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Height issues, and altered perspectives

KuraIthys
Honored Guest
I've been reading what little guidelines devised so far in relation to simulator sickness and the like, and one point comes up that I'm curious about, because it has implications for several things I wanted to try.

What I've seen so far suggests it's best to try and get a consistent and realistic sense of scale to the world.
I understand the issues surrounding consistency in scale, but it seems rather limiting.
What if you wanted to create a world where you play as something on the scale of an action figure?

Clearly, the correct scale for this is pretty small. Does anyone think this would be an issue that might cause adverse effects, or is it more of a matter of relative scale? (If the ingame world is built around the idea of the character being about 20 cm tall, does anyone think this would cause issues in and of itself, or would it suffice to scale all other distances appropriately so that the overall effect is the same as if things were built to a more typical scale - such as say, being 1.8 meters tall.)

A secondary issue relating to height... How crucial does it appear to be that the player's actual height and their avatar height match?

Let's say I wanted to create a game (to stick with a theme) where you play with toys. This is still all at normal human scales, but given the setting, it would seem interesting to place the player in the role of say, a 10 year old.

Given that a 10 year old is typically no more than about 1.5 meters, and a lot of adults are closer to 1.8, would the mismatch in height be a critical issue, or would most people be able to deal with it?

In general then, I'm curious as to how much you can mess with someone's point of view. Seeing things from a perspective you wouldn't really be able to in real life interests me, but at the same time I'd rather avoid making people sick as a result.

So I'd like to get a sense of how much you can mess around with things like this without causing serious adverse reactions...
10 REPLIES 10

konchok
Honored Guest
Only one way to find out. Give it a shot, It should be fairly straight forward to create. Send it out to people with a rift and we'll be sure to let you know!

KuraIthys
Honored Guest
That's true.

I mean, it would help to know how I deal with it personally before I subject anyone else to the results...

Ah well. More waiting... XD

cybereality
Grand Champion
You can change your height in the Tuscany Unity demo by pressing the 5 and 6 keys.
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brantlew
Adventurer
Excessive height can cause vertigo but not simulator sickness. I don't think the small height variations that you are talking about are much of an issue other than feeling like you are in a different body. It just feels sort of novel to be really short or tall but not sickening.

3DByte
Explorer
I haven´t tested it (because i have no Rift), but i am sure to simulate a kids/toys perspective correctly not only the height but also the stereo rendering in the gameengine must use the IPD value of a kid/toy.
The IPD setting for the Rifts OUTPUT however should match YOUR eye distance.

brantlew
Adventurer
"3DByte" wrote:
I haven´t tested it (because i have no Rift), but i am sure to simulate a kids/toys perspective correctly not only the height but also the stereo rendering in the gameengine must use the IPD value of a kid/toy.
The IPD setting for the Rifts OUTPUT however should match YOUR eye distance.


That's true, if you match the camera separation to your real IPD and only shrink the height then you will probably just feel squashed. The camera separation has to scale with the height.

ralfal
Honored Guest
The virtual IPD is extremely important in regard to how the environment is perceived. This is completely different to 3d on a screen where many people see stereo separation a more-is-better-setting that 'enhances' the 3d effect (often beyond what would be real).

If you overdo the stereo separation on the Rift, something different happens: you start feeling like a dwarf walking through a toy landscape, since the virtual IPD is larger relative to the world than your brain is accustomed to. As a result of this it interprets the world around you as being smaller. That's a highly interesting effect psychologically. You suddenly are able to walk through doors that you perceive as much smaller than you are in real life for example. Feels really strange (but quite interesting).

KuraIthys
Honored Guest
Good to know.

I'm sure I'd be able to experiment with this pretty easily once I had a headset, but It's nice to hear other people's thoughts...

dbuck
Honored Guest
So would doing this only entail enlarging the IPD and changing the player heights/scales? Changing the IPD just seems to make my eyes hurt, and changing the player scales just makes me taller, it doesn't influence how far apart the cameras are from each other?

Thanks 🙂