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Comment by adamesque | Hacker News Reader

I got a chance to play with an Oculus dev kit for 15-20 minutes over the holidays, and almost everyone who tried it walked away with some pretty gnarly nausea (experienced gamers and newcomers alike). I'm excited to see so many of the updates in the new prototype focused around alleviating this discomfort.

It's probably telling that they're couching the updates in language that addresses this, rather than just touting the technical accomplishments.

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The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"

The bad news is that while better tech and better design can significantly reduce motion sickness, I doubt we will ever completely eliminate it.

The really bad news is that nausea is funny. It's great for catchy headlines and quippy comments. I'm really afraid that the Rift will get a reputation as a "vomit helmet" and that will lead the masses to dismiss it. That would be a tragedy.

It's really important PR for VR to get the word out: If you feel sick, stop. Don't try to push through, you'll make it really bad. Try again much later. With practice, it will get better and better. When you get over VR sickness, all kinds of awesomeness awaits!

That's a really good point. I hope their PR teamis thinking of stiff like that. The media does seem to catch onto ideas like that all too easily.

He'll I'd be willin to throw up a few times considering the promise the rift shows for the future of gaming.

> The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"

I think this is might be correct, I remember getting motion sickness from playing Doom on a big monitor the first time. And several years later I was playing a lot of FPS games with no ill effects at all.

But it takes a person with strong willpower to practice! I got pretty bad motion sickness from the Rift, and it left me completely incapacitated for hours afterwards. Not only did I feel like puking but I couldn't do any work because my eyes couldn't focus on "2d" text on a monitor (we have a Rift devkit at the office, I made the mistake of using it in the middle of the day).

And I'm not a person with particularly bad motion sickness problems. There are sensitive people who will definitely not touch any VR helmet after the first time they've tried it and become sick for the rest of the day.

There will have to be improvements to the Rift hardware itself, the driver and peripheral software and the games that support it. And more games will have to be concerned about the physical correctness of movement, because it seems to be a factor in VR sickness.

Here's an interesting "competitor" to Oculus Rift with an alternative approach: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/casta...

Everyone I've shown the Oculus has gotten sick, which is 5 people.

When Wolfenstein 3D first came out people were complaining about puking. I think the hardware updates, game design updates, combined with learned use will mostly solve the motion sickness issues. Hell I get sick from cars if I haven't ridden in traffic in a few weeks.

I used to have a housemate who would come in and watch me play Doom clones, seated behind my shoulder - she would get motion sickness even sitting that far away (in the 15" CRT days)

Doom never made me motion sick, but I could only play Hexen for about 10 minutes at a time, and I never get motion sick when not playing a game (been reading in the car on long car trips since I was about 6).

I think it's something with the perspective being off in Hexen (and some other games) which makes you sick if you watch the player turning.

I can't watch other people playing Xbox games like CoD it makes me feel sick, the motion is just too much for me to handle.

If I don't play for a few days I feel the same way when I am playing but I can power though that in about half an hour.

No surprise though since my flying career ended early when I couldn't hold my lunch, a (bumpy) hot humid day too much to eat and being nervous didn't end well.

I've had the dev kit for a few months now. My experience has been that it depends highly on the type of demo played. Most people seem to have a lot of difficulty with first person shooters, but fare much better with flight sims. Lunar Flight (http://www.shovsoft.com/) is my favorite so far.

I think everyone's vestibular system is sensitive in different ways. But FPSs in the rift generally feel very "wrong" (not sure how else to describe it), when moving using a controller. Especially when strafing - it produces a sensory response similar to a feeling of drunk stumbling. But in a flight or driving sim, the same kind of movements feel much less wrong, even to the same people. Maybe because similar movement in the real world are also performed via control inputs, and our minds understand that?

I think there are some interesting questions there. In the coming years, an entertainment concept as vague as "immersion" might actually have tangible metrics associated with it, since its exactly that kind of understanding that will be needed to overcome this "VR sickness"

> I think everyone's vestibular system is sensitive in different ways. But FPSs in the rift generally feel very "wrong" (not sure how else to describe it), when moving using a controller. Especially when strafing - it produces a sensory response similar to a feeling of drunk stumbling. But in a flight or driving sim, the same kind of movements feel much less wrong, even to the same people. Maybe because similar movement in the real world are also performed via control inputs, and our minds understand that?

I think that this is a very interesting phenomenon, a physical "uncanny valley" of unnatural movements causing VR sickness. Strafing is definitely something that doesn't occur in real life, there's no way you can move directly sideways at regular walking/running speed. If VR ever becomes popular with FPS games, the genre will have to change or the audience will be limited to people immune to VR sickness.

Another interesting case was one of the Rift demos where you travel on zip lines. The physics of this demo were so incorrect that it made me nauseous. My body was expecting a rapid acceleration downwards but instead the movement on the zip lines was roughly constant velocity.

I would welcome more realistic physics to games even if it weren't for motion sickness. Hollywood physics aren't very interesting gameplay wise although it is visually stunning.

I also got horrible motion sickness from flying in a flight simulator with the Rift dev kit. I have flown a lot of flight simulators but doing so with the rift made me feel awful. I think that improved resolution might help here, the resolution was too blurry to make out the instruments on the panel or see the airfield before it was too late to land.

I definitely think that the translation tracking with the external camera will help. I have been using camera based head tracking (TrackIR) in simulator games and it is excellent.

I very much want Oculus Rift to solve the VR sickness problem. If the Rift catches on, in a few years there's no way you'll be able to be competitive in combat flight simulators without one because everyone using a VR solution will enjoy a better situational awareness. So it is going to be a choice between motion sickness (or defeating it) and being a sitting duck waiting to get shot. A head tracker like TrackIR is almost a prerequisite even today.

I can't wait to try the new Rift prototype and the customer version when it comes out and see if they've solved the problem. But I'm not buying one before I can try one out and see if this problem is fixed.

I can't find it (sorry) but there's a pretty amazing interview with Carmack floating around about how he apparently has mostly solved this issue. It really drives home just how much of a genius the guy is.

Edit: this isn't it, but will do the trick http://oculusrift-blog.com/john-carmacks-message-of-latency/...

He's a great programmer, sure, but this is a problem solved by a generation of engineers before him. Google "CAVE VR" to find some demonstrations of immersive VR environments which have been used in production for long periods of time without nausea or vertigo.

Indeed most of the human-factors research in this area has been in figuring out just what minimum features and precision are necessary in the tracking and display equipment and software stack to prevent these known problems. Making Occulus was simply a matter of shrinking the tech small enough to fit comfortably in a self-contained unit.

CAVE is cool, but it's a less immersive experience than HMD VR. With Oculus I feel like I'm in the virtual world, baring a few annoying problems that are resolved in newer prototypes. When I tried CAVE years ago (early 2000s) I felt like I was in a room with video projected on the walls. I haven't used newer versions of CAVE, so the experience could be much better now.

I also think vertigo is a feature, not a bug, but I understand that a lot of people don't see it that way :).

> Making Occulus was simply a matter of shrinking the tech small enough to fit comfortably in a self-contained unit.

And landing on the moon was simply a matter of assembling a vehicle based on decades of previous rocket research. I'm not saying Oculus is comparable, but you're simultaneously belittling someone's work and implying that it's already been finished. When in fact it has been extremely innovative and is very much on-going.

Were they playing anything or just walking around in the demo? I have one and have tested it out with many people. When people get sick it's usually because they've been in one of the less interactive demos just sort of looking around wiggling the mouse etc. The people who I let loose straight onto Half-Life 2 or other games where there is some sort of goal rarely get the same type of nausea. I think this is worth taking into account when people say "it's nausea inducing".

For insta-nausea put someone in the Tuscany demo and move them around while they wear the rift. Hilarity ensues!

We did one demo that was more or less floating above static terrain, and another with Half-Life 2.

My own nausea didn't actually start up until HL2. We were playing on a laptop (probably not enough horsepower), using slightly unfamiliar keyboard & mouse controls. So some movements were very fluid & second-nature to me, while others were jerky and off because of the slightly-off control scheme.

It's possible the most nauseating moment was taking the headset off, actually. Up to that point, my mouse hand had been a pretty accurate proxy for my in-game hand and arm, but taking my hand off the mouse and then ripping the "world" away with that same (now "phantom") hand was deeply disconcerting.

But it's also possible the nausea built up slowly over the course of playing. I'd love to spend more time with it to see if it's something you really can adjust to.

On the subject of movement while wearing a VR headset, it seems to me that most successful games will be those where your character remains seated. Flight simulators, space combat sims, mech games, stuff like that.

For that kind of game, just the Rift and a joystick should provide an amazing experience.

This is where the Omni or a product like it in the future comes into play.

I have the dev kit, and am extremely prone to motion sickness. I haven't had too big a problem with nausea except with a few games.

For me, the only time I really get nausea on it is when you do mouse look at the same time as head look... for example, moving the mouse to look one direction while moving my head.

I find by only doing one of those things at a time, I can really limit the motion sickness.

I showed all my family at christmas (mostly the experience demos where you look around without doing any controls) and no one got sick.

For what it's worth, I tried out a dev kit at the start of December (Half Life 2, spent probably 15 minutes playing) and had no nausea at all. There were a couple of other people trying it out at the same time, and I didn't hear any of them complaining about it.

I don't think I got sick, but had a hard time because of my bad vision, and was fearful of getting eyestrain headaches. I commented to a colleague that the device would benefit from some sort of corrective adjustment of the optics, such as the "diopter" and "pupillary distance" adjustments in a high quality microscope. And apparently a certain fraction of people have limited or no stereo vision. The pupillary distance could be done digitally.

What about nausea pills like the ones you take for sea sickness? Would that perhaps help, until you at least get used to the feeling.

I've tried it along with 20 other people, about 5 minutes each, nobody got sick. Maybe it wasn't a long enough time though.

I've been hearing nothing but stories about i. people getting sick and ii. the rift "completely fooling" people's senses. I had the opportunity to try the dev kit out over the holidays and I was really excited, but after trying a whole bunch of games I was actually kind of disappointed. I understand that it's dev hardware, and it DOES have a ton of potential, but I didn't even have the slightest hint of motion sickness. Maybe that's just my brain. But I also didn't feel like my senses were being fooled. Yes, I could look around and things were 3d-ish, but I really didn't find it immersive. Anyhow, I could see a high res display making a big difference in that department.

I found it really immersive when I wore it while standing up, but when I sat down to actually play the game it got a bit more "I am wearing a very cool headset".

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