Hacker News Reader

Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

Dk1&2 owner here, I've slowly soured on VR over the past year as my 'reptile brain' has come to associate the headset with motion sickness and I would say I have a pretty steely stomach. I'm an avid FPS player, spent 4 hours in the HL2 VR mod about 18 months ago with minimal sickness. But the killer for me has been the slow buildup of aversion to VR over time. I've never been more excited for a technology but I fear there are some impossible problems to solve.. Any other dev kit developers feel the same way?

View on HN

You should not be playing a FPS in VR, especially on anything pre-release like the DK2. Acceleration without some kind of cockpit to ground you is one of the worst offenders, and virtually all FPS games do that by design/necessity.

This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.

I'm glad Oculus is putting their "comfort ratings" front and center, and being really vocal about the principles of sickness-free VR, but I'm worried people are going to skip all the warnings and advice and ruin this for everyone.

I appreciate that and I only ever played about 8 hours of HL2 VR, I stopped when I beat the campaign and moved on to playing WarThunder for a couple months then slowly tapered off.

>>This is one of my worst fears about VR adoption: gamers, especially the kind who will be on the leading edge of this stuff, want badly to play FPS games and they'll find ways to do it and they're all going to hate VR.

Part of the promise of VR is being able to negotiate a virtual world on foot which currently has too much of a mismatch to work without sickening the user. So what are the long term solutions to this? To me they are really hard if not impossible problems.

Cloudhead's "Blink" system is one good first step http://uploadvr.com/cloudhead-blink-vr-movement/ AltspaceVR has been doing something similar for a while too.

Another idea is something called redirected walking, which basically tricks you into walking in circles even though you think you're walking in a straight line.

Someday we may have electronic solutions to sim sickness -- they've discovered that by sending tiny amounts of electricity through our inner ears, they can programmatically control how you feel you're moving.

Edit: Here's a video of Palmer Luckey talking about that inner ear stuff (GVS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CRdRc8CcGY&feature=youtu.be...

I've often wondered if the feeling of acceleration/deceleration could easily be simulated with a simple tilting chair. Tilt the chair back to simulate forward acceleration (like a car speeding). Gravity pulls you 'backwards', similar to the feeling of being pressed back in the seat. Opposite for deceleration. I hereby donate this idea to the world.

That's exactly what they do in full-motion flight simulators.

Racing games as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-N3XDc-3QQ

We can't expect great PC experiences to be great VR experiences. Great VR experiences are built for VR and rely as much as possible on 1-to-1 mapping of actual motion to virtual motion.

I see a lot of parallels with early mobile app development. Early mobile games often plastered the screen with virtual buttons, poorly replicating controller-based UI's onto a touch screen. The experience was bad and plenty of people wrote off mobile gaming as impossible. Then we learned how to build mobile games with a touch-centric UI.

I agree completely. The FPS "model" was a great way to translate realistic environments to flat, 2d screens but the typical run-and-gun style of FPS is just terrible in VR. Every time I read about these elaborate workarounds (omni-treadmills and the like) I can't help but think that people are missing the point and trying to shoehorn what works in 2d into the VR realm.

I get that FPS-style games seem like perfect contenders for VR since they are already pretty realistic and immersive for 2d constructs. Still, the conventions of FPS evolved to fit the flat world of computer monitors and TV screens. Once you're immersed, running around can be quite nauseating even if you're experienced with VR or have a decent resistance to VR motion sickness.

I'm more interested in trying out (and building) new conventions that are a natural fit for VR. Seated experiences and, eventually, ones that allow for walking around 1:1 in the room you're actually in will beat running around with a controller while looking through a HMD.

Here's my anecdata:

DK1&2 owner. I felt the same, but the Crescent Bay demo blew me the heck away. More amazing than experiencing the DK1 for the first time.

Then, recently, I tried the Oculus Touch demos. For an hour or so afterwards, I felt like reality was less real than the simulation, even despite its limitations. I felt like the realm of possibilities within that box was infinite, and real-life was limited in comparison.

This sounds like a defamiliarization effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization

The root cause of sickness in VR seems to be either a) slow hardware/slow software, causing judder or b) poor design which moves the player in ways that cause discomfort. The combination of these two is a one-two punch. I'd encourage you to pick up CV1 or Vive in 6 months with a modern rig and take it for another spin with an experience that's been properly designed for VR, I'd be really surprised if you continue to have any problems with sim sickness.

> a) slow hardware/slow software, causing judder or b) poor design which moves the player in ways that cause discomfort

Couldn't it just as likely be the inherent conflict between proprioceptual cues and visual cues causing sickness?

> Couldn't it just as likely be the inherent conflict between proprioceptual cues and visual cues causing sickness?

Sure, that's the general concept. OP's two points are specific examples of the causes of mismatch - examples which are well known, and can be mitigated.

a) When a program's framerate is high enough, moving your head causes a corresponding change in visual cue. When the framerate is too slow, the visual cue update is delayed from the motion. A mismatch.

b) When a game allows you to walk forward in a virtual world, your eyes get visual cues that you're walking forward, even though your body knows you're not. VR applications that instead simulate you sitting in place, and give you visual cues to that effect, limit that mismatch.

Yeah, I was talking solely about b), which seems impractical/impossible to mitigate.

First off, I'd definitely recommend reading http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JesseSchell/20150626/247113/Makin....

VR-wise, b) can definitely be mitigated. There seem to be two current strategies - either you design the experience to be primarily stationary, or you set up a room that people can actually, physically walk in.

stationary-only experiences might seem like a tight constraint, but constraints breed creativity :).

Rooms to walk around in have also been done, but they're obviously more effort to set up and maintain, and are typically done by larger institutions.

Another way to mitigate it is to simply teleport the user around, or perform transitions that do not give the user a sense of motion. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOFgAfuTtyo

Same. There is one major hurdle for me: it's too big of a pain in the arse to get up and running. In order to work on my game I have to muck about with NVIDIA Optimus (which they still don't have a fix for), take the headset off, change a Windows setting, put the headset back on. No it doesn't work, do it all again ad nauseam.

It's got to be a dream to make and play games on and right now, it's not.

I think a lot of this comes down to your setup. I've been messing around in Unreal Engine with DK2 and don't have those issues because I'm not using a laptop with Optimus. Now, granted, I also have a laptop and it does use Optimus so I'd love for a fix so I could use that laptop as a mobile demo setup but either way, I think it's just a matter of the current implementation requiring you to use supported hardware in order to develop for it or just use it.

OK, NVIDIA Optimus issues aside, one still must take the headset off to work on their game then put it back on to test it. It'd be much easier to develop the game with the headset on.

Kickstarter DK1 backer here (and have used DK2). I got burnt out on the hype a long time ago. Ignoring the problems that cannot possibly be solved by next year (eye tracking etc...), I'm not even sure that I'll even buy the first consumer version for Oculus or HTC. We need more games/experiences and time to see if there are software wars between Valve+HTC and Oculus.

The DK2 sucks. It's just not good enough. Vive, Morpheus 2.0, CV1 are much much much much better. They are good enough.

Echoing some of the others here too...

As a DK1&2 owner, I had a similar experience, but what brought VR back to me was Elite: Dangerous, a space sim. FPS's are a horrible VR experience currently and likely will remain so until we redefine FPS for VR. With Elite + joysticks, I've not experienced any of the motion sickness in the DK2.

Don't forget you're using a Dev Kit which is basically 2 years old - personally, although I agree with your DK2 assessment, I am reserving judgement for the consumer version.

Yeah. DK2 owner here. My DK2 only comes out to demo to friends these days.

It's not so much the motion sickness for me though. It's just that the novelty wore off and it became a chore. Elite Dangerous with a DK2 was incredible for a quite a while. I used to just fly around space stations and look around. Now after the 100th trading run i prefer the monitor as it doesn't require me to clean lenses or deal with a tangle of cables.

Few months ago, I was very excited about vr. I want to invest myself in vr, develop for it, learn it.

I'm also worried about the impossible problems to solve. For me, the biggest issue is the screen door effect. it is said that only 8k per eye resolution can solve this.

I think there are still 10 more years before vr becomes small, cheap and good enough.

Screen door doesn't depend solely on resolution. If a screen at the same resolution has a better "pixel fill factor", meaning smaller gaps between each pixel, it will have less screen dooring.

It may still look pixelated, but that's easier to ignore IMO.

Dk2 really needs a beefy computer. My concern about cv1 is that people will cheap out on computers or run the wrong games and blame oculus for motion sickness.

Ovr might want to restrict what apps can be run on what computers. Their mobile version has this benefit. Carmack had real vision leading the charge on their Samsung partnership.

Have you tried the HTC vive? I felt like moving around could be the solution. It was definitely the experience I was expecting with VR. Oculus was just weird when I tried it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com