What problem? The motion one where you feel sick when you use VR?
It’s already solved mostly you just have to train your brain. It takes time and effort but it does work. It took me weeks to train mine and it sucked but once I did I’ve been fine with VR for years.
I’m a huge VR fan, even an aspiring dev, but I still have nausea issues with smooth locomotion after years of on and off use 😞 I’m hoping as we incorporate more full body haptic solutions we’ll find more efficient work arounds than just adapting. Kinda funny as I’m the last person I thought would have issues, but while I can push it, I’ve still got a limit before I just gotta bail out. I think part of it, for me, is hardware (I can afford) still being too slow.
Interesting. How long can you go for before you get sick? I definitely can’t do more than an hour or two standing of smooth locomotion, although I find sitting helps even for games that are walking around.
It’s kind of all over the place. Sometimes I can deal with a half hour, other times like 5 and I’m done. But it’s not like I’m fine for while and then just start to feel sick, there’s a kind of discomfort of mismatch centered largely in my body from like the moment I start moving around with the joystick. I was experimenting with some Unity assets on the quest 2 the other day and messed up my teleport prefab so I had to use smooth locomotion and I managed 20 minutes but was uncomfortable the entire time. Interestingly enough, I get a pretty intense empathy like synesthesia from seeing people trip and fall or experience impact, especially in movies and tv, where like the feeling of a sudden impact flows through my body the way you might imagine a ghost would rush through you. For the life of me, I can’t remember if that started before or after I began working with VR.
One of the workarounds I’d like to try when I have the hardware for it is to see if matching up a vibration in shoes with footstep sounds might lessen some of the mismatch I experience. Because while the outcome is ultimately nausea, the discomfort is largely felt in the body. Like idk if you’ve ever had your tracking go completely out of whack and you felt like a jarring displacement of your physical self when your visuals jumped in a completely unexpected way, but for me it’s a lot like that.
That makes a lot of sense. Have you tried the trick where you stand and move your legs and arms in a walking motion while you move? That helps some people…sometimes it helps me, other times it actually make it worse for me. But yeah I also get a slight unease quite often when doing smooth locomotion which mostly goes away if I just focus on whatever I’m doing in game. If I try to focus on my body then yes, I can feel that a bit.
I have tried that, and it does help a bit, but without it being responsible for movement I found it hard to remember to maintain it. There’s a software called Natural Locomotion that I tried that uses extra sensors on your legs to control your smooth motion that kinda helped but even then it was very all over the place at times. I haven’t had a chance to try it in a while though. I suspect there"s not gonna be a single silver bullet solution but a combination of techniques. I am curious if I’d still have problems on a slide mill though.
The problem where if you move in VR but dont move in the real world your inner ear freaks out and you get serious motion sickness to the point where your body doesnt want to stay upright. Which is why most VR games are static experiances or involve you teleporting around.
Idk I havent used VR before but I saw this mentioned in Dan Olsen’s “The Future is a Dead Mall” and he said that at least so far its been a pretty hard limit on what VR games can offer.
Yeah this is trainable. Everyone I know that has had any real meaningful time with VR has had this issue and every one of them was able to fix it.
You basically just … Do it. And the second you start feeling sick you stop immediately and you go do something else. Once you feel better you go do it again. And you ready until the problem is gone. It took me a few weeks of this but eventually I was able to go hours before the sick started. My understanding is it’s basically a form of exposure therapy. You show your brain “hey we’re fine I’m not sick when this thing is on my head” and it adapts. The brain is remarkably flexible
Huh ok. It was sold to me as a permanently limiting problem (also if i were to leavy a guess I bet it IS for some people, in the same way that some people get car sick when they use their phone or read in the car but others dont) not something you could train away. Interesting. Thanks.
Still wonder if there’s ways that tech could get around it being even an initial problem though.
I think car sickness is probably trainable as well via similar methods. And yeah maybe it’s a permanent problem for some people but that definitely hasn’t been my experience.
I would wonder if there are some tricks though too. I was thinking some audio thing or pressure thing in your ears that mimics motion somehow. That’s gotta be difficult to test though so I doubt it’ll be happening anytime soon
I didn’t get nausea, but I did have trouble with games with smooth movement when I first started. I’d start moving and almost fall over.
With some practice, your brain learns that the VR environment and the real world are separate things and stops getting confused by them disagreeing.
Then you can play VR Overload without getting disoriented and falling over.
I get some motion sickness while reading for more than a few minutes in a moving vehicle. I’ve never tried VR gaming but I think VR gaming is not for me.
A lot of people have moved on from it as an issue and devs have expanded beyond just seated and teleport. Games like Lone Echo and Gorilla Tag spit in the face of anyone with nausea issues.
It goes away for most people after a week or so training with Skyrim VR or Superhot. A very good computer and a couple of armlet/leglet sensors for inverse kinematics helps.
Some stuff like falling long distances still leaves me dizzy, but falling also leaves me dizzy in rl so not really a bug.
even if it didn’t make people sick I hate the idea of navigating a virtual space with a joystick, it just feels unnatural and breaks immersion
omnidirectional treadmills are probably the only way to achieve immersive locomotion but they’re not very good yet and they’re expensive and bulky
Try using a “snap turn” if it is an option, instead of a fluid turn or 1-1 body rotation. Some games will let you hit a button to rotate 15-45 degrees without moving physically.
No idea how viable, realistic, or safe this is, but it would be cool/interesting if we could find some way to manipulate the inner ear fluid. Maybe inject some magnetic particles into the fluid then have an ear mounted electromagnet that moves them around? There’s probably a thousand problems with that idea but it’s interesting to think about.
