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The anwer to MotionSickness..

Anonymous
Not applicable
Alot of people hav motion sickness. Its anoying and so butt i think i got the solution. Look at it this way.. minecraft enderman. U look at them Ingame and theyr angry. But look at them in real life and u can stare at them without the game knowing it.. or

Battlefield... an enemy on the left. U move ur eyes to the left and u see him. This is also with the vr. Maybe in the future they can detect eye movement and optimize the screen cuz this must be the problem. & it would also improve gameplay reality...

Another good example is there are 2 men standing 5 feet away + a star in the middle. Look at the star and the rest is blurry.. but when in a game u have the oppurtunity to move ur eyes but not the game.. u now must see where im going... and it even is really easy cuz the only thing u need is like some sort of detection and software coding to let the screen move with the eyes.
11 REPLIES 11

Anonymous
Not applicable
I also see like alot of people (devs and creators) trying to add that sweet spot of focus to the screen. But wouldnt that make it less good cuz the only thing u need are the eyes. Right????.. they do the work 4 u blurring the sides out.

AnotherCrazyCan
Adventurer
No offence, but you're completely incorrect. Motion sickness in VR (Which looks so lifelike your body thinks it's real) is because you see movement, but you don't feel it. Eye gaze or tracking would not alleviate this at all because it's an issue with motion.
Facebook bought Instagram. How exactly did they ruin them?

SicTim
Protege
I'm very prone to motion sickness, and I seem to get sick (for now) everytime I have a camera dragging me around. For me, Lucky's Tale feels like my desk chair is literally sliding around the room, and I haven't made it past the first level. Same for the experience where you're exploring a Dali landscape.

Oddly enough, I have less motion sickness doing barrel rolls in Eve Valkyrie and Elite: Dangerous, apparently because I'm in control of the camera.

I even tried Dramamine yesterday, and it didn't help. This tells me the nausea is very subjective, and different things will make different people sick.

I'm waiting to get my "VR legs" (only on day 3). I was one of the folks (and there were a lot of us) who got sick playing the original Doom, but I got over it pretty quick. Assuming the same thing applies here.

morte111
Explorer
The effect has been researched and documented in various forums, the primary in-game mechanism to alleviate it (partially) is to a) place your character inside a cockpit of sorts such that your brain can accept the indirect motion and allow for the apparent lack of g-force and inertia similar to when you play similar games in front of a screen (e.g. Eve Valkyrie)
b) place your character in a semi-stationary 'observer' position where your camera's translation motion is very slow, even if your camera rotation/yaw/pitch is in real-time with the headset. (e.g. Lucky's Tale)
c) use sufficiently slow fade-to-black transitions whenever you need to place the player camera in a substantially differing location, orientation or zoom level.

I got fairly bad effects after about 7 minutes of GZ3Doom, which I attribute solely to the inability to either immerse my presence in a 3D space (the player camera in headset is sitting behind a 2D screen projection and the in-game objects are 2D sprite/decals which rotate partially relative to the headset orientation),  or alternatively to isolate my presence as sitting outside the motion, as the player camera is suspended outside of any stationary frame of reference.    Possibly the effects can be lessened over time if the player adapts to restrict their range of motions, but this retrograded implementation is not the type of game that will ever translate well to VR.

Category5x
Protege
I wonder if there are some experiences or exercises that could be used to train the brain to accept VR motion.  Maybe an app could gradually lead the user through tiered exercises to train the brain to accept certain indirect visual motion without bodily motion.  I only get it at certain times, but the nausea is pretty fierce when it happens.

Anonymous
Not applicable
Motion sickness has also been my biggest issue with VR as well. I've done a lot of testing with my VR experiments, trying to isolate the issue and find solutions. As SicTim and morte111 said, motion sickness seems to trigger as soon as the visual conflicts with our internal ear. The brain probably shouts "we're moving, we're moving!" and the internal ear says "no we're not! no we're not" - hence the conflict and motion sickness (at least, this is what I think). For me, as soon as the camera rolls,or if the game has abrupt up/down motion, I get motion sickness. What morte111 mentioned is rather interesting - it is indeed not as bad if the game puts you in a cockpit. I wonder if having a reference frame actually helps the brain (we're used to driving cars after all). But I've tried games that have cockpits, give me control of the camera and yet, I would still get motion sickness after a while.
The VR experience I'm designing now doesn't allow you to move around, and I can play this one for a pretty long extend of time and everything's fine (and none of my friends/testers have had any motion sickness with it). So I'll stick to that until I find more solutions to the motion sickness aspect of VR 🙂

morte111
Explorer
Indeed, I think we will have to wait for some form of inertial cues paired with the headset, (google "haptic gaming vest", "hydraulic gaming chair"), before we can overcome inner ear-based motion sickness - best wishes to sbushman18 in your endeavours to train yourself out of it tho! 🙂

We're still a long way from Sword Art Online and Caprica-level full sensory immersion, although the full bodysuit and suspension rigs in Lawnmower man will probably be an inevitable stepping stone along the way towards a direct neural interface.

All the best to squidbeam on your dev work!  It's a puzzle definitely worth solving.


Nofew
Protege
I had motion sickness when I first started working with the Rift, but I got over it by mistake in a few days. I think the specific things I did were important.

First, I never gave in to my motion sickness and let it "win". I never tried to prevent it, either. I basically told my body "You're going to get used to this feeling and /you/ are going to learn to deal with it, not me.". I think it's critical that one adopts this mindset first before going further.

Now, I started with Farlands, personally. Considering it's a game with a teleportation mechanic there's absolutely no chance of getting motion sickness, but that's not why I did it. At the time my computer and Xbox controller weren't talking with each other, so I just had to play games with the Oculus Remote.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that, while playing Farlands, I accidentally set the headset up JUST RIGHT. It actually took a lot of finagling to get it to sit in just the right spot on my face and to get the slider in just the right spot. Since this experience, I've figured out how to get it there within minutes rather than days.

The fastest way is to press the Home button, then the third button down on the right. A green cross'll appear. Look at the lines going sideways (---), close one eye, and move the headset up and down until you see dots. If you see a solid, straight line, *something is very wrong*. Go move it around until it's dots. The in-VR explanation doesn't make this clear at all.

Once you've got that eye set, try to hold that side of the headset in place, then close that eye and open the other and do the same thing. Once that's set, close that eye, open your first one, and do it again if you need to. Take your time getting it just right, and only do it with one eye at a time since your "dominate eye" will constantly overpower your other eye if you have them both open at once. The result is that it'll /look/ accurate, but you'll get really bad eyestrain and motion sickness with no idea why.

Once that's clear, *TIGHTEN THE HEADSET*. Really. Do that now. Right now. Make sure to get it as tight as you can without it squeezing your face so hard that it hurts after an hour or something. The goal is to make it tight enough that it can't slide down even if you push it; the top strap's the main important one here, but I've found it difficult to get that one on correctly without tightening the sides at least a little first.

Next you need to adjust the slidey-thing. First, try to center the headset with both eyes closed and just the feeling with your nose. This won't actually be exact; people's noses aren't actually perfectly symmetrical! But just try to get it so it feels at least a /little/ right.

Now, start with an eye closed, but this time look at the lines that go up and down (||). The goal is the same: Make the lines turn into individual dots. For sake of explaining things more easily, let's pretend you've closed your left eye first and you're using your right eye to make the first adjustment.

With your right eye open, move the slider until you see dots. If you never see dots, move the headset to one side (Remember that if you've tightened the straps properly, you can pull the headset down while you move it and it'll stay level!) and try again. If you still don't, try the other side. If you still-still don't, try the other eye.

We'll assume that you got it with your right eye.

Now, once that eye's clear, make a note of what the distance at the bottom reads.

Close your right eye and open your left eye. Move the slider until things are clear, then make a note of what the number reads now. Take that number, subtract the first one from it and divide by two, then add the result of that to whichever of the original two numbers was smaller. Set the slider to this number.

(Example: Right eye says 68, left says 64. Set it to 66.)

What we've done at this point is figured out how far apart your pupils are, and while it may still be 1 or 2 millimeters off, it's at least really, *really* close now.

So, say you ended up with 66, for example. This means that you likely actually need it at 64, 65, 66, 67, or 68. We don't know which yet, but it's one of those.

In this example, we'd set it to 66 and move the headset with one eye closed until there's vertical dots in one eye. Close that eye, open your other one, and if they're still dots, you're done! Adjust the straps if you feel like you need to to help equalize the pressure on the sides of your head and face.

If 66 isn't clear in both, set it to 65 with one eye, make sure you see dots, and switch eyes again. If you see dots now, you're done. If not, try 67. Same deal with 64 and 68.

Once this is all set up, things should be absolutely perfect. Any eyestrain should be entirely gone, and if you got used to having your eyes hurt, your eyes will actually feel freaking *weird* for a little while because they're trying to strain when they don't need to. For me, that feeling lasted for about two or three days, but motion sickness was practically *gone* from the get-go.


Now, while this will fix the sickness caused by "easy" movement, it won't fix "difficult" movement.

What's "easy" and what's "difficult"? Well, the human body can't actually feel constant motion; it feels changes in motion. As such, if you fade a scene to black and then fade it back in and during the black, make the player go from stationary to moving in a constant speed and direction, absolutely nothing will go wrong. But, if you don't do the face, the body might flip out because it knows it should've felt /something/ but didn't.

As such, "easy" is when things are a nice, constant motion, and "difficult" is when it changes somehow at any point.

I found it best to just dive right in; like a horror game, the main deterring element is dread, not the actual scare.

I started with Eve: Valkyrie, which never caused me too much sickness, and got *really* into using missiles and the Support ship that comes up first. It forces players to look around and keep their eye on a target, and some turns will cause sickness when this happens, but it's very short-lived and the battles are intense so I tended to forget about it easy and just move on. On my first day I lasted an hour and a half, second day was three hours, third day was over eight hours straight.

...That game's mildly addicting. Anyway, this is critically important: I didn't stop the moment I felt sickness coming on. I forced myself to play through it. On day one I got sick an hour in, so I played half an hour while feeling nausious. The second day I didn't get sick until two and a half hours in, and the third day I never got sick until I took the Rift off, at which point regular reality made me sick. Really! I got simulator sickness because I took the simulator /off/!

It's at that point I realized what I've been doing over the past few days to myself and how this is a crazy-effective way at killing motion sickness. Basically, I've forced my body to accept VR as R, and that G-forces just don't mean squat. On day three I convinced it so hard of this that it thought G-forces were bad and having them meant I must be poisoned, which is why I got sick by taking the Rift off.

Once I got past day three, I decided to try The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. That said, I believe any first-person game will work here. Give Technolust a shot if you'd rather use something a little cheaper!

I forced myself to stand during Carter. In the first few seconds of the game I pushed forward on the stick.. And fell right over. But I wasn't sick; I just fell. I only held it long enough to make me think I was on a platform that got moved and I had to tilt to compensate for the balance, and thus, fell. Hooray for soft stuff surrounding me! (Oh, right. Add that. <.<)

I got back up and tried again, and didn't start slow. I didn't push the stick halfway or avoid sprinting; right away, I just decided to go full-hog on it. Turns out that that was *WAY* easier for me; slower stuff, even today, makes me feel like I'm just dizzy and falling over slowly. Fast stuff, I've come to accept as actual lateral movement. Seriously, start fast, stay fast, and don't slow down.

I played for about half an hour before I had to stop. I got motion sickness five minutes in, but I knew that if I stopped right away that my body would've "won" and knew that if it made me feel sick, these inputs (So, VR) would stop. By forcing myself to go on, I was basically telling my body "You need to just ignore that there's no G-forces. There's none, and these sensory inputs won't stop just because you don't like them. Deal with it.", and it eventually did deal with it.

The second day I went right up to three hours because I got tired. There was no serious motion sickness. Later that same day I played again, this time for a collective total of about eight hours throughout the day, and I even tried to give myself motion sickness by spinning around without running, spinning with running, moving the sticks in random directions, randomly starting and stopping springing and so on, and just *nothing* tripped it except running forward, turning right and looking like 150 degrees to my right all at once. That said, I think doing that outside VR would be pretty much impossible anyway, so I'm not too concerned on trying to get used to that particular movement.

Ever since I got used to it with Carter, every other first-person game with smooth movement and rotation has only taken me 1-5 minutes to get used to. I've found that the scaling the games have and the speeds they let me move kind of "resets" the training and I have to get used to the new speeds and scaling, but that's a very swift process and doesn't have any lasting effects after a few minutes.

My next experience was Technolust, and the introduction was really iffy for about a minute, but it cleared up. I spent the next 15 minutes trying to puzzle my way out of my apartment, and in doing so completely cured any sickness I got from the introduction. Since replaying it, the intro doesn't make me sick anymore; I really just needed to get used to it.


So there. Long post, but I think it's worth it for people who are suffering so badly that anything with joysticks is unplayable.


PS: Oh right! O_O! I think it's critical not to hop to 50 different games while doing this! Force yourself to get used to one at a time. If you do too many at once, you'll just confuse your poor brainstem.

Caspersight
Protege
I have played a few walking games on my rift and one game that really made me feel funny was finding ethan carter. I soon found out that when moving the controller (right stick-head) slowly it made my sickness worse so now when I play I make sure that I I turn I do it quickly and there you have it, no sickness. then after a while of playing it over and over I never really had the problem and I have played the game two hours straight before. I think that turning quickly makes your brain not really take in the movement as well.