Cybersickness Could Spell an Early Death for the Metaverse
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
Honestly bewildering to see Meta push Zuckerberg as the main PR person for the metaverse, do they honestly not know Zuck is extremely uncharismatic and universally hated these days? Or is it simply a "can't say no to the boss" situation?
They should have just used Instagram/Whatsapp's branding, get celebrities/influencers for PR, ensure Zuck is never seen anywhere close to a VR headset and it could have been a success. Like this, it's doomed to be another Google Glass, even if it might be cool in theory/practice, no one wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. By associating it with Zuck, they ensured it'll get pooed on for easy Twitter dunks regardless of how good/bad it actually is.
Most people are just sharing random photos from their family and buying things on marketplace.
Facebook’s huge mistake was bringing in ‘news’ to drive engagement on top of family pictures during elections.
If they learn from this mistake, most people will slowly forget. It might be like how there are still people mad at MS for what they did in the 90s, but most people don’t care and are just using office stuff.
Anecdotally, very few of my friends share original content on FB anymore. It all goes on Instagram or Twitter.
You don’t need to turn off the general public. You need to turn off early adopters, whose excitement and advocacy you need to cross the chasm to the general public.
> MS for what they did in the 90s
The difference between Meta and MS is that Office was already universally used (or dominant) and essential to business when the public started griping about Gates. Meta makes a VR product no one needs (yet? Ever?) and has essentially no adoption.
Lots of those PR problems wouldn't even happen with better leadership. The requirement for Facebook accounts on Quest2 for example not only caused tons of problems, both practically and in terms of PR, it was also completely unnecessary, as Quest2 didn't have any Facebook specific features worth talking about. And now it's all getting rolled back to how it was before anyway.
So many of the problems that Meta is facing wouldn't even exist when they didn't create them in the first place.
Oh my sweet summer child, no. The technology is the table stakes. PR/marketing/branding to win the hearts and minds of the public to drive development to maintain the engagement of the public is key. See Blackberry.
Trying to win the hearts and the minds of the public with Zuck at the helm is an uphill battle to say the least. Have they put out any new product that the public has been excited about since they got to know what a psychopath Zuck is? No. They’ve simply bought Instagram (one of the best acquisitions in history) and WhatsApp (not sure this is driving much $$).
Time for investors to recognize that Zuck was a one hit wonder (albeit, quite the hit) but that he lacks any vision for a future that humanity actually wants to participate in.
A crisis shows a leader’s true colors, and Zuck has shown himself to be a visionless bully. It won’t happen, but the best thing for that company would be for him to step down as CEO in favor of someone more capable.
This has been true since the days of timesharing and BBS culture in the 70's / 80's and people will always have a natural affinity for that. If Meta abdicates that space, other things would fill its place. But I don't think we can go back to the era of thriving subcultures, the charm of novel connection, that we had in the 90's, so much has changed since then.
If aliens have the same evolution, Facebook would have just be called something else.
This his idiotic plan to pivot fb into the future because after WhatsApp and Instagram suddenly TikTok came.
And if you believe in a future with VR and in the one platform paradigm than this investment is worth a lot but it's in my opinion a very big gamble while suck believe in it's being a smaller gamble.
/shrug imagine suck actually believing in something worthwhile he actually could have used this by making a real working social media platform or start doing something for people like planting trees...
I'd be completely fine with a Zuckerberg-less VR market that took 5x longer to reach mass market appeal. I think it's good to build the tech quietly, only extend it into areas where it makes sense with each advancement, and not try to shove My First Multiplayer Unity Project out on everyone like they've done with Horizons.
The whole experience is based on a precise bespoke VR app. There is no information about it, or the used headset. To be fair that info might be available in the paper, but that's still bespoke app we can't know the quality of.
This quote makes me doubt even more:
> “If my iPhone doesn’t load a page instantly, I might grumble about it, but that’s the end of it,” Ringgenberg told The Daily Beast. “If my VR app stutters on me, I might physically get sick. That does keep people away from this technology.”
This is perfectly true! When it happens on my oculus quest 2, I immediately feel dizzy. BUT I can count the number of times it happened to me over a hundred hours of play on my fingers. (Notably I can reproduce one IO related freeze in Synthriderz' Lindsey Stirling Experience)
Also, this article doesn't mention brain rewiring: if we hand over modern smartphones to the average 2002 computer person, they would have no idea how to use it "where's the cursor", " how do I move windows", "why is my screen getting junk on its top without my will", " why isn't there a button to switch programs"? We just upgraded our brains to handle that. Same could happen with VR.
I'm definitely not a metaverse advocate, I still fail to see it immersive enough and cheap enough to work, and it requires a huge shift back to actually giving attention (which is ironic considering Facebook killed that attention). But I think the Oculus Quest 2 is an excellent game console (which implies it is not for everyone and that's fine)
Good point, I hadn't thought about it this way. Will people prefer fake living in the Bahamas over watching other people really living in the Bahamas? It's an interesting question.
It'll also require actual interaction without displaying your physical appearance, which Instagram, TikTok and Snap seem to have killed.
I do like the idea of digital gatherings though. Being able to chill and interact with a distant family member like they're right next to you is pretty cool.
This of course is also one of the reasons that I wouldn't want it for most business settings. I either don't need immersion that goes beyond video or even just audio for most conversations. Or I actively want to just be partially engaged--most big meetings I'm in.
The whole thing is unnecessary and dystopian to the max.
It doesn't seem to happen with sea sickness. I know people who've been sailing for 20+ years and they still feel a bit crap the 24 hours at sea.
My guess is that people will prefer to avoid a chance of feeling cybersick when they can just use some other form of entertainment / display that is guaranteed not to cause any sickness, even if the device is superior when it works without side effects.
You might have to go back to the early 90s for that, we had PocketPC and Palm and Symbian in the 00's... The change since 2002 has been incremental, I think 2002 me would find today's Android similar but faster and simpler - and today's iOS equally as confusing as 2022 me finds it.
I think VR is still in the PocketPC stage, where early adopters think it's great but most people don't need it or want it, it's expensive and/or clunky. It might catch on in 20 years when someone has another go with much better tech.
I owned a Psion 3, then 5, then Palm IIIxe, then a Dell Axim and then the first smartphones came out. First Symbian which was basically Psion, then iPhone and then Android.
I've never not had a smart device ever since the first. And while they have improved a lot some great features were lost (for example the Psion was much better to type an email on than a smartphone).
But my point is: it doesn't have to be perfect yet to be adding value. If it's not for everyone yet it doesn't mean it's a useless flop.
I agree with you that new tech can be good even if only a few people ever buy/use it, however I get the impression that Meta is investing billions in this VR stuff and are targeting "everyone"
Someone never did VR boxing at the Trocadero in London in the early 2000s.
the whole article starts with the point that people get motion sickness, and yet people still go on cruises and people drive cars, some people have to take medicine, but it did not stop the technology.
if there is real need for VR, it might be that those who get sick, will just be outcasts, if there is no real need, I dont think it matters if people get sick or
You mean, downgraded.
Those are not remotely comparable.
Indeed. PCVR has a bit less attention to it, the Quest experiences are very polished.
As one oarticular example, once X-Plane 11 starts loading it freezes the "loading hangar" you're looking at, and when you move your head it stays in the same place, making it 'feel' like it's moving in the opposite direction instead. It is extremely sickening and vertigo-inducing. I really have to close my eyes or jump to the SteamVR UI when that happens. Really, a developer should really avoid this at all costs. Just jumping to a black loading screen would have fixed it and it feels very lazy at the expense of the user.
It's a shame because X-Plane is otherwise much better than Microsoft Flight Simulator in its VR support. The "Ergonomic Yoke" is amazing and the buttons are much more responsive than in MSFS which made a really half-hearted attempt to support VR controllers.
But again, the native Quest experiences in the store are very well curated to avoid this.
That was to me the major pb with VR adoption, i'm really amazed people don't mention it more anytime Meta is discussed.
For games without smooth locomotion, VR sickness usually isn't a problem unless it's a crap game that stutters or has other problems.
Honestly, this sort of game is probably a worst-case scenario for motion sickness. Like most FPS games, it's designed around unrealistically fast player movement, which is a recipe for nausea -- and the janky physics and low-resolution models and textures of a nearly 20-year-old game don't help, either.
Where VR still has issues with motion sickness is whenever you move away from that stationary experience. Most normal games want you to run around, dodge, jump, etc. That doesn't translate well for VR and that's where the motion sickness comes in. When the visuals move around, but your body does not, that creates a disconnect and motion sickness. Games playing on a TV can get away with it, since the TV is only a small rectangle in your field of view, but VR is all encompassing, so that doesn't work that well.
There is a good chance that will never be fully solved, but that's not a VR specific problem, but a problem that the real world has just the same, boats and cars still make lots of people sick. The solution is to simply not play those games that require more motion than you can take. And for getting around without visual motion, we already have teleport locomotion in VR, that just zaps you right to where you want to go without having to slowly travel there.
Oh really? I have a couple friends who didn't get the memo, apparently.
Back in Oculus DK1 days that was still a serious problem still (3DOF, 60Hz), but once we got the Rift that pretty much disappeared.
The wrong games will of course still make people sick, but so will a roller coaster in the real world. That's a game design issue at that point, not a hardware limitation.
That said, yeah, there's gonna be a motion sick crowd, it's gonna be notably large, and membership at the moment is effectively random (having done a sport with seasickness, sailing, you'd be surprised who is susceptible to motion sickness despite doing the thing _all the time_).
VR is gonna be a tough sell to the masses until this is sorted out more, is my rather non-informed opinion. Complete physical disorientation isn't something that happens often day-to-day.
Yes, the characters are cartoony, though they both have a way to make a pretty decent avatar from a mugshot (not cartoony - it's photobased but pretty lowres, pretty nice though considered it's based on only 1 photo).
But having an actual meeting in VR the cartoonism fades away quickly as you start actually collaborating. Being able to see people move and point helps a lot, and if you're speaking about manufactured products you can show them in 3D, move them around etc.
After 2 hours taking the headset off it feels weird suddenly finding myself at home. It really feels like I was somewhere else with others. This feeling is hard to convey to someone who has never tried it. All they see is a picture with some cartoony characters.
I really think this tech will be instrumental in improving interaction in online meetings, and also reducing reliance on intercontinental travel for real meetings (which really needs to happen for climate reasons). It doesn't feel as exhausting as a Teams meeting where you just have a mosaic of bored faces that nobody actually looks at.
And that's with the tech in this state of infancy. It's pretty promising already as it is. I'm not surprised Meta but also Microsoft are betting on this.
> VR is gonna be a tough sell to the masses until this is sorted out more, is my rather non-informed opinion. Complete physical disorientation isn't something that happens often day-to-day.
You're contradicting yourself. Clearly having a small measure of discomfort is not enough to dissuade people from using the technology. Otherwise they'd never have continued sailing.
I think this is the major factor of why this will be a business failure for Meta. Failure in the sense that this product is not for the masses like a social media "product".
3D TV's were supposed to be the next big thing and never took off. People don't like wearing this type of thing on their head for long periods of time. Then there are huge numbers of people that will get motion sickness, feel disoriented, have vision issues and other physical reasons they won't want to or can't use VR.
Maybe its a generational thing? Okay, is the business plan then to wait 20 years? If this VR product and push doesn't get across the early adopter chasm [0] in the next 1-2 years its not going to happen for mainstream.
It would be cheaper to talk with Epic and have them create a private Fortnite match assuming proximity audio can be done (remove the gaming shooting physics part of network traffic and I bet audio would be good enough). Let employees outfit their avatars with a bunch of business related "skins" and let them create meeting spaces using the existing fortnite build system. If you remove the shooter/death/gaming aspects and put in some lightweight meeting types of things like virtual whiteboards you accomplish the same goal - 100 people in a "meeting space".
Most of the time, meeting in VR is best done in smaller groups where participation in the conversation can flow naturally. This is where the ability to easily transition from offline work to full VR immersion comes in. This is far from a solved problem and as the recent Quest Pro release has shown it is being actively worked on by Meta. Their vision appears to be a headset that you can wear all day with the benefit of having virtual monitors to work on and an instant transition to meeting with others in VR. I have yet to see text rendered through a Quest Pro but from the specs my guess is that they aren't there yet, it may be passable but it probably isn't very comfortable for text heavy uses. They're pushing hard in this direction though. Other VR hardware companies should take note!
Using Unreal Engine (Fortnight is built using it) is a great idea. There are a few social VR apps out there using it and it is far superior to the Unity based apps in my experience. It is a more mature engine overall.
Looking back now, I had impacted earwax the whole time I was there, which was also affecting my sense of balance and causing a lot of discomfort...
90% of people have no problem at all.
The last 9% of people will feel a mild dizziness. If they take it slow, don't spend more than 15 minutes in their first time, and ramp up usage, they'll be fine.
And mostly, this isn't a VR problem. The hardware and OS-level features have eliminated large swaths of the causes of sim sickness. The one they can't solve is application design.
The thing that causes sim sickness in people today is artificial locomotion, moving the virtual view without moving the physical body. Moving users without user input, or accelerated linear movement from joystick input. And the article calls out that the test app used joystick movement. This is well known in the industry to cause issues for a large number of people. Yet the author lets the researcher claim "our environment doesn't do anything to cause [simsickness]" without pushback.
Not that I'm a fan of Meta. I'm just also not a fan of articles like this.
That sounds about right from my anecdata. I enjoy VR, but I have to treat it like drinking: I know it'll make me feel crappy afterwards.
The commonly called "smooth locomotion" method, aka moving in VR with a joystick like we do in 2d games is the worst to get used to. Natural locomotion (walking in reality to walk in VR) or teleportation does not get people so sick so fast.
The worst is when you're facelocked into motion, linear path interpolation into a hard stop without any other cues, that's never pleasant.
I suspect height dislocations could be odd for some people, and certainly disregarding scale.
These are all forms of lack of detail in environments.
Trying to manage the "guardian" is likely another source of complication, once you ram your hand into a doorknob, suddenly you have to manage two worlds, a complicated spinning mess, and a real world that can hurt you, that's disorienting. I would say their model of sensitivity needs to know how you're playing the game.
I've driven HL2's "Water Hazard" in full, played VR zero-G 6DOF disc soccer, been dropped down an elevator shaft, none of that batted an eyebrow -- even standing up. (well more than the sickness one would deal with sprinting to end a zombie apocalypse, fun sick)
Isn't this the part where we're all supposed to jump up and down and shout "walled garden!" and "monopoly!" so we can pretend to be all HN counter-culture?
I think that crowd only comes around when FAANG unleashes cyberhornets to meet quarterly targets, not when a player pledges on a (presumably serious) seismic shift.
I wonder if there are any classes of attack that only become possible using VR? that is, some combination of visual/audio/kinaesthetic inputs that do not occur in the natural world and that would harm a human brain more than a normal induced seizure attack, or affect people who would not normally be susceptible.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-assault-epilepsy-patie...
Plenty. All you have to do is let the system slowly drift. Humans aren't very good at keeping track of their orientation and position without visual or tactile reference, so you can basically remote control the human wearing VR.
You can move them closer to a wall and than the game can instruct them to punch, broken bones will be the results. Happens plenty of times already simply because people aren't careful enough with setting up the playspace for enough away from obstacles.
If you would slowly tilt the VR playspace people would start falling over. Again, happens plenty of times already, even without overly malicious games, just having the game world accelerate (e.g. virtual rollercoaster) will throw people out of balance.
For a real world example, see "Richie's Plank Experience", which is famous for causing numerous injuries. The game isn't doing anything too special or trying to be malicious (walk over a virtual plank hanging out of a skyscraper), but due to being targeted at VR first-timers as well as encouraging moving around in the real world, you end up with people jumping head first into TVs.
All VR system on the market right now do allow you to setup a dedicated play area, that will automatically show and alert you when leaving it. Games can't override that by normal means, but a malicious game would probably not have that hard of a time to work around that.
VR is best enjoyed sitting, in cockpit games like racing and flying, that's where VR really shines.
VR is the reason which got me completely hooked to simracing, which I just couldn't enjoy enough doing on a monitor. I did experience some sickness, but it was very brief. Driving in reverse took me some more time to get used to, but eventually all motion sickness dissapeared.
I think it's just different for everyone, just like with regular games everyone has their preferred genres.
It might not be natural, but it's essentially a super power. No need to walk where you want to be, you just point & zap over there instantly. If you play around with it for a while, you start missing that ability in the real world.
Now in multiplayer it does get a bit awkward, as other people zapping around does not look natural. Meanwhile introducing a delay into the teleport such that the avatar can play a walk animation feels really unnatural for the teleporting person (VRChat has that option).
But that said, I don't really consider it an issue for the social experiences Meta is aiming for, as those social experience aren't happening while zooming around at 50mph, they happen while sitting at a table or a couch. A lot of VRChat social interaction happens with people sitting in front of a mirror, locomotion isn't really that big of a deal there and can largely be done via roomscale movement in the real world.
It feels like being near a bush of razor blades, and if I have to walk through it, especially with polygons clipping near my face, it feels unpleasantly like close to being cut. I can ignore the feeling but it's quite unpleasant.
I don't get that (much) when looking at the same thing on a screen. Only when it's through a headset.
This assumes people can properly focus at short range, or that graphics tricks can “fix” the problems of the astigmatic or far-sighted.
Here's a suggested solution: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/06/29/the-regurgista...
I naively think that the fact that the user actually (mostly) see the surroundings would make a difference in this regard.
The body balances by using the contours of objects seen through the eyes mixed with sensory input of the balancing nerve and touch.
So to much overlay might make you sick as well I think.
If you cover up things, not work together with the real word view (including moving, adapting to how the user move the head and match the balance input), you basically would have crappy VR.