How big an issue is the nausea problem for VR products?
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Similar to the author I worked with HMD systems while in the air force, specifically the integrated HUD avionics F35 helmet system. He is correct about the current lack of accommodation (depth perception) and the vestibular mismatch for movement. Other posters discuss vestibular stimulation, without realizing that such stimulation actually induces physical motion. The biological systems are too tightly connected to just simulate physical movement in the brain without a physical reaction.
What he misses, which is critical is that certain virtual retinal displays can solve the accommodation and multiple depth object focal lengths. This is the major thing that magic leap has going for it, but while it's hard it's not impossible to do in multiple ways. We have our own multi-depth accommodation vrd patent filing.
There is no real solution to the movement problem though... Except to actually work with virtual objects in the real world, AKA augmented reality.
So the actual solution to his problem doesn't lie in VR solutions, it's in AR.
Until we have sufficient BCI that works around vestibular and ocular pathways we aren't going to see the matrix levels of presence in non AR displays.
In other words, he's still right that VR headsets won't work with current technology.
The mixed reality continuum doesn't require different displays to provide different types of systems, so the distinction between AR and VR from a hardware implementation standpoint eventually goes away. If you build a VRD for AR then you are 90% of the way towards a combined system that could also work for VR. The trick then is figuring out how to "render black", arguably the hardest challenge for a combined system or even just hmd AR system.
So yes, currently it's an issue with current systems but won't always be the case.
In terms of locomotion, i agree that you can't get there (at least for systems with 6DOF) through systems that are ocular input only and not have the vergence problem. The caveat being if you can build a fast enough photon to cortex system.
Why is that necessary? I bet I could have tons of fun with wireframe based augmented reality games with zero opacity in them. That would also be a good way to deliver heads-up real-time data.
The military/defense guys probably played around with this before. I'd love to hear their take on wireframe AR.
>Nvidia’s CEO reckons the challenges holding VR back aren’t going to be solved for 20 years, delivering a surprising dose of realism to a VR industry creaking under the weight of hype.
It's less of a "sufficiently smart compiler" argument and more of an "if you only touch 5% of the scene, the other 95% is just looking through glasses, and people do that just fine" argument.
Don't forget, people get nausea and vertigo in everyday life in certain circumstances - driving while reading for example.
A consumer focused solution really isn't feasible.
Last month's Wired article on Magic Leap says that they've got the magical depth focus problem solved. Unfortunately it's frustratingly short on details. So I don't think we'll know for sure until it's actually released, but if this first generation of Vive/Oculus doesn't solve the issue, whatever generation that Magic Leap ends up being in might.
Until they show something to the public, I'll give them zero credence of having really advanced the state of the art.
The short version is, an OLED/LCD has an "infinite" focal length and cannot do otherwise. So by default everything in the display is rendered at the same focal point. You can do some tricks like blurring elements, but these are not responding to the convexity of your eyeball or how your eye muscles are working, so if you look at something that is software blurred it will still look blurry. Even with eye tracking it's still really a hack, and isn't naturally responsive - it's the software reacting to your gaze.
Display based accommodation however renders objects at different focal points. So when your eye changes gaze point and your ocular muscles respond to put your eye at that focus level, the object/s come into focus. It's the reverse of the hack.
Sounds like a trivial difference but is completely different, significantly more convincing and logistically more complex.
Vestibular mismatch remains an issue, but for seated sims there are hydraulics, for walking around sims - there is no mismatch. There's a crazy amount of experimentation going on right now with locomotion systems, such as some that involve you walking across your space, turning 180, and keeping the world fixed in your view, but with visible dust in the virtual air that becomes the main thing you notice, not the faded out world, and on you go.
For running/terrain, we just need backpack pcs and larger tracked areas. I already know of a startup looking to breathe new life into old indoor laser tag installations.
As to his anecdote - I stuck dozens of people in my dk2 and many were nauseous, myself included. On the vive - nobody - a d I've let far more people try it as a result of the overwhelmingly positive reaction - I had to pry my sixty something mother out of it.
Re: post simulation - that I concur is a problematic one. I can see very bad shit happening and it being ostensibly due to post-simulation experience distortion. I can vouch that it's very real - but that you do find your legs. After my first few sessions in the vive (never had with dk2, not immersive enough), I'd come out seeing things as weirdly unreal, too flat, and generally felt a bit "spaced". I don't get that any more - and my exposure hasn't been that heavy - maybe 50 hours over the last three weeks or so.
It's all about the software. I've been developing DK2 based experiences for trade shows and have seen thousands of people try VR for the first time. Perhaps 1 in 100 suffer from simulation sickness, but this highly depends on the application. E.g. One of my first prototypes made everyone that tried it very sick - including myself (this due to a single camera movement mid-experience - flying over a rail & then spiralling up a staircase).
Unfortunately, beyond the scarce info on the subject of sim-sickness - my experience has been derived completely from trial & error.
I'd like to see more specific information shared on the subject of simulation sickness.
It makes for an interesting conflict with the desire to provide an "extreme" experience, I think.
It happened when I attempted to use the Rift with Portal, which at the time had very primitive Rift support. The game had a calibration mechanism which adjusts the field of view for each eye independently, as well as the "left-rightness" of objects as they recede into the distance.
I fiddled with the calibration for a little while, but everything looked pretty muddled. Suddenly it all came into focus, mostly, and I played the game for an hour or two. Which is to say, I stumbled around in this weirdly-calibrated world.
When I took off my Rift, I was astonished to find that I was cross-eyed, and couldn't uncross them. I tried closing my eyes, focusing in the distance and then back, etc, to no avail. After a few hours I gave up and went to sleep.
I woke up fine. It was one of the strangest experiences I've ever had, and I was wondering if anyone's experienced a similar effect.
EDIT: Interesting. Apparently the answer is "No, no one else has experienced this."
I should clarify some details. This was several years ago, back when Rift support was in its infancy. The only thing I remember is that there was some sort of program designed to inject Rift support into games. Back then, Mirror's Edge, Portal, etc didn't have Rift support, but using this program, you could hack it to work.
I think what happened is this: Point at the ceiling, then bring your finger close to your nose. Keep focusing on your finger. There's a distance where you have to cross your eyes in order to continue focusing on your finger. Bring it a little closer.
I'm pretty sure that's how I had the calibration set up. And I played like that for a couple hours, which caused my eyes to adapt to that situation. Hence, cross-eyed vision.
I've played many other games with no problems, so it was definitely a product of the bizarro calibration. It'd probably be a bad idea to try to replicate this, but there were no lasting effects.
B) I can't resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaz2hxZLycY
To be clear for anyone else that may read this, any sudden visual impairment warrants an immediate visit to the ER. Even though many problems will resolve themselves, there are plenty of others that can cause permanent vision loss if they aren't treated properly.
I'm not a doctor, but I've had similar symptoms unrelated to VR. After several tests (including an MRI), I was advised to wait and see if the problem recurs. Given how long you've been asymptomatic, just wait and see seems like a reasonable course[1]. On the other hand, my symptoms did come back after a while, and it sounds like that VR session put more strain on your eyes than I've ever subjected myself to.
[1] I am not a doctor; when in doubt, talk to anyone w/ a medical license
It's not an uncomon effect for any close focusing to distort vision temporarily, especially if your eyes are tired. I visited an opthalmologist last year because of persistent ghosting at night, and it turned out to be from reading laying on my side in bed causing one eye to partially cross but not fully uncross until morning.
There is no absolute need to let the player experience real acceleration in unrealistic games, you can't differentiate between being at constant motion and being stationary. What I am getting to is that in unrealistic games you can make things move only at 5km/h or not at all, sure not realistic but possibly ok enough for less players to get motion sick, sure not a perfect solution but game developers have done amazing things with the limitations of 2d screens, and some people still get motion sick from shooters played on 2d screens. Not polished enough for real mainstream use but still polished enough for a very big market.
Alternatively you could make the player accelerate at steps of 5km/h:
while(Speed > 10){ Speed = (Speed modulo 10); inGameSpeed = (inGameSpeed + 5); } actualPlayerSpeed = inGameSpeed;
Even the most expensive research OLED panels with high enough pixel densities for VR have only existed since the early-mid '00s. The studies he linked to are from 1989.
> Depth perception
The author neglects to mention that OLED light field displays have already solved this problem completely. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g
The technology already exists (you need a pair of expensive MicroOLED displays and some special lenses), it's just not available at a consumer price point.
> Momentum
For someone involved with military devices, it's surprising that this guy has never heard of galvanic vestibular stimulation. GVS will never be easy and will always require very, very extensive calibration per-user, but it's still possible to use for simulating perceived movement.
This isn't that important for me personally, as I've never experienced VR sickness even when playing fast-paced high-momentum VR games for multiple hours at a time. I could see people who get VR sickness wanting this, as GVS would help prevent it from happening.
Whoa! I have been kind of watching the whole VR thing from the sidelines, and I didn't expect this to be even anything somebody was even thinking about.
Thanks for the hint! Are there any specific projects that you'd think are worth mentioning here ?
Just providing an accurate projection of the visual field to the eye's doesn't solve the problem completely. Visual perception is not a passive mechanism, our eyes 'explore' the visual field through quick movements and readjustments and this process inherently locks together the proprioceptive signals from the ciliary and ocular muscles to the stream of information from the retina. By only providing screens, we can't simulate this process in a natural way and our body will detect it.
Similarly - our vestibular sense is strongly tied to our experiences of our body moving through the world. Just using a blanket stimulation of electrodes on the skin will not recreate these signals in anywhere near a convincing enough manner to fool the brain's perceptual processing.
All of our sensory perceptions are strongly linked together - if just one is perturbed in an unconvincing way (try wearing glasses that aren't prescribed to you for a while), our brain will do our "caveman brain" thing and make us sick.
That's the point of the light field displays GP mentioned. They also encode depth allowing the eyes to refocus on the correct depth corresponding to the object's virtual position.
Put differently, a LFD reconstructs photon paths, as if you were looking into a window facing the recorded object.
The remaining engineering problem is that those microlens arrays step down the effective resolution of the display, so you need much higher DPI to get the same sharpness as a non-LFD would get you.
Even your example is wrong. You can in fact adjust to glasses of the wrong prescription. People who need glasses have deformed eyes which is basically like having the wrong prescription. The brain adjusts, and people can go without glasses without vomiting everywhere.
The nausea reaction is an issue, but it doesn't affect the entire population. I have friends who can't play video games because of motion sickness, but no one argues that video games can't be commercially successful. And various tricks like removing head bob, adjusting the field of view, and adding a virtual "nose", have been shown to significantly alleviate that.
Who told you he refers to 1989 headsets only? The military also has 2016 $80,000 (and more) headsets.
One other interesting thing to note (at least on the HTC Vive) is the majority of the content for the platform is focused on standing / walking with motion in real life matching 1-1 with motion in VR. Which both stops a major source of motion sickness and rules out entire categories of software like flight simulators, which seems to be his entire work history.
I knew as soon as he mentioned military VR results that his case was going to be based on ancient and inferior hardware and outdated results, and include no actual results or even first-hand experience with a Vive. (At the most generous reading of the article, he worked with a DK1 a while ago.)
I've tried a couple seated flight-sims. You simply can't see distant objects as well as you'd expect due to the low resolution of the panels, which is far more important in flight sims than with most other things. I can't say I got sick, but it didn't feel real to me, and I can see how others might get sick.
4K and, later, 8K VR should solve a lot of that.
The next problem will be figuring out how to render 10000x5000 at 120hz in realtime on consumer GPUs. It will definitely require insanely beefy rigs to accomplish.
I've been playing modern games at 1440p 120hz since 2011. We've been at 4K and 5K 120hz-capable (on the GPU-side) for quite a while already as well.
It's hard to imagine not being able to hit >8K 120hz in under 500W once we get GPUs on the 7nm node.
Of course the actual displays aren't here yet, but the compute resources needed aren't out of reach.
WOW interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlXYqfQHNuA
Anecdotally, I have a Rift, and do not get sim sickness except in rare circumstances involving at least an accelerating viewpoint, and even then not severely and only briefly.
Motion sickness tolerance varies a lot of course, I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the percentage who would have this problem with VR, but unlike say, watching a color television, the percentage is not insignificant.
As for your discomfort after taking the headset off, this is mostly because current VR tech strains the eyes a bit due to everything always being in perfect focus.
Here's an optometrist having his first experience with VR and talking about what he thinks:
Yes. It's highly dependent on the game, too; certain games seem very prone to issues. For example, The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game, causes nausea in enough players -- including me! -- that there's a whole section in the configuration for "motion sickness options", like changing the field of view or disabling head bobbing.
(FWIW, I was able to play through the game comfortably after switching it to a third-person viewpoint.)
All entertainment works within some constraints of the medium, and things that are great on one medium often are impossible or just bad on other medium. An expert saying "VR won't work for vehicle/racing sims because of acceleration/vestibular issues" is perfectly compatible with VR working great for real customers - if you look at the provided content, then they manage to provide quite a lot of fun and variety while simply avoiding any vehicle/racing sims, probably because of the same issues.
Only two experienced significant nausea. Two or three more reported feeling a little queasy. The rest didn't have any nausea-related problems.
A few people reported vertigo, one desperately gripping the chair they were sitting on when they looked down. One literally threw the headset off when some VR dolphins in another demo got too close. These are unusual reactions.
I'd say about 90% of the people don't have any problems at all. The consumer Rift should be even more acceptable.
Still, these devices are all in their infancy. Expect devices a few generations in to be far, far better than the ones that mostly target early-adopters today.
I expect the main challenge to overcome for most users will be comfort. Few people will want to wear these things for long, once the novelty wears off. A lot of people don't even like wearing regular glasses. Wearing these bulky, hot, uncomfortable headsets for extended periods of time will not be worth the trouble for most people, once they get over the gee-whiz factor.
Since (nearly) everybody in this thread seems to be under the impression that it's impossible that the vast majority of people who've used the Vive are actually telling the truth about the lack of nausea it incurs, here's one of several weekly videos put out by the developers of Fantastic Contraption, showing people playing their game unimpeded for two and a half hours: https://www.twitch.tv/colinnorthway/v/61979623
In hours and hours and hours of real usage, the only thing about the headset you ever see anybody people in these videos complain about with the headset is sweat.
It took some getting use to doing barrel rolls or adjusting yaw and pitch too quickly. As I improved, the sickness from more complicated manoeuvres subsided.
I think that attitudes that VR is somehow dangerous and impossible to be done without sickness are foolish and ignore historical precedent; Many things throughout human development have felt 'unnatural' and required adjustment and training - driving, flying, skydiving, moving pictures; yet humanity has adjusted to these in short course.
The biggest issue is when the world moves without you - Windlands is a big culprit here. In general standing and using controller locomotion so far has been a recipe for nausea.
But outside of that, so far everyone who has used my unit (and that's about 20 some people currently) has had a blast. No cases of simulator sickness (and I've only seen two reports of that in the community as a whole so far) and no nausea other than an initial misattempt with Windlands.
Sorry, VR is probably here to stay, though whether it goes mainstream will be about whether or not the price can drop quickly.
Just like when mobile apps came out, existing games didn't work on the new platform. No one wanted to play an FPS on mobile. VR is a new platform and developers have to adjust for what works on it. Games like SPT, holopoint and zenblade get it right. They're all simple games inside a room but they are all create amazing experiences. I've been using my Vive almost every night for weeks and this is definitely here to stay.
I've tried a few different games with controller locomotion (hold the joystick up to move your avatar that you see from forward, etc) and I definitely had some trouble. Part of the trouble was mostly about constantly mixing up whether I should try to use the controller or real movements to move in-game, but also a bit of nausea at times too.
>The Google Cardboard VR folks seem to know this and basically suggest that applications make it seem like we’re basically standing still and just turning our heads around (which we really are - so no nausea). That’ll work - but it’s not going to get you an immersive 1st person shooter game…or a car racing game…or…well, pretty much anything immersive.
Sure, not all currently-existing game genres will translate well to VR, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing VR is good for.
But I have to say that the experience was quite a bit different with the room scale VR like the HTC Vive. The only time I experienced any nausea in there was in Hover Junkers. The game has you riding a vehicle with frequent changes in direction at high speeds. This again seemed to be related to the perception of motion without corresponding sensations.
But the teleportation used in games like Budget Cuts didn't affect me at all. (There were some disturbing bouts of claustrophobia when I teleported too close to a wall, but that didn't induce any nausea.)
At the time that I tried the Vive, I spent about 20 hours total playing with it, spread across probably 4 sessions. I think my longest duration without a break was 6 hours. It was exhausting but not nauseating. The others with me had similar experiences. In fact, one of them normally gets so nauseated by things like this that they have prescription medication for nausea for use while riding in the car -- and they didn't experience any nausea at all.
Unfortunately Oculus and HTC/Valve can't stop developers from doing the obvious things that make everyone sick. Dumb developers can and will.
Some people get sick simply looking at motion on a 2D monitor. So there will always be people getting sick in these experiences.
I'd be interested to hear what vintage and what specs those $80K headsets really were. Knowing the specs of older $50-100K research HMDs, I have extreme doubts that resolution, latency, or tracking accuracy match today's consumer headsets even (most of the tech stemming from the billions and billions of dollars of investment spent on smartphone development from the past decade).
When talking about depth perception, hyperbole like "THAT problem can’t be fixed by any known technological means" (in reference to focal/depth plane projection) is completely inaccurate, and contributes to the feeling of crochety old man ranting. There are multiple VRD and light field solutions being worked on to address the multi/vari-focus issue (my current favorite approach is the micro-lensed near-eye light field displays, although I suspect that barrier-based LFDs will be what gets adopted first).
Vection is a big issue, but there's a huge amount of 1:1 motion experiences available, and based on personal/anecdotal experience, most people have no problem spending 15-30m in them w/o having strong adverse effects. Thousands of people have done the 10m+ the Oculus Connect and Vive Experience demos w/ very few issues. Based on that, I believe that for experiences w/o artificial vection, comfort is primarily a software problem at this point, not hardware.
Personally, I'm pretty bullish on all the locomotion experiments going on (teleportation, re-orientation, redirection). I'm a bit less convinced on vehicle/cockpit vection w/o linked motion control, but the price is certainly not an issue for high-end military simulators and lots of enthusiasts are making DIY 6DOF simulators.
His section about momentum is stupid - the Vive especially allows 1:1 mapping from VR to real life so that isn't an issue.
Also, this comment is probably the most stupid thing in there:
> Sadly, the $80,000 googles we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick - so this seems unlikely.
Call me a skeptic but as if they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones.
1:1 mapping from VR to real life is fine if you're walking around a small room (and not puking all over the place). However, it's not fine if you want to anything that involves a more interesting range of motion: driving, flying, even walking in a straight line for more than a few meters.
> consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones
Remember Google Glass, which was all revolutionary and state of the art in 2013? DARPA had these in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display#M...
Practically no one gets sick from Vive in 1-1 experiences, which is all the parent said. The article says VR won't work, but really he just means artificial vection won't work.
There are also plenty of ways of making vection work by limiting certain things. For example with Vive allowing easy 360 tracking of hand and headset, you can avoid all artificial rotation. Some people only get sick from artificial yaw.
Also there are things like FOV restriction you can do during movement which limits vection. Then you can snap back to full FOV once the artificial movement is done and let the user walk around the room again with full FOV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY
I would guess the article author is bound by non-competes locked into ancient military contracts and can't get in on the startup action in consumer VR and is just bitter. People are probably asking him what he does at parties, and they say in response, oh I know of Vive and the Rift, and it is getting on his nerves so he is just sort of trolling to lash out.
Flight sims with visible horizons do indeed cause tons of motion sickness in a lot of people though. But that doesn't say anything about VR in general.
People will get used to the sensation, and get over it, especially as they grow up with it from childhood.
i am really surprised by this. Do you have source for this claim perhaps?
As did another commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796367
You could research the Lumiere Brother's films, and probably find some material on the matter pretty easily.
See also, the history of IMAX (70mm film). Originally invented in 1929, named Fox Gradeur,they cancelled the product for decades because it was too realistic, and was making audiences profoundly uncomfortable.
I even recall reading recently that color film and television caused lots of nausea when they first hit the market.
More recently, you may recall that the Blair Witch project was making audiences around the country vomit, because they were not yet accustomed to jerky handheld-style cinema: http://amarillo.com/stories/1999/08/13/usn_LA0713.001.shtml#...
It was just a new an unusual experience, which is something different.
Else they wouldn't have gotten over it without millennia of adapting to it.
And a Ford T is basically the same thing as a modern car. The modern car is just better in every category, but basically it is the same and it was there first.
Well.. yes? He says it's impossible to make VR that doesn't make people sick. We now have VR that doesn't make people sick. He's wrong. He decades of experience probably cloud his judgement because until now VR was terrible.
Any argument for this statement, or just 'I tried Vive and it was great'? It doesn't say anywhere that $80k was a budget but it's rather clear that it was cost of the unit.
Sorry, but you just make loads of big claims and all with nothing backing them.
The argument is obvious - consumers are the biggest market for displays by a huge margin. The military don't have super-advanced displays that LG and Sony can't match. The military didn't make a 4K 5.5" screen before Sony. They don't have huge display research divisions.
I feel like the original author should have to show this $80k low latency, high res VR system before I can disprove it. All I could find was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-rFLlvdD4
It looks shit compared to the Vive. Look at how bad the field of view is! No numbers on latency or resolution but come on. There's almost no chance they're as good. Hell, the technology to get really low latency, like G-Sync and OLED displays didn't even exist until really recently.
Just because it's 'military' doesn't mean it is the best.
We have predictive tracking and timewarp to reduce the felt latency to virtually zero, does the military unit have that? Full positional audio?
I'm sure the military have fine engineers, but do they have John Carmacks, Mike Abrashes, JMP van Waverens, Cass Everitts, etc.?
If I recall correctly, this was one of the biggest issues that Sega ran into with Sega VR. They knew that short term exposure to 3d/VR would shut off some of the cues your body uses for depth perception, and they were concerned that prolonged use might have a more permanent effect. Because of this, their lawyers advised them not to release the product for fear of lawsuits if people suffered permanent damage.
I experienced incredibly bad motion sickness at a racetrack once; the ole "vestibular disconnect". I had been gradually improving lap times and went to one circuit which was continual left-right-left-right sequence of corners with very little let up (cornering G's around 1.5). After 3-4 laps I had the cold sweats and had to get out of the car... I tried 3 different sessions to shake it and couldn't. Was dizzy for the remainder of the day wanted to throw up constantly. A good sleep and I came right. The dizziness was horrible - you definitely wouldn't want to have that experience then go on to operate heavy machinery :)
In my understanding talking to a scientist friend in that field - everyone has different tolerance levels, but when it happens and your body goes into "caveman mode" the results are horrible. The underlying message in the authors answer (my read) is it's "be careful... you can really mess someone up".
After that incident at the track my empathy for motion sickness went up a few notches..
However, I feel like I'm in the minority on this. No one around me seems to have any trouble watching movies in 3D, for a start.
I guess, just as some people aren't fit to operate a vehicle (problem in eyesight or other reasons) there are some who aren't fit to use VR and I really doubt they (we) amount to the mentioned 50%.
It makes sense to me that if I'm only seeing the image for the left or right eye individually the 3D effect wouldn't work.
Maybe it's never too late? This guy was 67 when his brain switched to 3D mode.
I'm sure we'll be fine eventually.
I think the problem will be "solved" with a combination of improvements in the tech (light field, etc), conditioning (the brain has surprising plasticity, especially if you condition it from a very young age), custom designed applications (to avoid the motion problem), and maybe lots of nausea medication. :-)
I'd certainly agree that the brain can adjust to using VR, but at what cost? If using VR means losing your depth perception and sense of balance, so that you are walking around bumping into things (or worse driving), then it's probably not going to be worth it for many people, despite how fun it might be.
Dubious.
> I believe that the most major problem is with depth perception.
We're well on our way to solving this problem. (https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254)
> [The momentum problem] simply cannot be fixed by any means. The laws of physics don’t allow it.
The solution is simple. VR experiences would need to be more or less fixed to a small room. AR experiences just don't have this problem.
lmao retort
I would expect, even a fairly incompetent engineer, to not make such elementary mistakes... its pretty easy stuff to measure, and even more trivial to know if you made the thing to start with :P
And if the distance disparity would indicate hallucination and trigger vomiting as a defence mechanism agains shrooms, how comes existing FPS games have no such issues?
Some people claimed to have problems playing Mirrors Edge back in 2009, but it seemed like it was mostly the hype and the attention-craving. I myself never felt any issues, and neither did anyone I've talked to.
> how comes existing FPS games have no such issues?
People can get very seasick. FPS gamers are self selected group. People who feel nausea stop playing. I often get fever like nausea if I play too long. Not too bad though.
Watching a friend play _DOOM_ in 1996, playing _Halo_ in the 2010s, playing _Fallout 4_ (on a 65" screen about 2 m distant) today: all these scenarios have induced nausea in me.
On more than one occasion, an hour of play has put me in and out sleep for 12 hours.
On the same headset, the "Villa on a hill" demo scene is problematic, though, because of some issues with geometry inside the house (warping angles), and more generally, "walking" around while sitting down.
I think it'll be interesting to see how motion sickness from VR compares to seasickness -- I've talked to many people that have been sailors -- and started out with lots of problems, but eventually "got over it". And I've also heard stories of people that never got over it.
I don't think everyone will enjoy the same VR games and experiences, but I don't see how that's any different from other games and software. There are some FPS games I simply can't enjoy -- but those games still sell well. So I don't see why VR can't be a great success for a market that doesn't include everyone.
As a counter-point, I know people that can't focus on text on screens that have a resolution below the "retina"-screens, and there are of course a number of people with various sight-related issues (See eg: Moore's "Color Forth" system, and why he made it the way he did).
Perhaps VR will create a new, substantial section of the populace that will need to be classified as "limited function" due to not being able to use VR. No-one is claiming we should retire 2d screens because they are of no use to blind people. That's not to say there won't be controversy, but seeing that many people already enjoy VR, should be enough to point out that it's likely some form of VR will remain useful in the future, especially now that it is arguably rather affordable?
That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. The only evidence cited is that the military issued a warning about driving after exiting a military flight simulator. I'm not questioning that the effects of VR can persist after exiting the simulation, I just don't think they can be compared to the effects of alcohol without significantly more investigation.
AR is a different thing entirely. The Hololens holoportation demo was one of the most amazing tech demos I've ever seen. Watching that, you know where the future lies. The gear manufacturers may not like to admit it, but there will likely be a long "arcade" phase to AR entertainment were we pay a visit to a "holodeck" facility that has the half a million dollars in gear which would be required to make this a great experience. I have no problem with that - I already pay to go see a movie or go bowling or to an amusement park.
Multiple multinational companies sink many billions of R&D dollars into fundamentally flawed and dangerous consumer technology. Said consumers, not wanting to accept the truth conspire to almost completely suppress any meaningful spread of reports of the flaw.
Feels sorta unlikely to me! That's not really how the world works. Surely the simplest explanation is most likely ... that first gen consumer VR is in most cases "good enough", and a significant minority consumers experience some amount of sickness, but not enough to invalidate the industry?
Why on Earth are people in this thread putting so much effort into weighing in with their two cents "assuming nausea is actually a serious problem"? I understand that Hacker News loves playing devil's advocate, but devising theories to explain non-existent phenomena is just being tedious.
I have no real problems with nausea (or motion sickness in general) and I love my Rift. That said, I do get mild headaches if I play it for more than an hour. So yeah, it's a thing.
An architects experience on hololens:
Microsoft promo - but I doubt the architect would like to make a total ass of himself. I work in CAD for construction and while not directly involved in Hololens projects people mostly see this as transformational for their clients. So, there might be actual value here but the market has not yet spoken.
In previous VR surges designers were not so educated in digital and the workflows were not there. VR was a thing itself - now it's more like a one more view into an established process and dataset - and is actually only an incremental change and not a profound one (and is thus likelier to succeed)
Just got my HTC Vive. Nausea isn't a problem for me, but age has definitely made me farsighted. Muscles in my eye might strain to let me focus close, but that's just not happening nowadays. Since this has happened gradually over the years, my brain has gotten used to it.
Oddly enough, when I tried the Oculus Rift, I found I could focus more clearly on nearby virtual objects than far away ones. Not only is VR an alternate reality where I can play with force fields and laser beams, it's a reality where my eyes aren't old anymore and work correctly.
Google's Daydream is all about creating standards to improve this situation.
I think children that grow up on the sea adapt to sea sickness, maybe similar here.
PSVR is impressive and what I think will be the most successful system as it the best value and already has a ~40m user install base where it will "just work".
For me the biggest issue is using any of these systems for more than 20-30 minutes is uncomfortable as you have this big unit sat on your face. Whereas when I sit down to game I like to do so for a couple of hours but that just isn't possible (for me) with VR.
The audio tech in this area is pretty weak. Dolby Surround is about "gee whiz" not detailed modeling of environments with customizations for the impulse response of each moviegoer's ear canal. Lots of work to be done.
I was glad to see Oculus was tackling the problem... then I got a look at what they were actually doing. Can't say more other than to point out there's a lot more work to be done.
The Gear VR was a really cool device despite The Oculus software being crap. (Forcing online connectivity for offline app)
The device made me sick for hours after I used it personally.
Worth it!
It seems like people commenting don't want to take in the point of view that VR is just too early at this point.
VR is very cool but you don't want to develop for the hype train unless you have the dedication to get over
the hurdles and can take a a financial upset.
I used to love to play games, now I can only play "unrealistic" games. Anything 1st person makes me sick. This effect gets worse as I age.
"The simulators which exhibited the highest incidences of sickness were helicopter simulators with cathode ray tube (CRT) infinity optics and six-degrees-of-freedom moving base systems. Of those studied, fixed-wing, fixed-base, dome displays had relatively low incidence of simulator sickness."
If you read the second study, the VR environments tested we're exclusively those of piloting helicopters.
Since helicopters have a lot of lateral and rotational acceleration, its plausible that this is why the simulation sickness is so great.
Actual ships at sea far much less so.
Stand in front of a tall building/chimney. Now look at the base of the building. Slowly raise your eyes to go from the bottom to the top. You perceive dimensions of the building as the same all the time.
Now do the same on camera. You notice the building changes its dimensions as you raise the view.
This effect will make you feel sick when you have it right next to your eyes. Brain simply does much more for our perception to work.
Oh, wait, we already have the software to do it, while I'm again convinced the military units and projects discussed in OP don't.
The only time I've gotten sick at all on vr is playing project cars, and that was only from reversing and going forwards a few times after a wreck.
It really sounds like he's basing this on no experience with the current generation of headsets.
You mean, like radio and telephone and television and computers and smartphones?
Social factors are a big thing, and while it pains me to say it (and your comment was worded in an unnecessarily offensive way) I do think that you might be at least partially right.
You are certainly right that social factors have a huge effect on the uptake of new technologies, but it's often hard to predict how those social factors will change and shape the uptake of new technology.
My example is text messages. Doesn't that seem like something only a total dork would like? I was a fairly early adopter of text messaging myself, and I certainly fit the 'poorly socialized nerd' stereotype, and my perception at the time was that text messaging was for people who were too poorly socialized or nervous to talk via voice. But that's not how text messages came to dominate. text messaging came to dominate, as far as I can tell, because it's seen as somehow rude to actually talk with someone who isn't physically in the room with you when other people are in the room with you. (It doesn't seem like it ought to be rude to me, but my social responses are not normal. I can certainly observe that the vast majority of people find that sort of thing rude, and I act accordingly.)
my point here is just that you are right to say that social perceptions matter in the uptake of these technologies, but probably premature in confidently stating that you understand what direction those social perceptions will push.