR sickness to the most susceptible people, so if you pick and choose your games and stick to ones that don’t cause issues, you can play VR without any conditioning right away too.
As this is my personal strategy as well, I would like to add that your sample size is now 2, with a 100% success rate :3
Although for me personally I don’t have to retrain that quickly. My resistance to motion sickness certainly gets weaker over time, but I seem to have reached some kind of baseline, compared to my previous state, where about five minutes could give me an awful headache, while now I can take it for a bit longer, even after not being in VR for a month or two.
Speaking of, we need more VR games. I’d love to play more of them, but nothing new is really big and exciting or anything, which is how these long breaks even happen.
My sample size is much larger and indeed that has been the case. I’ve been hosting VR demos for 10 years now, since DK2. DK1 was bad news for people even slightly prone to motion sickness. 3dof is only viable for motion sick prone people if they can keep their head exactly where the game expects it to be, which you can’t.
With each new generation of headset, there has been so much less prep for getting random people into it and making sure they wouldn’t even get mildly nauseous. More software options without translational movement and much less obvious safety nets in games that do. You can always find at least one game/experience that is right up someone’s alley that won’t cause motion sickness even if it turns out they would otherwise have been really sensitive to it.
But I always let them know that when they do want to start branching out from the “safe” choices, that they should treat it like sea sickness, limit exposure at first and build up sea legs. Ideally never get to the point where you would throw up, try to stay as far away from it as possible while still having fun. You will eventually notice one day that you haven’t thought about it in a long time.
I take an off-brand Dramamine then hop in. Best if I know 20 minutes in advance that I’ll be playing since it takes a little time to digest, but I’m not doing chores.
And you even have some vr fans just blindly claiming that all games should use gliding for movement and that having the option to teleport ruins the game even if they don’t use it. even though gliding (they call it natural locomotion) makes people sick because it’s obviously unnatural. They claim there is no need for movement systems that don’t induce motion sickness because it’s a matter of getting used to “natural locomotion” an anyone who doesn’t get better is because they are lying🙄.
It’s a tricky issue. On one side, yes, it will make some people motion sick, but on the other side limiting a game to teleport drastically limits what you can do in the game. It means nothing of currently established monitor-based game mechanics work in VR. You essentially completely lose locomotion and environmental navigation as game mechanic and everything becomes a static gallery shooter. It also means that multiplayer completely stops functioning, as while yourself zapping around might be acceptable, having the other player just randomly switch placed is certainly not.
Modern VR has been around for 10 years and so far nobody has figured out how to make teleport gaming work. Meanwhile all the unofficial VR mods gets celebrated, since despite their locomotion issues, they actually feel like full games in VR, which the teleport games never archived.
At the end of the day, it’s a far better idea to design games for the people that want to play them, then those that don’t. The early focus on teleport has regressed the VR industry for years and the conclusion after 10 years is basically that it causes far more harm than good. You don’t win anybody over for VR by showing them games that look far less impressive than what they are used to from a monitor.
100% accurate. All the teleport-to-move games I tried just sucked. Enabling free movement is a must for good VR gaming.
It’s too bad for the folks that get motion sickness, they are missing out on some rad shit.
I am not sure if you are mixing allowing teleportation with not allowing natural locomotion or if you are claiming that allowing teleportation would be limiting the game in some form. Many games support both. My comment was about people complaining that the game should not have support for teleportation (since they don’t use it).
There are plenty of multiplayer games with locomotion. The problem you describe regarding not being able to play multiplayer has been resolved in this games with different mechanics. Most of them use some form of stamina so you can’t just run away. To name an example since you claim no one has done it take a look at half life alyx.
I agree with the fact that it doesn’t work well for existing games non vr games. But I don’t want to play those games in vr…
Regarding your static gallery comment that’s not true at all. You teleport to move larger distances but you interact with your environment by moving in the room where you are playing so you can walk, dodge, crawl, etc…. Teleporting is more about repositioning your play space so you can actually walk and move around using your body.
Although with most games, the accessibility options need to be there (even when they sometimes aren’t), some games incorporate their movement mechanics into gameplay heavily. Take BONELAB for example. Great game, but simply impossible to play for some people due to the movement. Adding teleporting (or really any accessibility movement option) would simply ruin it though, as the entire game is based around physics based interactions, walking, running, jumping, climbing, etc.
Bonelab literally made me sick for hours. I tried to power through it and that’s when I realized VR wasn’t for me.
It’s a slick game…but oof…I just can’t do it.
You get used to it. I think people try it for a short while and give up.
Even playing fast-paced shooters on a widescreen will make me slightly “screen-sick” if I haven’t played in a month or two, but it goes away by the next day.
I found VR to be worse for the first couple days, but then it fades, too, and pretty quickly it becomes second nature.
Worst thing I found with VR headsets is the heat. Those displays and sometimes the gpu (depending on headset) get warm, and the HMD is snug on your face so it gets too warm sometimes.
Yea it’s like getting your sea legs. I could only play bone works on the valve index for about ~10 min before the nausea got to the “oh shit I might actually puke” level.
Just playing for 10 - 30 minutes a day basically cured the nausea within 2 weeks. After that I could play till the controllers died.
Truth. My kids pay Gorilla Tag, Population: One and a lot of the Meta Quest games (I use ReVive for my HP HMD), those are kinda tough for me to get used to so quickly, but I also play Elite: Dangerous on VR and that is the absolute shit on VR (except for the on-foot part…WTaF Frontier), takes me very little time to adjust to. I love VR, this is stuff I’ve been dreaming of since I was younger, and sincerely hope it doesn’t go the way of 3D TV. It’s a lot of fun.
40-70% and 80% for women sounds insanely high. I got a used HTC Vive to have beat saber parties with people and so far none out of about 20 people have experienced nausea even with heavy drinking.
That’s why I basically dropped VR, and even when playing, I only played beat saber. Alyx was a very bad experience for me (mind blowing game, but not if I’m sick after 15 mins) and with that, every other game with movements (no mans sky ship is very bad)
Headline: VR is Still is Fucking Dope for 30-60% of Players
1990s: VR is the future. Put these on!
2000s: VR is the future. Put these on!
2010s: VR is the future. Put these on!
2020s: VR is the future. Put these on!
its an issue of refresh rate tbh.
I went from vr at 90fps/90hz to 144fps/144hz and i went from motion sick to acceptable.
What kind of statistic is 40-70%? Its up to 80% for women… does it start on 45% for them? The numbers, what do they mean?
Some people even get sick just from the wrong FoV and motion speed combination in 3D games, this is just 10 times worse.
I went on a a VR rollercoaster with my new girlfriend (asian) at a amusement park where they move the cart according to the movement in VR.
She was totally OK, and I was totally wet of sweat, down to my underwear. I really almost puked.
But I have that problem even on a bus and in a car as a passenger (so I basically always drive if possible). Big ships, trains and airplanes are totally ok.
When I was about 9 I had to puke on the bus and my dad didn’t want to have to clean the buss so he let me puke into the pucket of his jacket 🤪
I bought a Vive since I was careless and wanted to see what the VR hype was. Considering that I've probably used it less than 100 hours in about 4 years, I think of it as a bad investment.
In its current technologically limited state, VR feels more like a gimmick than a real experience. I think that all of what VR is currently trying to do is still waiting for that uninevented Star Trek holodeck technology to come around anyway. Headsets and wands are unwieldy and breaking down/setting up the system is a PITA.
As much as I want VR to be awesome, I’ve had motion sickness from playing Portal while sitting at a desk. Consequently, I think this is just one of those technologies that I have to be happy for other people to enjoy.
I am highly susceptible to motion-sickness and figured I’d need to test drive before spending $200+ on some new VR gear.
I suspected this was a problem.
HTC, Valve, and Oculus (well before the Facebook buyout) established very early on that frame rates of 90 fps or higher with a response time of <1 ms were critical factors for preventing motion sickness. Meta either hasn’t gotten the memo or just doesn’t care.
Even with well-established VR legs, I start feeling unpleasant if my FPS starts dropping below 75 for extended periods of time.
Aside from that, it’s also down to game development. I’ve been seeing newer, inexperienced VR developers creating scenes that don’t take into consideration how our brains perceive motion; and they end up creating some nausea-inducing scenes or game mechanics, in addition to doing things like shoving your head onto the floor or through an object. The easiest example is pressing into a wall or table, and the colliders shove your head and body back when you’re not expecting it.
For those with nausea, I’ve had some good results with ginger candy. Something chewable that is comprised entirely of ginger.
I take it with me whenever I give a demo somewhere.
Works in seconds.
I never felt sick from just VR, but the continuous movement made my brain confused like I wanted to fall over, but after a few hours of it I got used to it for good and now have no problems with VR, other than fatigue of moving around so much aha.
I think most people could break it in, but are reluctant to keep playing or play again once they feel sick doing it. While its easy to get immersed, you have to disconnect yoursrlf from it and remember you are in the real world, when friends and family try it I have to make sure they dont walk into walls, but on my own I have full awareness of my surroundings even when I am blind to it.
It's a really fun experience, I hope it keeps getting developed regardless of sickness issues. Higher framerates are definitely important, the 120Hz mode on the Index is definitely recommended, any lower and its more likely to be sickness inducing.
It really depends on the person and the hardware. I’ve seen people with PC-VR setups that get sick, but are 100% okay with wireless. I think it’s an issue of FOV, FPS, and overall just getting used to wearing a big box on your face.
I see a ton of people shitting on VR because they get sick, saying that it’s just a gimmick and it’ll pass. I think it’s a neat piece of tech that deserves to get better, hopefully the issues will be ironed out over the generations.
A suggestion that worked for me was to have a fan blowing on you while playing.
VR has very little appeal to me.
Are they just using shitty headsets, such as the Oculus ones? I’ve never had this issue with HTC Vive OR Valve Index…
Most of them throw up because of the motion. With what I’ve seen of Metaverse, I can understand that they throw up because of the content, too.
I easily get motion sick with first person games, so I can’t imagine what VR must be like. My only recourse, however, is imagination because I have a nerve disorder in my face, which makes it extremely sensitive and I can’t wear VR gear because of it. I’m far from alone when it comes to people with health issues and VR.
A big part of reducing motion sickness for me was to ensure that the lenses were set to the appropriate pupillary distance. If they’re too wide or to narrow, that can affect your body’s ability to handle VR
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 1 year ago
Posted this reply in another instance, but several years ago researchers found that adding a virtual nose dramatically decreased motion sickness. However, I haven’t seen any developers adding one in games. I wonder if it’d help.
Crackhappy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wonder if that is why Voldemort is so angry all the time. It’s because he’s nauseous.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
Outside of that news article, I have literally never seen a single VR game use a virtual nose.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Like with everything, it would cause an uproar in the game world unless it were controllable. I wonder if it would also require sacrificing some usable pixels? If virtual noses take off, I can see video games being designed around them, but it’s possible that integrating one into existing games is harder. Games have a development lead time measured in years so fundamental changes take a while to integrate.