To Reduce VR Sickness, Add a Virtual Nose

I too read it as noise. This happens to me very often these days , don't know if it's part of some cognitive decline :P

EDIT: Another such HN headline misreading was when I read "The contribution of Cheese to western civilization" as "The contribution of Chinese to western civilization" .

The mind takes many shortcuts when it reads. It's easy to read "digital nose" as "digital noise" since that's the more common phrase. This is little like how you can read words with their mddile lettres mispacled.

I had the exact same experience, only with one added bonus thought: "OK, so I don't see any noise. Middle of the image... Maybe they consider this weird shape to be noise for some reason? Hmmm, what is it anyway?" :)

I read the title to the the post here on HN. Then I read your comment, every bit of it, *except to the last line, when it finally hit me I was probably misreading the text and it said nose, not noise. This is all on top of me having had the same problem a week or two when this was reported here then. It's crazy how much of reading is whole word pattern recognition using context, and how weird it can get when it fails.

When I was scanning the headlines quickly on the front page I thought it was "noise" at first too - then I noticed the definite particle "a", felt that phrase seemed unusual ("a virtual noise"?) and saw "nose" when I focused.

I wonder if it's partly due to the proportional font... nose and noise look pretty distinct in a monospaced font because of the length difference.

Most of us are seeing the phrase "digital nose" for the first time.

Easy mix-up, everyone read it as "digital noise" and thought to themselves, "grainy screen? noise as in randomness of the input timing? that doesn't sound helpful."

+1 I swear I read it 3 times.

I thought I was alone on that...

Right there with you. ;-)

I stopped playing games about 10 years ago, but thought I would come out of the break to play Portal... I did, and was very saddened to find that I just couldn't play it because it gave me really bad motion sickness and headaches. The nauseating feelings kick in after just 60 seconds of gameplay (and no, not just when going in and out of portals -- even when I'm simply walking around without making portals the headaches come in).

I hope more research is done on this, and some solutions are found, because I really want to finish playing Portal. :)

It could be a FOV (field of view) problem, try upping it to 80-90 degrees. Many games designed for console assume you are 10 ft from a tv, not 2ft from a monitor, so the default to as low as 60 degrees. I know if I don't up it to at least 75 I can't play for long without feeling disoriented, and I know some get headaches.

"The effect became noticeable once frame rates passed a certain level in the early 2000's and after that I was unable to play most FPS games."

This is a little surprising to hear given that it it's usually low frame rates that are associated with motion sickness in VR. Indeed achieving sufficiently high frame rates to minimize motion sickness is currently one of the primary technical challenges of developing VR experiences.

How did you conclude that it was rising frame rates that led you to develop this reaction?

This is a known effect and most games have the ability to put a dot in the middle of the screen for reference. It doesn't work for everyone and for every type of motion sickness. Mine doesn't seem to work with any of these tricks and is at best mitigated slightly via software if its an option and usually its not for most items (disable vsync, increase FOV, turn on reference dot, turn off walking motion bop, turn off blurry transitions, etc). I think we're about the discover that motion sickness is a Hard Problem and lots of proposed solutions will only attack part of the problem domain. We're just not built for visual perception of motion without inner ear activity.

VR will most likely be hampered in a way to not allow motions that cause sickness, until this is all solved (if it ever is). This is going to hurt gaming, but it'll be good for other applications. I think motion sickness is really going to give AR companies a leg up. Projecting game elements into real space could be our only real solution here. I mean, we're about 20 years into the 3D gaming revolution and we still haven't solved this for 2D monitors, let alone headsets that make it a lot worse. Frankly, I'm not sure if the 3D headset revolution is actually going to happen. 2D screens are so convenient and you can remain social and aware of your world while using them. Even with motion sickness fixed, there are still so many liabilities.

Saying VR will be the standard tomorrow for viewing media, games, etc is a bit like saying 20 years ago every theater will be a giant IMAX. Sometimes the added experience isn't worth the hassle and I say that as someone with over 100 games on Steam.

Couldn't you just put a paper cutout hood at the bottom of the screen? Seems like it would serve the same purpose.

I'm on the same boat as you. I feel your pain. The only exception is that in my case only FPS make me motion sickness. Race sims, 3rd person, and such, I can handle them very well...but FPS I can only play for like 15m.

I really want to try VR, but if this motion sickness is not fixed it's gonna be a deal(heart) breaker for me :(

Why not use the third person view? Not for a racing sim like gran turismo or whatever, but it is easily my preferred way for games like gta or nfs

...based on the position of where it is in your field of view, the digitally rendered nose might not need artificial blur.

When you view it with a head-mounted display, your eyes might just see it as blurry anyway...

The nose would be blurry as the lenses make everything in that area of the screen blurry (at least on the DK2).

A Chinese friend once told me she can't see her own nose. And the thought of us whites constantly having our nose in our field of view was funny to her.

Your real nose always covers some part of your visual field, still it doesn't bother you, because your brain removes certain stimuli that persist over a long period of time.

Perhaps one could gradually dissolve the nose over the first X hours of playing without causing sickness.

Don't be tricked by that "area". I admit I haven't tried it but, from my experience with the Oculus, you will barely able to see that nose (unless you actually try to look at it, like you would in real life). That area is mainly in the peripheral vision.

I agree with you. The impact of these findings is greatly overstated by the headline, and you make an excellent suggestion regarding a competing explanation about why it might help.

Next study: repeat the study using a "nose" in the outside, or of varying sizes, and see if it helps.

This research is interesting, but it's not front-page interesting.

Lucky you!

I play games where using a VR headset is a competitive advantage. Racing sims and flight simulation, combat and aviation. I get quite bad motion sickness from VR (DK1, DK2, both are bad), so I know that within a few years I have no chance of making it in any online multiplayer games.

Funnily enough, the first sensations of motion sickness in a flight simulator have a resemblance to what I feel when I go flying in a small aircraft. However, in real life, I get used to it, VR just keeps on getting worse and worse.

What makes it worse is that once you stop playing, the VR-induced motion sickness doesn't stop. It goes on for hours, bad balance and mild nausea. It gets worse if the lenses in the Rift are a bit off (they must be adjusted for every person), that leaves me incapable of reading or writing for the rest of the day.

So yes - it's really that big of a problem. If a 30 minute gaming session leaves a significant portion of the customers incapacitated for hours afterwards, there's no way you can call it a product and put it on the shelves.

BTW, I have high hopes for a competing product in development, the CastAR head mounted projector. It doesn't block your view of the real world so it might not cause as bad motion sickness. That also makes it viable for more serious flight simulation where the Oculus is useless because you can't see the flight controls (ie. your hands on the gaming controllers).

http://castar.com/

To not experience any VR sickness with the state of today's technology, you must either be using exclusively the tame applications of the technology -- such as garden walk, home tour, etc, and not trying out any FPS games like TF2 or something -- or you have something biologically off about your linkage between your natural balance sensors and how your brain tries to correlate them with what your eyes see.

Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)

I got a DK2 when it first came out. When I tried a rollercoaster, I felt a little off but ok. Over the next few weeks I noticed slight nausea with the Zelda demo, Tuscany, and the Tiki boat. But that was nothing until I tried Quake 2. After fifteen minutes of playing, I couldn't stand up, and was extremely ill for several hours. Since then anything where I am not seated triggers the same feeling again.

I think the brain/balance issue is very common if not the norm; much more than is accepted in the community. It will be a disaster if it's not solved before a commercial release.

I once convinced my girlfriend to wear the DK1, in one of the demos that came with it (Tuscan villa), without her moving, just looking around a static location.

In less than 10 seconds she ripped it off in a sick panic, and spent the rest of the afternoon looking green on the couch.

So yeah. People can get pretty wrecked.

Apparently that indicates you are more than likely male. VR sickness affects women at a higher rate than men. It's interesting what we learn about how perception works from trying to trick it. http://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexis...

It can be really bad, my short experience with a DK1 left me feeling sick for hours afterwards.

I don't either. But I don't feel particularly immersed either (even with the DK2). I fail to see the "depth" in the pictures.

I have never experience it myself either, but I saw a lot of students that experienced it in the VR lab. Especially people who had not 100% eye-sight on both eyes had a lot of troubles.

So it is a serious problem, and VR won't fly in consumer space until this is fixed. Important is also the head-tracking, and a low input latency as well as a high display refresh rate. So VR might be a fade like 3D TV, and augmented reality displays like the former Google Glass could be the winner. But who knows.

As John Carmack said in a talk, they found that there is a variety of sensitivities out there. Some people deal with it just fine, some are sensitive and some are super-sensitive.

I have a DK2 lying around unused. Besides some trouble getting it to work at all, I haven't been using it much because after the previous session I felt sick for an hour.

But probably it's only because it's working as intended. Last session I tried a bunch of roller coaster sims, so maybe feeling sick just means it is working properly :)

I've only ever used an Oculus DK2. If it isn't perfectly calibrated for my eyes before I use it it's basically unusable. I'll most likely vomit within 30s to a minute.

Once it's calibrated I can't play for more than 15-20 minutes without getting a slight headache.

I'm pretty resistant, I got slight nausea after playing Unreal Tournament on the DK1 for 20 minutes or so but I've yet to experience it with the DK2 even with low frame rates.

I haven't had motion sickness in VR either. That said, everyone can get sick. Some people have a higher tolerance than others, but no one is immune.

My students regularly show me how easy it is to calculate extremely precise results. Now, whether they should trust that precision is a rather different question, and one that even the good ones struggle with for a while. (In other news, I wish that more people paid attention to uncertainty propagation. Or heck, even just some oversimplified heuristics for significant figures.)

As indicated by other quantifications in the post, I assume it is based on the average amount of time people were able to use the device before they had to stop due to sickness.

That just comes as a % related on how much (average) time people played the same game with and without the nose. 13.5 percent refers to those ~90 seconds added playtime. This means, on average the Tuscany demo has been played for 697 sec (~11 and half mins) without nose, and 792 sec (~13 mins) with. It would be interesting to know the dynamics of the experiment (the testers were aiming to hold on as long as possible? Or they were simply told "play as much as you want"?), since the Tuscany demo is quite short, and most of people wouldn't play it for more than 10 minutes, besides sickness

This article is about a "NOSE", not "NOISE."

And no, the framerate of Brigade makes it unlikely to work well with VR.

They're not cross-eyed. You can view them as intended by focusing beyond the plane of the monitor, like a "magic eye" picture.

With a VR headset, the left image is shown to your left eye, and the right to your right. Intuitively, it should be clear that they aren't cross-eyed, since your nose is in the middle of your face.

And as someone else said - you're crossing your eyes, when you should perhaps be doing the opposite - looking far into the distance until the images overlap.

Close your right eye, your nose will appear on the right of your left eye. Close your left eye, your nose will appear on the left of your right eye. They have this correct. When you put the goggles on it will seem the same as you currently see, the nose fades because it is on the far side of your vision field of view and on opposite sides.

I always wondered after seeing this a bit ago if the addition of a torso might also help. Part of the disorientation might be that it seems like your body is not there. A nose with a torso and eventually LeapMotion like hand controls/arms, may help reduce VR sickness.

It might appear like that, but it is about distance! Moving the two images over each other will make your brain think the nose that is farest away from the common center is closest. BUT: the nose should ideally be mirrored, so that the shapes match, at least if you want to combine the images directly using cross-eyeing. They are correct if you show each picture to one eye though (what VR glasses are doing), every eye sees what it would see. However, little differences are filtered out anyway from your brain, merely a disturbance.

They are not cross-eyed.

Right before that quote is this one:

"participants with the nose were able to play the Tuscan villa game for 94.2 seconds longer than those playing without"

It seems dishonest to ignore the first half of a sentence while quoting the second half.