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Comment by maroonblazer | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that 1/3 of the population suffer from motion sickness, so for them (I'm in this group) VR isn't an option for the most part.

Of course if this is a solvable problem - those who otherwise suffer from motion sickness are symptom-free in any VR application - then I agree VR could have a bright future.

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I get quite motion-sick. Boat rides are - at best - mildly unpleasant.

After trying the oculus dk1 roller coaster demo, I was incapable of doing anything for 4-5 hours and still felt sick days later.

I play beat saber regularly; taking off the vive after an hour I feel mildly disoriented for about half a minute and then I am fine. The tech has progressed tremendously and no longer gives me any trouble (which may not hold true for everyone but it’s definitely been fine for me)!

The DK1 was basically the same as google cardboard in terms of tech... I still have mine under my desk.

A big part of it is does your ingame motion match your real world motion. In games like Beat Saber the only movements are from you physically moving. I've had a VR headset for maybe 4 years now and can still only play racing games for about an hour before motion sickness starts to settle in. I bet the roller coaster demo would be much less disorienting if one sat in a motion simulator. I'd love to own one eventually for my sim-racing setup.

With modern VR techniques (teleportation) and hardware (Vive/Rift hardware or later), this is no longer a problem.

Wouldn't generalize this; I think there are also factors like game performance (FPS) that are at play. I can play Beat Saber and HL:Alyx just fine on the Vive without any issues whatsoever, but whenever I want to give 'Blade & Sorcery' another try I feel absolutely terrible after a few minutes of gameplay. I do think it's poor performance (low FPS and 'location stutter' where the game seemingly can't decide where to place me exactly) are the cause, but I could not place a finger on when/where exactly the threshold is where I start to feel sick.

Yeah - performance is an issue here (I've worked on VR tech before). What I'm suggesting isn't that developers are getting it perfect, but that we have technologies and techniques that make it work at scale (without people being sick).

That can probably be trained away.

Even assuming this is true (I'd be inclined to doubt it) why on earth would anyone bother?

Because all your friends are playing a VR MMO and are talking about it nonstop on social media

Go on, how?

I'm getting into boat-sailing, and I'm saddened by the nausea it causes. I'm looking into ways to reduce this, and I'm thinking ways to deal with motion sickness incurred in VR-games is probably applicable to me.

I go sailing and don’t get nausea much these days. But VR still makes me queasy after an hour or two.

Add others have hinted, it depends a lot on which games you play, how well they perform and their locomotion mechanics.

Exposure

Nausea at sea is definitely something that typically goes away at least after a couple of days at sea. You get "sea legs". But if you're having it more as a now and then hobby I'm not sure but I recon that there's a long term training element in it as well.

Interestingly, it's the same when you go into space. Around half the people experience it and there doesn't seem to be a link between people who get motion sick and those who get space sick. Symptoms can be mild to relatively severe but people tend to adjust after a few days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_adaptation_syndrome

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