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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

I get simulation sickness even from games I play on a 1080p screen from an arm's length away. I couldn't stand a 3D-glass for more than 15 minutes and therefore I'm too afraid to even try the VR headsets more than ten seconds (It gets really bad when it starts with a splitting headache and nausea combined).

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%.

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An interesting anecdote - My friend who absolutely cannot play or even watch someone play an FPS game had no problems with the samsung gear(arguably a device on the lower end). You should give it a try and see how you fair.

I would suggest a positionally tracked headset as the absolute best test case.

My wife gets sick in 3D movies and she can handle the vive surprisingly well. When the image adjusts to your own movements it's less nausea inducing than viewing lots of motion in a movie while sitting still.

This actually probably has more to do with the fidelity of rendering in the Vive apps. It's important to remember that due to hunter/gatherer specializations men and women (testosterone and estrogen dominant individuals actually, we tested this with hormone treatment patients that were swapping genders) tend to perceive visual reality differently [0], indeed the eye has the second most (besides genitalia obviously) sex differentiating receptors than anywhere on your body. All of the stuff the OP was talking about with motion sickness and parallax are mostly male concerns (as men use parallax and motion as our primary vision perception systems). Women use shading and lighting as their primary systems; which makes them prone to sickness when those aspects are screwed up (as in older systems) but if rendered with enough fidelity (as we are beginning to be capable of) may not have that problem. At the end of the day, we don't really understand how vision effects different people's brains that well.

[0] http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf

I've yet to try a VR headset but because I have very different vision in one way to the other 3D films simply don't work for me. I can watch them but I only see them in 2D, my experience with Google Cardboard was the same, so sadly I don't think I'm ever going to get to experience what others do.

Have you got any more information on this effect? I know someone who says the same happens to them, and I'd love to find out more about it. Thanks!

I'm told by my optician that my brain never worked out how to use both eyes at once due to a squint when I was young - at any given time I'm only actually processing the input from a single eye. They attempted to correct it but my peculiar vision was picked up much too late in life so it just made me motion sick as the brain rapidly alternated from one eye to the other. It also means my depth perception is pretty appalling, at a distance I've learnt to compensate, but watching me try to put together two small objects close up can be pretty hilarious as I wildly miss.

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.

That reminds me of http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-wo...

Maybe it's never too late? This guy was 67 when his brain switched to 3D mode.

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