The problem with this response is that it's mostly right, but misses enough that it ends up being misguided but for a reason that is unstated.<p>Similar to the author I worked with HMD systems while in the air force, specifically the integrated HUD avionics F35 helmet system. He is correct about the current lack of accommodation (depth perception) and the vestibular mismatch for movement. Other posters discuss vestibular stimulation, without realizing that such stimulation actually induces physical motion. The biological systems are too tightly connected to just simulate physical movement in the brain without a physical reaction.<p>What he misses, which is critical is that certain virtual retinal displays can solve the accommodation and multiple depth object focal lengths. This is the major thing that magic leap has going for it, but while it's hard it's not impossible to do in multiple ways. We have our own multi-depth accommodation vrd patent filing.<p>There is no real solution to the movement problem though... Except to actually work with virtual objects in the real world, AKA augmented reality.<p>So the actual solution to his problem doesn't lie in VR solutions, it's in AR.<p>Until we have sufficient BCI that works around vestibular and ocular pathways we aren't going to see the matrix levels of presence in non AR displays.
They're comparing apples to oranges. The $80,000 military VR headsets of 1989 absolutely did not use OLED or OLED light field displays. They've only recently been available from manufacturers at any price with their current pixel density and refresh rate (OLED has always had amazing response time, but refresh rate has been lacking until recently) specifications.<p>Even the most expensive <i>research</i> OLED panels with high enough pixel densities for VR have only existed since the early-mid '00s. The studies he linked to are from 1989.<p>> Depth perception<p>The author neglects to mention that OLED light field displays have already solved this problem completely. See <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g</a><p>The technology already exists (you need a pair of expensive MicroOLED displays and some special lenses), it's just not available at a consumer price point.<p>> Momentum<p>For someone involved with military devices, it's surprising that this guy has never heard of galvanic vestibular stimulation. GVS will never be easy and will always require very, very extensive calibration per-user, but it's still possible to use for simulating perceived movement.<p>This isn't that important for me personally, as I've never experienced VR sickness even when playing fast-paced high-momentum VR games for multiple hours at a time. I could see people who get VR sickness wanting this, as GVS would help prevent it from happening.
The proof is in the pudding. I'm kind of amazed that the first response to this article is not either: "Correct. We tried Vive/Oculus on 1,000 subjects and 90% were sick within ten minutes," or "Incorrect. We tried it on 1,000 subjects and 10% were sick after 2 hours." Or some other clear test from real players. How can the viability of VR be this speculative this deep into launching to real customers?
One game that seems to work for me in VR is EVE: Valkyrie;
An arcade style multiplayer dogfighting in 0G space.
As you are in space, the lack of an 'up' feels like you are never at the 'wrong' direction.<p>It took some getting use to doing barrel rolls or adjusting yaw and pitch too quickly. As I improved, the sickness from more complicated manoeuvres subsided.<p>I think that attitudes that VR is somehow dangerous and impossible to be done without sickness are foolish and ignore historical precedent; Many things throughout human development have felt 'unnatural' and required adjustment and training - driving, flying, skydiving, moving pictures; yet humanity has adjusted to these in short course.
I've got a vive and at this point I've probably spent around 40 hours in it, including a few multi-hour sessions. Before that I played with an early Rift dev kit for several days.<p>The biggest issue is when the world moves without you - Windlands is a big culprit here. In general standing and using controller locomotion so far has been a recipe for nausea.<p>But outside of that, so far everyone who has used my unit (and that's about 20 some people currently) has had a blast. No cases of simulator sickness (and I've only seen two reports of that in the community as a whole so far) and no nausea other than an initial misattempt with Windlands.<p>Sorry, VR is probably here to stay, though whether it goes mainstream will be about whether or not the price can drop quickly.
I've experienced quite a bit of nausea from goggle only VR products like GearVR. Even the menu was enough to get me sick -- moving my head forward without the menu changing distance with me seemed to make my body think I should feel movement but didn't, or something like that. The nausea in these situations was quite bad and lasted for 30-60 minutes or more after taking off the goggles.<p>But I have to say that the experience was quite a bit different with the room scale VR like the HTC Vive. The only time I experienced any nausea in there was in Hover Junkers. The game has you riding a vehicle with frequent changes in direction at high speeds. This again seemed to be related to the perception of motion without corresponding sensations.<p>But the teleportation used in games like Budget Cuts didn't affect me at all. (There were some disturbing bouts of claustrophobia when I teleported too close to a wall, but that didn't induce any nausea.)<p>At the time that I tried the Vive, I spent about 20 hours total playing with it, spread across probably 4 sessions. I think my longest duration without a break was 6 hours. It was exhausting but not nauseating. The others with me had similar experiences. In fact, one of them normally gets so nauseated by things like this that they have prescription medication for nausea for use while riding in the car -- and they didn't experience any nausea at all.
This is all just empirically incorrect. VR headsets are already in the hands of consumers, and not causing simulator sickness in the circumstances described. Developers have now had lots of time to experiment and find out what does and doesn't cause it. Accelerating the viewpoint? Yes, that'll affect some people. Placing objects close to the viewpoint? That's completely fine, and the author's idea that this will somehow mess up people's depth perception is flat-out wrong.
I can't really this guy too seriously when the bolded "kicker" to his story are citations to studies from 1989. Equipment and research from that time period had latency in the hundreds of milliseconds. (For context, modern studies (2009) show that 5ms latencies are imperceptible in HMDs [1])<p>I'd be interested to hear what vintage and what specs those $80K headsets really were. Knowing the specs of older $50-100K research HMDs, I have extreme doubts that resolution, latency, or tracking accuracy match today's consumer headsets even (most of the tech stemming from the billions and billions of dollars of investment spent on smartphone development from the past decade).<p>When talking about depth perception, hyperbole like "THAT problem can’t be fixed by any known technological means" (in reference to focal/depth plane projection) is completely inaccurate, and contributes to the feeling of crochety old man ranting. There are multiple VRD and light field solutions being worked on to address the multi/vari-focus issue (my current favorite approach is the micro-lensed near-eye light field displays, although I suspect that barrier-based LFDs will be what gets adopted first).<p>Vection <i>is</i> a big issue, but there's a huge amount of 1:1 motion experiences available, and based on personal/anecdotal experience, most people have no problem spending 15-30m in them w/o having strong adverse effects. Thousands of people have done the 10m+ the Oculus Connect and Vive Experience demos w/ very few issues. Based on that, I believe that for experiences w/o artificial vection, comfort is primarily a software problem at this point, not hardware.<p>Personally, I'm pretty bullish on all the locomotion experiments going on (teleportation, re-orientation, redirection). I'm a bit less convinced on vehicle/cockpit vection w/o linked motion control, but the price is certainly not an issue for high-end military simulators and lots of enthusiasts are making DIY 6DOF simulators.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3095496/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3095496/</a>
Well, he's obviously wrong because we have it now and it <i>does</i> work. I've tried the Vive an Rift and while some things made me feel a bit sick, it was mostly when the camera moves without your direct control (e.g. in Lucky's Tale).<p>His section about momentum is stupid - the Vive especially allows 1:1 mapping from VR to real life so that isn't an issue.<p>Also, this comment is probably the most stupid thing in there:<p>> Sadly, the $80,000 googles we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick - so this seems unlikely.<p>Call me a skeptic but <i>as if</i> they had lower latency and higher resolution. $80k is a tiny budget for the military, and consumer displays and graphics hardware are the state-of-the-art, not military ones.
I think the real issue here isn't if or how often VR headsets cause simulator sickness. The real issue is that VR can fuck up your proprioception. If pilots, who are using it relatively infrequently, are having issues lasting for several hours to several days, what sort of issues are gamers going to have when they're using these things daily over the course of years?<p>If I recall correctly, this was one of the biggest issues that Sega ran into with Sega VR. They knew that short term exposure to 3d/VR would shut off some of the cues your body uses for depth perception, and they were concerned that prolonged use might have a more permanent effect. Because of this, their lawyers advised them not to release the product for fear of lawsuits if people suffered permanent damage.
I get simulation sickness even from games I play on a 1080p screen from an arm's length away. I couldn't stand a 3D-glass for more than 15 minutes and therefore I'm too afraid to even try the VR headsets more than ten seconds (It gets really bad when it starts with a splitting headache and nausea combined).<p>However, I feel like I'm in the minority on this. No one around me seems to have any trouble watching movies in 3D, for a start.<p>I guess, just as some people aren't fit to operate a vehicle (problem in eyesight or other reasons) there are some who aren't fit to use VR and I really doubt they (we) amount to the mentioned 50%.
Using the sweeping assumptions embraced in this article, any 3D games which happen to cause motion sickness (due to the player having 'six degrees of freedom' in zero g) to a non-trivial proportion of players when played on a monitor or TV, such as Descent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(video_game)</a> prove unequivocally that 3D games 'will not work' on TVs or monitors.
He mentioned seasickness as an example, yet people still go on cruises.<p>I think the problem will be "solved" with a combination of improvements in the tech (light field, etc), conditioning (the brain has surprising plasticity, especially if you condition it from a very young age), custom designed applications (to avoid the motion problem), and maybe lots of nausea medication. :-)
I'm still confused about the price comparison he keeps using. Is that really apples to apples? The Navy may have wanted to sell a dozen of these units at a time whereas oculus and HTC go into true mass production. I was always under the impression that rally limited runs of anything are far more costly per unit.
> [the goggles] we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles<p>Dubious.<p>> I believe that the most major problem is with depth perception.<p>We're well on our way to solving this problem. (<a href="https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8hLzESOf8SE?t=254</a>)<p>> [The momentum problem] simply cannot be fixed by any means. The laws of physics don’t allow it.<p>The solution is simple. VR experiences would need to be more or less fixed to a small room. AR experiences just don't have this problem.
If the focus distance and convergence distance being mismatched would cause nausea, how comes 3D movies have no such issues (at least for the vas majority of viewers - I haven't head anyone complaining)?<p>And if the distance disparity would indicate hallucination and trigger vomiting as a defence mechanism agains shrooms, how comes existing FPS games have no such issues?<p>Some people claimed to have problems playing Mirrors Edge back in 2009, but it seemed like it was mostly the hype and the attention-craving. I myself never felt any issues, and neither did anyone I've talked to.
> so driving a car while “under the influence” of post-VR disorientation is probably as dangerous as drunk-driving.<p>That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. The only evidence cited is that the military issued a warning about driving after exiting a military flight simulator. I'm not questioning that the effects of VR can persist after exiting the simulation, I just don't think they can be compared to the effects of alcohol without significantly more investigation.
The authors points about both ocular and vestibular sources of VR nausea are valid, and both will probably be resolved. There are two solution paths: technical and biological. The author spent a bit of time on the technical solutions but none on the biological solutions. The simplest biological solution is one that we all already possess to varying degrees - neural plasticity. The brain is a plastic organ. In young children it is even more plastic. I doubt that the studies have yet been done, but I'd bet that kids trained with high-quality VR goggles from the age of three would not suffer from either form of nausea. Also I doubt that they would suffer from the after-effects of VR. Old-timers like myself will experience nausea. For my wife, it will be so bad that she just won't do it. I expect that the majority of today's adults will reject VR. But as with all things, the children are the future.<p>AR is a different thing entirely. The Hololens holoportation demo was one of the most amazing tech demos I've ever seen. Watching that, you know where the future lies. The gear manufacturers may not like to admit it, but there will likely be a long "arcade" phase to AR entertainment were we pay a visit to a "holodeck" facility that has the half a million dollars in gear which would be required to make this a great experience. I have no problem with that - I already pay to go see a movie or go bowling or to an amusement park.
Why then is the HTC Vive Reddit filled with post after post of people having a great time playing games for hours, and very few reports of nausea or sickness? I'm not suggesting we ignore health concerns related to VR, but the huge gulf between the anecdotal evidence post-launch and this guys VR sickness apocalypse make me think something is off.
VR for flight sims is a bit different than the designer scenarios that to me seem the most interesting use scenarios of the current fad in VR.<p>An architects experience on hololens:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/70xDCokzAck" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/70xDCokzAck</a><p>Microsoft promo - but I doubt the architect would like to make a total ass of himself. I work in CAD for construction and while not directly involved in Hololens projects people mostly see this as transformational for their clients. So, there might be actual value here but the market has not yet spoken.<p>In previous VR surges designers were not so educated in digital and the workflows were not there. VR was a thing itself - now it's more like a one more view into an established process and dataset - and is actually only an incremental change and not a profound one (and is thus likelier to succeed)
<i>So we’re continually estimating range using the tensions in two sets of muscles - one for focus, the other for convergence. When the brain gets the right signals, these two mechanisms agree perfectly.</i><p>Just got my HTC Vive. Nausea isn't a problem for me, but age has definitely made me farsighted. Muscles in my eye might strain to let me focus close, but that's just not happening nowadays. Since this has happened gradually over the years, my brain has gotten used to it.<p>Oddly enough, when I tried the Oculus Rift, I found I could focus more clearly on nearby virtual objects than far away ones. Not only is VR an alternate reality where I can play with force fields and laser beams, it's a reality where my eyes aren't old anymore and work correctly.
Part of me wonders if children are exposed to this technology from a young age, will they experience this type of sickness at all? Like how our parents couldn't figure out a nintendo or can barely open an email, maybe our children will be like "duh dad, you puke after 10 min in VR while I can live here all day!"<p>I think children that grow up on the sea adapt to sea sickness, maybe similar here.
I don't have a VR headset so I can't speak from direct experience about VR, but I don't buy the author's argument that the disparity between the divergence system and the focusing system makes elimination of nausea impossible. I have two pairs of single-vision prescription glasses: one for walking and driving, and one for looking at computer screens. They have different focusing characteristics, and yet I can switch from one pair to the other without any disabling effects. Hell, I even wear a set of bifocals sometimes and switch back and forth from one second to the next. Some people even like wearing "progressive" lenses that have continuously varying focal lengths from the top of the lens to the bottom of the lens. Lots of people like using reading glasses too; I've never heard of anyone getting sick from that. I think the author is underestimating people's ability to get used to different focal lengths.
I quite enjoy using the current VR systems, Vive in particular is very impressive although not at all practical for most people.<p>PSVR is impressive and what I think will be the most successful system as it the best value and already has a ~40m user install base where it will "just work".<p>For me the biggest issue is using any of these systems for more than 20-30 minutes is uncomfortable as you have this big unit sat on your face. Whereas when I sit down to game I like to do so for a couple of hours but that just isn't possible (for me) with VR.
In addition to the distance cues the brain derives from eye musculature he mentions, there are also distance cues based on audio perception. This perhaps explains why dramamine has an odd impact on VR motion sickness.<p>The audio tech in this area is pretty weak. Dolby Surround is about "gee whiz" not detailed modeling of environments with customizations for the impulse response of each moviegoer's ear canal. Lots of work to be done.
A lot of people are selling their Gear VR on Ebay.<p>The Gear VR was a really cool device despite The Oculus software being crap. (Forcing online connectivity for offline app)<p>The device made me sick for hours after I used it personally.<p>Worth it!<p>It seems like people commenting don't want to take in the point of view that VR is just too early at this point.<p>VR is very cool but you don't want to develop for the hype train unless you have the dedication to get over<p>the hurdles and can take a a financial upset.
I used to play Doom, and Quake and would have to lie down and curse the developers. It was almost identical to having been on a sailboat in rough seas below deck. It's terrible.
I wonder if the same seasickness remedies used on water would work with VR. Frankly, after what I got from games 20 years ago, I'm really afraid more modern realistic VR will be even worse.
I've yet to blow chunks on a vr headset, however in 2015 I came close via a homemade headset for a nexus 7 with the cardboard app 'Drive City Rollercoster'
Dispite nearly falling down the stairs with a nexus 7 strapped to my head, (I broke my fall with my left arm)
I'm sure this tech will take off this year.
As an older consumer I have found that as I age I am more and more sensitive to these sorts of effects.<p>I used to love to play games, now I can only play "unrealistic" games. Anything 1st person makes me sick. This effect gets worse as I age.
I have a hard time believing that driving after using VR is the same as driving drunk. The problems described are real, but we need to work towards solving them sooner or later so why not now? It will get better and better over time.
I find the problem of the pain in the neck of heavy VR headsets a lot worse than nausea. I get nausea after maybe a couple of hours. But for the neck, I have to remove the headset regularly for it to be bearable.
I also felt VR will be ended up like what 3D-TV did, that something sounds great initially but can't be adopted for many people, you got dizzy and sick after a while and that is enough to stop using it.
I'm wondering why the Oculus developers didn't take those things into account, especially since they are so well known to experts. The most interesting challenges of VR seem, as of yet, unsolved.
What he neglects to mention is both studies raise concerns about simulations of <i>helicopters</i>. From the abstract of the first study:<p>"The simulators which exhibited the highest incidences of sickness were helicopter simulators with cathode ray tube (CRT) infinity optics and six-degrees-of-freedom moving base systems. Of those studied, fixed-wing, fixed-base, dome displays had relatively low incidence of simulator sickness."<p>If you read the second study, the VR environments tested we're exclusively those of piloting helicopters.<p>Since helicopters have a lot of lateral and rotational acceleration, its plausible that this is why the simulation sickness is so great.
Perspective projection is the problem. Make the following experiment yourself:<p>Stand in front of a tall building/chimney. Now look at the base of the building. Slowly raise your eyes to go from the bottom to the top. You perceive dimensions of the building as the same all the time.<p>Now do the same on camera. You notice the building changes its dimensions as you raise the view.<p>This effect will make you feel sick when you have it right next to your eyes. Brain simply does much more for our perception to work.
I've had an oculus for weeks and have none of these problems. I even played Ethan carter without comfort controls and as long as I'm not standing up its fine. Standing up while moving in vr just makes me lose my balance.<p>The only time I've gotten sick at all on vr is playing project cars, and that was only from reversing and going forwards a few times after a wreck.<p>It really sounds like he's basing this on no experience with the current generation of headsets.
It will work, it just won't catch on because people don't want to wear shit on their face all day and look like a moron talking to beings 90% of the population can't see. It's just a toy for gamers and developers right now. No telling when the general population will start using VR regularly but probably not until the devices start to look like a regular pair of glasses.