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Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

Ctrl+F "inner ear" - no results. To me, that's going to be the keystone to a functional VR experience. Until there's some relatively non-intrusive mechanism to fool the body's systems into playing along, I'm sorry, I don't think image resolution or refresh or FPS will solve the problem. They're all very important, sure, but I think the biology of the conundrum is the most challenging short term.

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Shouldn't this be qualified by adding "beyond room-scale?"

Because when VR/IRL movement are the same, there's no need to fool the body's systems.

How do astronauts combat nausea in space? Practice. I personally don't expect a technical solution to this any time soon. We just have to acclimatize ourselves.

> We just have to acclimatize ourselves.

Aww. But I already had my scalpels out for DIY inner ear surgery. I just finished watching the YouTube howto and everything... :(

> We just have to acclimatize ourselves

A lot of discomfort for relatively little (at least thus far) gain.

Not everyone is fit to be an astronaut. Not everyone is able to eliminate nausea through reasonable amounts of acclimatization.

The target audience for VR is everyone.

Everyone? It's always going to be a niche thing. There's lots of people who can't play regular video games because of motion sickness, but the video game industry doesn't suffer.

you should replace 'always' with 'foreseeable future'. its plain wrong otherwise.

I know many people who can't play first-person games because of simulator sickness. That didn't stop the game industry.

To add to this, motion sickness from FPS-on-a-screen is inherently unfixable due to the lack-of-locomotion issue. But roomscale VR deals with that issue. VR done right could very well expand the FPS market.

There are two solutions to this that don't involve any new tech:

1) Don't move your POV in VR.

2) Train your brain interpret movement in VR as world movement not body movement. If you can maintain a sense that you're not actually moving just because your eyes are showing a lot of stuff moving around you, then your vestibular system and vision system will be in accordance and you won't have any motion sickness.

Children who use VR from a young age will have an easier time of this, but adults can learn it too.

That's only really a problem if you're strapped to a driver's/pilot's seat or some other system where the game isn't mimicking your body's movement. The current solution for that is one of those 6 DoF motion simulators, which might have to be good enough.

People with really bad cases of motion sickness have problems playing games on a flat screen let alone in VR. I don't think we'll be able to do anything for them in the near future.

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