Ask HN: VR Sickness | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: VR Sickness

15 pointsjeffrallen18 comments

I just experienced severe VR sickness after only 3 scenes, less than a few minutes of exposure. I never have any other kinds of motion sickness, nor vertigo, so this was an unwelcome surprise!

I read that 40-70% of people have symptoms after extended use. I couldn't find a figure for how many have an immediate reaction like me.

I'm wondering... How can this technology possibly attract the kind of investment and attention it does, when it is apparently incompatible with human sensory input processing?

Other studies show that the effects are much less for young people and much worse for women. Again, I was surprised to find this out, and I'm wondering what HN readers are thinking/doing about it.

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I used to work at a VR arcade. I saw thousands of people try VR for their first time. With games and experiences we considered "comfortable", I saw someone develop motion sickness exactly twice.

VR sickness comes from these sources:

* "Fake VR" 3DOF devices that approximate the experience but without positional tracking, e.g. Cardboard, Samsung Gear, Oculus Go, etc. Fortunately those seem to have dropped off the market.

* Low and/or inconsistent framerates due to insufficiently performant applications or weak hardware.

* Artificial forms of locomotion with sustained, smooth motion of the point of view. The faster the motion, the worse, with racing games being the worst and simply intolerable for about 30% of people.

By avoiding #1 and #2, and limiting to #3 to customers used to VR or willing to risk motion sickness, we were very successful at making it a non-issue. So I believe that it's a matter of quality control and user education, not an inherent problem with VR as a platform.

Start with a scene that does not move your body fluidly — just do teleporting and stand up and look around. You may have a friend who says “oh the only way to play Half Life Alyx is to play with smooth locomotion”.. yea that’s fine for people who have gotten used to that but not for people new to VR. Smooth locomotion is like being on a boat but you can’t feel the rocking of the boat. Better to use teleporting mode. It also depends upon headset. Valve Index at 120 or 144Hz helps.

In the short term you can get used to it. I used to get vr sickness instantly when moving with a joystick but eventually you get used to it. I now have zero vr sickness even when doing crazy physics defying spinning or something.

As for the long term - my hope is that it gets better as the headsets get better. It seems to so far.

One sort of interesting thing along these lines - I remember in the book "Masters of Doom" they're describing the early days of FPS development and how people would frequently get very nautious and grab the trash can by their desk to vomit.

You never hear about that anymore. What is that? Better screens? Playing games when you're a kid? Whatever is at work there, seems like it might apply to vr too.

I thought the same when i first tried the first CV1 version of the oculus. The latest Quest however does not cause sickness, at least not when the scene is not moving, and even when the scene is moving, it's small. That's good enough for me, since i can enjoy VR without moving as well. I actually agree with you, i think most of the uses of VR will not be in gaming and won't involve dizzying videos.

I also noticed real-world-dizziness, i.e. it takes some time to adapt to the real world's visual flow after extended use.

VR, like many things, can take some getting used to. But because the experience is so amazing a lot of people are willing to build up their VR tolerance.

Try a different experience. One where you are “static” and everything else is moving around you. Things like beat saber, table tennis etc. never make me sick. Roller coasters, driving, flying games and even ones where you are just walking around are really tough

> build up their VR tolerance

Yeah, makes sense. But also is surprising: DVDs, video games, smart phones and other technologies with historically fast adoption did not require their users to brave physical discomfort to build up a tolerance.

But that’s because they’re not convincing your brain that you’re somewhere else doing things that your body isn’t actually doing.

I also have this issue.

What's helped me is a combo of the following:

- Start with games or experiences less likely to trigger it. This means ability to run at high frame rates, 6dof, and ideally optimized for a seated experience in a cockpit. Your body expects the world to move around you when you're in a cockpit or car.

- If doing PCVR make sure your system is beefy enough. Elite: Dangerous is just barely playable on low settings with my potato gtx 970M. And that's with low frame rates that can cause discomfort, and some situations like in stations where I max my card out and it starts doing a seizure inducing level of flickering and jumping of frames.

- Munch on some ginger root or drink ginger tea or chew ginger gum.

- Open a window and have a fan blowing at you.

- End your session the moment you feel nauseous. Do not power through. Over time you'll be able to go longer and longer but training your body is not instantaneous.

> End your session the moment you feel nauseous.

Yeah, did that, with prejudice.

Tore off the headset and not planning on trying again. I did have a lingering disappointment to not be able to see the museum content that others could see, though.

VR is not important to me, not planning on building a tolerance for it.

Locomotion is a hard problem to solve, I can't find the source but a study in 2018 found that about 18% of people feel nauseous in VR. The headsets have improved significantly since then and there are many tricks a vr dev can use to make the VR experience less nauseating such as vignetting on move. There's a really good resource here https://locomotionvault.github.io/ that lists different approaches.

On a more comical note, some devs go out of their way to show that motion sickness isn't a problem for their game: https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/lrj1dy/motion_...

Read the story about Oculus (I think it’s called “The History of the Future”). I seem to recall older headsets cause sickness for many people because the refresh rate isn’t quick enough on the displays. Newer Oculus headsets address this apparently.

I used to get virtual narcosis (it’s a term from Wired magazine many years ago) bad. There used to be a VR game at the top of Stratosphere in LV many years ago. I played that game, took the headset off, and had the worse case of virtual narcosis in the rotunda. Not a good experience.

This was a big issue when the likes of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom came out (in fact, one of id's own staff members would regularly have to lie down on the floor to catch his bearings after a burst of play). I think it's just a case of a new immersive technology coming out, and people getting used to it. As someone else said, if the problem is less so for young people, then generationally it will become less of an issue as time goes on.

In my experience, it really depends. I cannot play some games because of the motion sickness, while I'm totally find in some others.

You have different solutions to reduce the sickness. For example teleportation or reducing the field of view when moving. Showing a virtual nose helps too. Common object that are not scaled properly or having unrealistic colours increase motion sickness too.

Now if you are subject of extreme motion sickness in VR, VR is probably not for you. But a lot of people are fine and love VR.

You haven't mentioned what headset you're using. This has become less of an issue with headsets like quest 2.

Most people get used to it rather quickly, given they are using state of the art gear, like the Valve Index.

I used to get motion sick after ~ 30 minutes. Nowadays, it rarely happens anymore. Moving around with the stick, jumping, dropping from ledges is fine.

Slightly Off -Topic.

Are you latency sensitive, do you often feel when your computer / web page reaction time sometimes being unstable and causes mild frustration?

Do you feel frustrated with Jank or micro-pauses within Apps?

Do you play FPS Games?

what kind of headset are you using? try fixing the lens in a position that fits your head and make sure it's strapped well. confirm your refresh rate matches the game you're playing.

I really urge to not play games like Wolfenstein VR for this reason. I have seen people continuously accusing everyone that they see to be a triple SS agent or an outright Twitter bot since it has blurred the signs of reality and the video game.

Most people who play this game often suffer from this special form of VR sickness. /s

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