To Reduce VR Sickness, Add a Virtual Nose

I feel like such an idiot. I read it like noise, as in added digital noise.<p>The first image&#x27;s caption said &quot;note the massive nose in the middle of the game&#x27;s frame&quot; and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise.<p>&quot;particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there.&quot;<p>Yeah, that&#x27;s me not finding the nose.

Hopefully I&#x27;m not too late to weigh in on this one but I&#x27;ve experienced this personally for years.<p>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&#x27;s and after that I was unable to play most FPS games.<p>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... &quot;Hood view&quot;, 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.<p>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.<p>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.

They should put a blur on the nose. Having it in focus just seems wrong and perhaps distracting from their goal of giving the brain what it expects. Heck, I just tried right now and I&#x27;m now old enough that I can&#x27;t even get my nose into focus at all anymore (pretty sure I could when I was a child, lenses are getting harder to flex I guess).

&gt; <i>Whittinghill says this is likely a result of “change blindness,” a perceptual phenomenon that allows our perceptual system to ignore objects that we see over and over again.</i><p>Uhhh, that&#x27;s not what change blindness is at all. It sounds more like vanilla sensory adaptation. Our visual system has adapted to the presence of our nose in our visual field (since it&#x27;s always there), which is why we don&#x27;t notice our noses in day to day life and don&#x27;t notice a virtual nose placed at the same location.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Change_blindness" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Change_blindness</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neural_adaptation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neural_adaptation</a>

Now I&#x27;d like to know: do people who have lost their nose irl experience more motion sickness?

Colour me skeptical.<p>You decreased sickess by 13.5% by covering up about that much of the screen.

For a second, I thought this was going to be about adding smells to the experience... which would probably be a very bad idea, as nauseating experiences condition strong smell aversions.<p>I wonder if a nose pincher would decrease motion sickness with VR.

Am I the only one who never experience any VR sickness at all? Regardless of latency. Is it really that big of a problem?

It reduced motion sickness by about 13% - and appears to cover about that amount of the screen. Are we sure the effects aren&#x27;t simply because you are effectively covering up part of the screen? What happens if you cover up 50%? 100%?

I&#x27;ve often wondered if it would help by adding retina tracking and adding the subtle shift in perspective it creates.

Imagine the possibilities! You can now pick your own virtual nose! With virtual avatars in social apps, you can pick your friends&#x27; noses, too! Or their hair, or their ears, or their pets. You can make your friends look exactly like you want.

<p><pre><code> shown to reduce the effects of simulator sickness by 13.5 percent. </code></pre> How do you calculate such an exact value?

Does that mean that path tracing engines like Brigade[1] fit well with VR?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y</a>

Interesting, this article not only made me more aware of my own nose in my field of view, it increased my awareness of the fact that my left eye is my dominant eye (a bit unusual given that I am right-handed). It takes effort for me to notice my nose from the right and after reading this I have a distinct sense of my nose being off-center to the right side of my face. Weird! I wonder if this trick would work by placing the virtual nose only in view of the dominant eye (I suppose that&#x27;s more complicated to implement, though).

I reckon the noses in the examole images are on the wrong side. The images are cross-eyed, e.g. the left image is for the right eye. The nose on the left image should therefore be on the left, and vice-versa for the other eye. You can test that by crossing your eyes so the images match and try focusing (the first try takes a while). If you see a stereoscopic image, the source is cross-eyed. If it were not, The depths in the image would look &quot;weird&quot;, because they&#x27;re inside-out.

Argh, the stereogram animations on this page are of the &quot;stare into infinity&quot; type rather than &quot;cross your eyes type&quot;. The first one is impossible for me due to insufficient interpupillary distance, combined with my inability to diverge my eyes. :)

This is something you experience a lot with GoPro sort of footage as well. A trick in that world is to show part of the helmet or bike (or whatever the camera is attached to) to give you a steadying point because, otherwise, the camera appears too shaky and crazy.

Original post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9262743" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9262743</a>

Would this still benefit someone of East Asian descent who doesn&#x27;t see their nose?

It&#x27;s called seasickness and known for thousand of years.<p>You get it or you don&#x27;t and there is nothing technology could do about it for a long period of time at least.<p>Well someone could take some medicine before playing VR, but that would be a little bit too much, wouldn&#x27;t it?

Am now conspicuously aware of the nose in the middle of my face.

This is... genius.