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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

I do find that comfort issues (i.e., nausea) make it hard to port non-VR games to VR. Movement just has to be a lot different in VR to avoid the nausea, either more focused on teleporting or changing the basic structure of the game so that the player is still or confined to a small location and the world moves around the player.

I let my kid play a pretty simple game on the Quest that had regular joystick motion and an hour later she was sick and threw up. The effects of VR can be surprisingly delayed and non-obvious.

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Not everyone gets nauseous or motion sick from VR. I think it's okay if some VR games are designed around joysticks, as long as teleport mode is still an option.

I remember in the early 90's people similarly would develop motion sickness from the FPSs of the day, such as Doom and Quake.

Different games affected me differently, when I was 13 I could play Goldeneye 4 player on the N64 for hours with my friends but the Turok multiplayer focused game I could only handle 30mins before I would get nausea. I grew up playing Doom and Quake on PC without issues. Some games still make me sick, Dark souls 1 I have no issues with but Dark souls 2 is unplayable for me. Also I can play Rocket League for hours and feel perfectly fine. The source engine in VR was the worst experience for me and now when ever I see half life 2 in motion it makes me sick.

It’s quite varied and I would like to figure out what the common denominator in all of this that triggers my nausea response.

I used not to belong to this group, but shortly after my son was born, I started to get motion sickness from a few different things, including some old games (e.g. Shadow Warrior)

Perhaps due to hormonal changes?

Does the version matter? E.g., same response with 360 DS2 VS. PS4 or Xbox One? It might be consistency of framerate or FOV.

I haven’t tried on recent consoles so all my current gaming experience is on PC. I have played Rocket League at both sub 60fps and 200+fps and with narrow and wide fov and it didn’t change anything for me so I don’t know if it’s that.

I am one of those people! I got over it once during the Doom era, then a second time during the Counterstrike era. I keep trying to get used to it a third time but it hasn't worked.

I don't know whether the games changed rendering in some way, or my monitor is too big, or it's just age.

I couldn't play Wolfenstein without getting nauseous, but for some reason doom was fine. I think ut is ok to release a video game that some people can't enjoy. We don't forbid flashing lights, and that can send some people into actual seizures!

I still get motion sick after a while when watching someone else play an FPS. If I'm playing myself there is no problem. I can also get motion sick as a passenger in a car, but have no issue driving.

This is still a thing. My partner can't play Skyrim in first-person mode, only in third-person mode, because of motion sickness.

Doom on SNES was instant motion sickness for me. Thankfully I only rented it from blockbuster!

The Meta Quest store has comfort ratings for all games, indicating the likelihood of motion sickness. Children are particularly prone to motion sickness in VR, partly because their proprioception is less developed and also because they often have narrower IPDs than the headset minimum.

There are a variety of tricks that help a great deal when using joystick-based movement controls; while they don't work for everyone, they can work for a good majority of users when implemented well. There's the obvious stuff like being absolutely fanatical about controlling motion-to-photon latency and avoiding violent and uncontrolled camera movement, but there are a variety of less-obvious stuff like using vignetting to reduce the FoV during motion and making all acceleration instantaneous.

I'm occasionally prone to motion sickness when playing some flat-screen games, but I've had no issues with games like Onward and Ancient Dungeon on the Quest.

The current VR mod defaults to teleport mechanics. Most people can become tolerant to camera motion over time.

When I worked with people who had been writing code for VR for a long time a large portion of them didn't use VR much because of nausea issues. I don't think tolerance is as easy to achieve as people think, and can get worse over time instead of better.

I think some people become tolerant of a mild unpleasantness. But just as many people end up finding the entire experience unpleasant for reasons that aren't obvious to them (but I suspect are related to nausea), leading to VR's very poor retention.

Many people even get nausea from playing non-VR first person shooters, or things like too much screen shake. Nowadays most games have a slider to increase the field of view, which decreases nausea, but for a long time it simply wasn't known that this is an issue. There are some problems which people don't tend to complain about, they just avoid products which cause those issues, apparently "for reasons that aren't obvious to them".

I’d note the experience is not dissimilar to motion sickness, which despite being present in some humans, hasn’t stopped us from using cars or boats. Use of cars and boats allows people to become adapted to the experience through the amazing plasticity of the human brain.

Now, the use cases for cars and boats might be more compelling for sure, and maybe for those that experience this discomfort its benefits don’t outweigh the unpleasantness of the adaptive period, but I’d note motion sickness isn’t universal, and for smaller motions like automobiles (probably more similar to VR than boats which are an extreme), not even that common.

Figure skating is evidence that one can "train" one's vestibular system to ignore the mixed signals.

Now that I think of it, an anti-nausea VR training program would be excellent to treat motion sickness.

Is it? There are not that many figure skaters in the grand scheme of things. I’d assume there’s some element of self-selection going on along with the training.

Figure skating doesn't induce mixed signals I believe. The mixed signals from VR presumably come from the inner ear accelerometer giving different signals than the visual system.

in my experience most people need to use VR intermittently for about 2 weeks to fully adjust

i really struggled with vr initially but having used my quest 1 since pre pandemic it's fine and no longer have issues when using it for an hour or two

I don't know if you know this but kids throw up for many reasons besides VR nausea. Are you sure she didn't throw up for some other reason?

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