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Comment by SLHamlet | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if they asked Iowa State University researchers about their NSF-funded study that VR makes women and girls twice as likely to get sick, because Meta sure didn't.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/04/vr-nausea-study-iowa-nsf.h...

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If the industry as a whole actually cared about motion sickness, we wouldn't be seeing every other game be an FPS with stick movement.

It's frustrating because the two common methods for reducing motion sickness shouldn't be hard to implement, even for lazy console FPS ports. Tunneling while the user turns, and teleportation controls. All VR games should have those accessibility options. A stable +90FPS framerate and the highest fidelity VR equipment also helps.

Granted, these are still not a silver bullet for motion sickness. A lot more research needs to be done in this field.

There's research that the difference happens at the hormonal level, i.e. it's probably not fixable on a certain level.

It's mind-boggling that the industry just generally isn't interested in looking into this. I asked five top ex-Meta folks about this for my book and they shrugged or didn't answer. You can't say VR is the Next Big Thing if it tends to make half the population literally want to spew chunks.

But what response were you expecting? Plenty of men face suffer from VR motion sickness too. It's not like privileged class is marking and closing the ticket as "not reproducing".

Is it half the population? Do a third of men and two thirds of women suffer motion sickness from VR?

If so, what kind of solutions do you imagine would be in order? The only things I can think of would be improvements to optics, resolution, frame rate, reduction of latency, better motion tracking, maybe reduce headset weight... which seem like the kinds of improvements that this company is working towards?

It's not just better hardware, though. As I mentioned, two very easy solutions to help alleviate motion sickness are purely software based. If you're just going purely hardware, we already know that 90FPS is a bare minimum to keep people from puking, along with controls that have you teleport to a spot instead of jerking forwards with your analog stick.

And having the most high fidelity headset you can get. But its improvements are marginal at best compared to what really needs to be done to figure out motion sickness if you want it to actually catch on.

I get zero motion sickness and I play exactly that, FPS with stick movement.

Very early on I realized that turning with the stick gives me nausea, but not moving back and forth. So I use the stick to move back and forth, and my own human body to rotate. Can play for hours with zero issues.

I don't understand why this is news. The researchers freely admit they don't know the causes either (see speculation below), and frankly Meta's probably in a better position than them to collect additional data. They won't be unbiased, but they're certainly motivated to make their product be useful for as many people as possible.

> As for Danah Boyd’s speculation that the gender difference in VR nausea may have a hormonal component, he says there’s not enough data to answer that question, but there are some intriguing findings:

> “I do not know of any good studies on cybersickness and hormones,” as he puts it. “There has been some research on motion sickness and hormones, and sometimes we extrapolate (cautiously) from the motion sickness literature to cybersickness. For example, Golding, Kadzere, and Gresty (2005) reported that motion sickness is related to hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle. However, they also note that the effect of hormonal fluctuations was much smaller than the gender effect itself, so it is not likely to be the primary explanation.”

> He believes any gender difference might be related to social differences, and less central to the overall challenge of overcoming VR nausea:

> “[S]ome of my research on the gender effect indicates that 1) the effect is relatively small, and 2) the effect is partially explained by differences in prior experience of visually-induced sickness (e.g., screen-based games, movies). It's certainly a topic worth investigating, but it's worth a reminder that there are vast individual differences in cybersickness susceptibility even within a given gender.”

The word motion before sick is important.

People don’t get sick for real

These headsets can absolutely cause prolonged periods of nausea. People don't get diseased, but they can get sick.

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