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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

> wait just a little bit longer for the vestibular fix I have been talking about.

If this is what I think it is, it is going to be huge. The buzz is that someone has discovered a cure for motion sickness, and it's incredibly simple: just wear a small vibrating device on the back of your head, sending a continuous vibration signal to your inner ear. For reasons unknown this seems to deactivate whatever part of the vestibular system is responsible for motion sickness. It is supposedly effective in >99% of people and does not disrupt balance.

Read the inventor's description here: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/9ywify/inventor_may... Of course a cure for motion sickness will be great for VR but the applications in everyday life will be much, much bigger.

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Motion sickness is only normally an issue in these 3DoF headsets.

You don't tend to get it with room-scale setups.

I'm hopeful that decent inside-out tracking will be a thing in 2019 - then it's off to the races.

Perfect inside-out tracking with hand tracking, mixed VR and AR - that's when consumer VR gets big.

Motion sickness is a problem for _all_ VR headsets.

Even if the headset tracks in 6-DoF most games still need some form of artificial locomotion. Rarely is it acceptable for the entire game to take place in the same 5ft x 5ft space, and introducing artificial movement causes motion sickness for some people. Just letting users teleport doesn't always cut it.

Yep, just fire up any free-walking VR game and try to move around. I never get motion sick but it still feels very strange to move without walking.

The sensation is somewhere between having my soul sucked out of my body and having a terrible ear infection that impacts balance.

Yeah, that's a 3DoF - your location in the room is not being tracked.

The HTC Vive rarely gives you this feeling as you are free to walk about and there is a 1:1 relationship between the VR and real world.

That only works for games with a very limited player space, or games with a teleporting mechanic. Other games, like Onward allow you to both walk within your room with your location tracked, as well as free-walk using the joystick like a normal first person game, that's what I was talking about.

As I understand it, if motion sickness were not a thing then it would enable a lot more compromises on the performance of VR headsets and the games that play on them. Dropping framerate and stuttering in these games is 100% unacceptable at the moment because it instantly induces intense motion sickness (unlike when the same thing happens on a conventional screen and it's merely irksome).

I don't think anything is going to resolve the "i'm having a stroke" feeling when a VR game freezes or crashes.

Imagine your vision froze in real-life, you would rightly freak out.

So I bought all those stocks in dramamine manufacturing companies for nothing :-(

Yes! Ménière's disease [0] and other vestibular diseases are (thankfully) rare, but truly horrible. Diseases like Ménière's are sometimes clustered into the list of 'suicide' diseases, due to their severity. Vestibular science, in general, is very poorly funded and therefore poorly understood.

Hopefully, things like VR and the need for a better understanding of vestibular disorders will drive funding and understanding[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ni%C3%A8re%27s_disease

[1] https://hearinghealthfoundation.org/donate/

My grandfather had Ménière's disease, and I have had vertigo on a couple of occasions myself. It is debilitating. Unfortunately this device wouldn't restore balance, but at least it could relieve nausea.

The really fascinating part is that somehow this works without any measurable impairment of other reflexive responses.

Hopefully doesn't also cause cancer or alzhaimer by some convoluted mechanism.

Stochastic resonance strikes again.

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