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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

Vergence accommodation conflict is a contributor but not anywhere near a primary source.

The jury is still out on that. There simply is no research to prove or disprove what you or I are saying.

My educated guess is that it actually is quite important and the key to making VR more comfortable for long term use.

I think it is the primary issue. I am a software developer who works in the neuroscience field. I am not an MD but I have read enough research to know you cannot definitively say what the cause is, and that disrupting such natural processes in the brain are likely to have consequences. To me it seems obvious that it's the primary source of the headaches and nausea commonly associated with VR.

For example I have certainly felt sick in the real world from roller coasters. But I have never felt the type of sick I get when I put on a VR helmet. It's another feeling all together. And it comes on differently than any other sick feeling I've had. This is anecdotal of course. I digress.

If VR doesn't solve this issue, VR doesn't go anywhere IMHO. But it's obvious they will solve it in time and as someone who closely follows the field it seems to be one of their primary concerns.

The primary engineering challenge of VR is motion sickness caused by a mismatch of visual and inner ear information, which is extremely well established as causing people to throw up in a wide range of contexts outside of VR. The principles behind modern VR tech are decades old - the reason we're getting consumer VR now, in the late 2010s, is because commodity computing hardware is now fast enough to render scenes and track heads with a low enough latency to prevent motion sickness. However, low hardware latency is necessary but not sufficient to prevent motion sickness - the application developer also has a responsibility not to throw the user around in virtual space without corresponding real-world movement. A great many VR applications do not respect this principle - two such programs were mentioned by JabavuAdams at the top of the thread. Hence, the primary cause of nausea on VR is motion sickness caused by content.

Yes, even in a decent VR experience you will get headaches after an hour or two, possibly or even probably from vergence-accomodation conflict. But that's entirely secondary - you won't last more than a couple minutes on a virtual roller coaster.

I've been working in VR and AR for nearly a decade. I've even built my own headsets. The experiences that make people sick are always low framerate. I've put people through experiences pegged at 90FPS for hours at a time with no nausea.

Perfectly valid point. I still think vergence/accommodation needs to be solved as an important key step in VR dev for more comfortable experiences. Its harder to do than just upping frame rates.

You need foveated rendering to start with but im sure you know the rest. If you want VR, well you need actual VR. Its not enough to trick your vision superficially. You have trick the whole system. I digress.

Foveated rendering doesn't solve vergence accommodation. Your eye will still be focused at infinity regardless of where you are looking, you'll just have the illusion that the foreground or background are out of focus. Eye tracking plus dynamic lenses (perhaps liquid lenses) or real light fields are necessary.

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