Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.
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
Also idk if it plays a role, but I now know that it’s absolutely necessary to have your contact lenses or at least glasses on when playing.
Some people even get sick just from the wrong FoV and motion speed combination in 3D games, this is just 10 times worse.
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.
I see VR arcades in suburban malls fairly often, maybe give that a shot first. The VOID experiences were great but they went out of business during the pandemic.
I am never sick when doing roller coasters or reading in a moving car, but I was really nauseous after my first 15-min VR session. I was pretty scared I fucked up buying a Valve Index only to get that much sick playing… But I had a feeling (hope?) that I could get used to it: After about 2 weeks of playing a bit every night I was no longer getting sick at all. I can go until the controllers run out of battery now.
To me the effort was worth it, but I have a friend that was the opposite and didn’t enjoy experiencing virtual worlds that way…
My advice: If you ever try it then try to ignore the sickness -as you can get used to it- and focus on how much you enjoy being immersed in virtual worlds.
You just need a bit of knowledge that is tough to get without knowing it exists.
The main component of VR games that causes problems for people is when the motion in game doesn’t match the motion you are really doing. There are plenty of games that don’t have any of that. And even when you are ready to start trying games with that, you can overcome it if you experience it bit by bit. Just play until you start to get a warm/sweaty face or a bit dizzy feeling, then go do something else for a bit. You will build up the time it takes to trigger that feeling and it will be more mild as you keep training out of it.
I’ve been demoing to people for 10 years and have had less than 5% of people even get mildly nauseous during a demo, even fewer recently. The methodology of the test in the article can’t have been anything other than them picking the worst possible experience and having people endure it for an hour or until they felt sick with no explanation of what to look out for. Since 30% of people are literally completely immune no matter how bad their test could have possible been.
Even back with the DK2 and the crappy choices for software back then it was still pretty uncommon to make someone sick, and usually it was either my fault or a hardware issue rather than something that could be attributed to VR as a whole.
What we can do about feeling sick is to ignore VR and never use it again.
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.
I tried a vr headset at a convention where they had it just giving you a virtual tour of a farm to show off what the headset could do.
I had to take it off in less than 30 seconds because it was giving me a migraine and making me feel sick.
Yeah, I would say there are definitely specific experiences you could make that make 80+% nauseous(I have pretty good VR legs but moving platforms can still disorient me). But a well designed VR game accounts for that, see something like Beat Saber.
This. There is a reason why I can play beatsaber without feeling anything. But instantly get sick when playing pistol whip. The level moving around me is just disorienting.
Minecraft, sticking someone in the cockpit of a plane in war thunder are both no-nos from what I learned.
Are they just using shitty headsets, such as the Oculus ones? I’ve never had this issue with HTC Vive OR Valve Index…
I think it’s more likely they made a game that was just poorly designed for VR, moving players when they don’t expect it a lot and the like.
Uh Quest is better than the Vive 😅
Depends if you look at the manufacturer behind it. But hardware wise, it is indeed better.
I do think they mean the standalone vs PC powered.
there are pros/cons to each brand, plus there are tons of models across each product line. I own many headsets (index, vive original, vive xr elite, oculus dk2, quest 2) and honestly I can’t say any one of them is the best as each is unique from the screens (oled VS not), wired/wireless, full body tracking, standalone VS pc, comfort, etc.
That being said, I personally go for the vive over quest as it has more accurate tracking (laser VS camera), full body tracking, better screens (OLED), and works better with steamvr.
Plus as a VRChat user I can use vive advanced controls which is a godsend for expressing yourself in VR, other controllers just don’t have as much flexibility in terms of mixing expressions and being able to set intensity levels to each expression ingame.
You get used to it. It helps to have a good graphics card so that the frame rate is high enough. I am sad many good games don’t support VR. I.e. Start Citizen, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. Yes, there are mods for it, but it should be supported natively (if mods can do it, why can’t the developer?). It is just so much more immersive to be able to look around naturally and see stereoscopic.
In the case of Star Citizen, they used to support it, but since the game is still being actively developed in the alpha stage it kept breaking. Not worth the time and money to keep fixing it, so they put it on hold. As far as I know, they still plan to support it after the main feature set is stabilized and they go into polishing mode.
But I agree, it would be great if it still/already had native support.
if mods can do it, why can’t the developer?
Because it’s not worth it to waste budget and time on a feature used by 0.01% of your playerbase.
First person shooters already make some people feel nauseous. It’s the disconnect between your vision telling you that you’re moving while everything else, especially your balance centers, saying you’re not.
VR kinda makes it even worse if you’re not on some 2D treadmill
I am a victim of this. It sucks.
Maybe we just aren’t built to experience motion in this way.
“… and that’s a huge problem for the companies behind it.”
Thank you for clarifying.
They could market it to anorexic people and make a profit. Puking while having fun.
Sorry, I’ll let myself out.
What kind of statistic is 40-70%? For women It “goes up to 80%”, where does it start then? The numbers, what do they mean?
Yeah, if those numbers are anywhere near accurate I have had a significant outlier in my demos to the public so far. I have had less than 5% of the hundreds of people even get mildly nauseous. To get numbers like they are, I would have to cherry pick the worst possible experiences and not prep anyone at all.
“VR” doesn’t make most people throw up, being a terrible host might, but honestly even in that scenario I find their numbers hard to believe. Considering at least 30% of people are completely immune to it and don’t even need to be eased in at all. And another 30% would take a few hours of worst case scenario to get to a point where throwing up is even on the table. So unless they are specifically trying to provoke the worst possible response, their numbers aren’t even possible.
I wish more people who thought they couldn’t handle VR had come to me first. Or any responsible host.
This isn’t even lies, damned lies, and statistics territory - it’s just nothing. I know VR motion sickness exists (I still get it even after an uncomfortable amount of time in SteamVR sometimes) but that’s… that’s not anything
There’s also different levels of VR. I can get sick with 3 degrees of freedom (pitch, yaw, and roll) if I move around with it on. But with 6 degrees (also includes movement along all 3axes), I’m peachy.
My best friend gets sick watching video games on a TV, but she does fine with 6DOF VR because it’s the disconnect between the motion she sees and what her body experiences that’s the problem
Usually when numbers are presented that way it’s because there are many studies they looked at. So I presume there was one study showing a rate of 40%, another showing 70% and the rest of the studies fell somewhere in between those two extremes, with differences likely due to types of games, types of systems, and any number of other factors, including chance. They could have just averaged all the studies and quoted a number like 55% for example, but I think the other way actually paints a better picture of the data. It’s still possible they’re full of shit, but just presenting the numbers like that doesn’t mean they’re pulling it out of their ass.
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.
Other than that I agree. Just a gimmick and I don’t see the way forward.
The one I want to play is HL:Alyx
HL: Alyx is legit good.
I just can’t justify buying a whole rig just of r one game.
It suffer quite a bit from being “baby’s first VR game”, it’s extremely basic and completely lacking in any interesting mechanics. If it’s your first VR game, it will feel amazing, if you already played other VR games it will feel like a serious downgrade in a lot of areas. Even compared to Half Life 2 it feels like a downgrade, as there is just much less to do in Alyx, less guns, no vehicles, more linear, smaller environments. It’s a great looking game, but the mechanics are just extremely limited due to the focus on teleport.
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.
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.
I wonder if that is why Voldemort is so angry all the time. It’s because he’s nauseous.
Outside of that news article, I have literally never seen a single VR game use a virtual nose.
Eagle Flight uses it, but it is a beak instead of a nose.
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.
When the camera movies without me physically moving, I am throwing up immediately. Do you mean a virtual nose would fix that?
Potentially, yeah. Here’s an article I found talking about the research: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q1/virtual-nose-may-reduce-simulator-sickness-in-video-games.html
This is the detail I wanted to know:
Surprisingly, subjects did not notice the nasum virtualis while they were playing the games, and they were incredulous when its presence was revealed to them later
Our nose is cleverly edited out of our our awareness but it’s most certainly there. Apparently the virtual one is capable of straddling the same fence.
Ye! Tbh one of my biggest pet peeves with VRChat is the fact that they shrink your head to avoid it interfering with the player camera, but the result is that you don’t have a nose. It’s not as obvious with human/humanoid avatars because, like you said, it’s normally “edited out” by our brains (though you can probably see it if you want to by crossing your eyes, I know I can see mine); but it ends up being super obvious with furry avatars due to the lack of a snout/muzzle. That said, I’ve seen a few furry avatar creators starting to add a snout (not sure how they do that, I think they parent a copy of the face onto the head bone), and it’s pretty neat. Maybe other avatar creators will follow suit.
Ok that sounds interesting. I just though that glasses wearer might not have motion sickness as often due to the glasses being similar to the VR(or keeping the glasses under the Headset
I wear glasses (which I keep inside the helmet) and have mild motion sickness when moving in VR. The faster I move in-game, the worse it gets. Racing games are OK because I don’t move inside the car, I suspect having a static dashboard is similar to a virtual nose.
Glasses wearer here. VR makes me nauseous af. And not just during, for hours afterwards. Its not an intense ‘I have to vomit’ but a queasy feeling that persists. I’m old though, and my kids have zero issues with it.
Glasses wearer here, I still see my nose with the glasses on. VR gives me mild motion sickness but only when moving around in a “smooth” way (Teleporting or walking irl is fine but using regular controller movement makes me want to throw up after ~30 minutes)
Findings showed the virtual nose allowed people using the Tuscany villa simulation to play an average of 94.2 seconds longer without feeling sick, while those playing the roller coaster game played an average of 2.2 seconds longer.
Yeah instead of throwing up immediately, you won’t throw up until 2.2 seconds in. Problem solved!
What about those, um, VR videos you can find online? I think 94 seconds is all I really need.
I don’t think you want a nose for those videos.
Don’t kink shame me
The “Tuscany Villa” is an ancient demo that I tried in the Oculus DK1 in like 2014 or so, and it made me sick for hours. It uses very fast continuous movement instead of teleport, and it has a set of stairs that will make you instantly throw up if you try to climb them.
It’s is perfectly possible to create VR experiences that will not make anyone nauseous, Moss being a good example.
So you are saying that 90s is a remarkable improvement?
I would expect a huge difference in the usefulness of a simulated nose, depending on the content. In a roller coaster the movement of your head (rotation) and the movement of the carriage (translation) are separate and clearly defined this way. You control the Rotation while the game controls the translation. I don’t know what this villa demo is, but depending on how the movement is controlled, an unintuitive and unnatural system is bound to make almost everyone nauseous.
Any app that moves the camera (or thw whole world) without user input will make people sick, it’s just a law of good VR. Any app that doesn’t render at a stable 72fps+ will make people sick. Any app that simulates things that make people sick in real life, will also make people sick in VR.
On the other hand, any app that keeps a stable 90fps, that uses teleport with a very short fade instead of thumbstick movement, and that never messes with the camera position, will not make people sick.
Most people who have tried VR and have felt sick, were basically victims of awful, non-optimized VR experiences, and awful VR hardware like Google Cardboard and variants.
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.
First person games also make me motion sick, for lack of a better word, because I’ve got permanently screwed proprioception (so less “sick,” more “horribly dizzy”), so I’ve never even dared try VR. I feel like the market is a lot more limited than companies might think it is.
I also cannot play 1st person games for this same reason. But oddly enough, VR games actually make me feel less motion sick than flat 1st person games do.
I actually wonder if proprioception has a lot to do with it. We pretty much use all of our senses with proprioception, and they are more limited by VR. No matter how good the eye tracking is, there will still be big blind spots and no matter how good the 3D sound is, it still won’t quite replicate how real sound moves between your ears. And then, of course, you have the illusion of walking without moving your leg muscles. This won’t change for a while. Not without major technological advances in VR gear.
I’m pretty sure that Meta is the only company that thought there’s a big market for VR, and even they seem to be giving up on it. Apple’s device seems more oriented to giving you a private workspace than a real virtual world - like a big array of virtual monitors to replace actual hardware - and that avoids the worst motion sickness triggers. Of course, their device is also priced far out of mass market.
The most popular applications for VR are all games, and even the gaming companies are doing very little development in that space. Fewer people think VR will be a big thing than thought 3D TV would be a big thing.
