Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully I'm not too late to weigh in on this one but I've experienced this personally for years.

I am a person that experiences motion sickness from most 3D environments if on a sufficiently large screen. 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.

Despite this I loved the Need for Speed franchise. Hot Pursuit on the PS3 ate up a lot of my free time. :) I could only use the game in one visual mode though... "Hood view", where the hood of the car remains visible at the bottom of the screen. That provided my brain with a fixed reference point and as a result I could spend hours in there.

When a following release of NFS for PS came out (I think it was Most Wanted 2012) they removed the hood view option. Five minutes into the game and I get a strong motion sickness headache. After searching a few other titles I found similar issues with all of them and gave up gaming.

I wrote EA and Criterion Games a couple times about this but never heard back. Unfortunately it was a deal breaker for me trying anything further in the franchise. I hope that game developers (especially with immersive VR now) take the time to find and test with someone like myself as tricks like this help a lot.

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. :)

Have you tried traditional motion sickness remedies, like ginger tablets or Dramamine?

I've been playing FPS shooters for most of my life. But I've had to stop.

For some reason HL2 would give me headaches. Really, really bad headaches. I thought it might be the Engine, or me being tired. But I don't get headaches playing TF2 or Dystopia, both of which use the same engine. Surprisingly, Portal and Portal 2 didn't give me as bad headaches.

Later games are hit-and-miss. Bioshock I didn't suffer. Bioshock Infinite gave me headaches within 15 minutes.

And watching any Let's Play of a shooter gives me headaches within a minute.

I've chalked the majority of it up to getting older. My gaming binges used to also give me headaches, but only after several hours. So I've had to switch to strategy games instead. But still, something about certain ways things are rendered or the FoV or framerate is affecting me and I wish I knew what it is.

Portal, like many new-ish 3D games, have a very narrow FOV (in the 60-75 degree range) compared to classic 3D games (90-100). If you have a widescreen monitor (which amazingly wasn't standard when HL2 and Portal were released) try cl_fov 110 in the console.

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.

Actually I experimented with something like this. I tried blocking parts of the view but it didn't work. Honestly not sure why though. The hood did move a little with inertial responses and perhaps my brain perceived that as an intermediary.

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

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