Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[toxibunny]

I'm looking forward to seeing more 3rd-person stuff in vr.

[Dio]

I may have missed some sarcasm here, but it's 3rd-person is hard in VR because conventional tracking and chase cameras aren't compatible with it. One of the Eutechnyx guys has played with one of their racers on it and mentioned that any external view cam is ten-second-barf central.

Maybe it's possible to develop a new type of camera that won't suffer this - approximately fixed in space, perhaps. Maybe something like the original Alone In The Dark. So your head would control a nearly fixed camera, but your controller would control the player in the environment, and it only moves by jump cuts...

[gilesgoat]

I may have missed some sarcasm here, but it's 3rd-person is hard in VR because conventional tracking and chase cameras aren't compatible with it. One of the Eutechnyx guys has played with one of their racers on it and mentioned that any external view cam is ten-second-barf central.

Maybe it's possible to develop a new type of camera that won't suffer this - approximately fixed in space, perhaps. Maybe something like the original Alone In The Dark. So your head would control a nearly fixed camera, but your controller would control the player in the environment, and it only moves by jump cuts...

I can confirm the 10 seconds barf thing.

There's an OR demo I can't remember the name where you drive a car.

As long as you are INSIDE the car and you can see the cockpit/steering wheel it's quite ok and almost 'natural'.

Then you say .. "let's try one of those outside cameras to see how it looks" ...

.... RUNS fast into the loo ...

It's SO strong you feel SICK for an hour or even more afterwards ..

[Yak]

that was Assetto Corsa. Yeah, fine inside the car, don't try the bonnet cam view on the drift track if you value remaining external to your lunch though .

But generally inside-the-vehicle sims are perhaps the least bothersome of conventional VR experiences because you have the in-game cockpit surrounding you and (largely) conforming to what you're feeling being sat on your arse in a chair. Going third person floating about somewhere behind the vehicle I could see being a fast ride to the toilet bowl .

[gumboot]

There are drugs for this, you know.

This suggestion is SO stupid that I will pretend is not here.

Besides all those drugs have nasty side effects.

Indeed; I rate them by how many rappers they've killed.

That's part of what makes me wonder about how anti-emetics can interact with other drugs, and other recreational activities, which might otherwise just make you puke everywhere.

Probably by making them all much more dangerous.


Also according to wikipedia, you can fix the problem by dropping the frame rate to 4Hz.

[gilesgoat]

The puke reaction stimulated is actually "correct" , according to certain documentation comes from the fact your brain is in disagreement with other senses, it concludes you are hallucinating so it believes you been poisoned and wants to empty your stomach. Incredible but that's the logic behind that feeling.

The problem lies fundamentally on the fact that "the device and the rendering is too slow", studies seems to say that to reach "perfection" you should be rendering images at 300 Hz or so refresh rate, other than that the best you can do is to use prediction methods to try to render the frame you need as close as possible to where it should be.

Still that won't save you from "disagreement" between mind and vision, if I give you a vision telling you "a certain type of motion/event should happen" and then it does not, no matter what follows you'll start to feel sick.

Basically "you know the limits of the device/tech, you have to work around those" you just don't have to make some things happen, I haven't tried yet to create an VR thing where you can freely move around, but I will, I think that's a pretty big challenge to make it sickness free, something "has to be found/studied" to avoid the problem.

I think one of the key elements is that you always need "a reference frame", something where your vision and mind can hang to.

[gumboot]

It's a shame about the reference frame. It seems to me that the possibility of taking all that away and experiencing something completely abstract could be an amusing diversion, if only it didn't make people puke all the time.

[Dio]

There is also a possibility that some habituation may be possible over time (Tom Forsyth had mixed notes on this one at GDC, commenting that while game developers seem to be able to tolerate things that the general public won't, motion sickness can actually get worse with habituation).

For example, some of the literature on early motor vehicles describes them as terrifying, vomit-inducing beasts when cornering - even moving at < 10mph, slower than humans regularly travelled on horse or by stagecoach.

[Darkflame]

Is it not like sea-sickness? If the body's sense of rotation is out of sync with what your vision shows?
Not sure how practical home 360x360 gyroscopes are.

[gumboot]

Is it not like sea-sickness? If the body's sense of rotation is out of sync with what your vision shows?
Not sure how practical home 360x360 gyroscopes are.

You don't get much control. You can spin a human around so they feel the constant acceleration of gravity in the necessary direction, but then they feel the spin that got them there and they don't feel the acceleration in the proper proportion. If you try to get much more elaborate then you're probably better off just doing things for real instead.

[Jimaroid]

I had my first dose of VR sickness a couple of weeks ago, it's not like anything else I've experienced. It was incredibly unpleasant and difficult to describe, it was a mind and body nausea feeling that lasted for a good couple of hours, in some ways very similar to the nausea I used to get from migraines. It wasn't just an issue of feeling like I was going to vomit, it was very much like being in a state of psychoactive wrongness.

To put it in context, I've sailed open seas in things ranging from dinghies, 30ft yachts and fishing boats to the usual speedcats and ferries and been sick so know what that's like. I've pulled many G in aerobatic flight and never lost my lunch once. I'm not very good standing next to high drops and sometimes get a mild dose of vertigo.

VR sickness is something different to all those. It's not just a loss of horizon making you feel queasy. It's a new illness, so the only way I can explain it is that VR sickness is going to be something we hear more about.

Interestingly, I've had plenty of time on the Oculus where I've felt fine. Minorescue has been great to play, it's familiar yet totally different to anything I've experienced before. It's a very very interesting, new and different experience. It's exactly the sort of thing that makes me excited about the new wave of VR. I'm not interested in simulated reality, I want simulated unreality, to experience the things that can't be done in our physical universe.

The demo that made me feel really ill was this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ir ... -cyberpunk

[Mqark]

This is an interesting article regarding the difference between biological men and women's different reaction to VR sickness

http://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift ... be-sexist/

[Dio]

I had my first dose of VR sickness a couple of weeks ago, it's not like anything else I've experienced. It was incredibly unpleasant and difficult to describe, it was a mind and body nausea feeling that lasted for a good couple of hours, in some ways very similar to the nausea I used to get from migraines.

I got a mild dose of it with the very-un-OR optimised demo I tried at a game dev. It was the way it screwed me up afterwards that was really notable, that no surface felt quite solid for a good hour or so.

Funnily enough, I often get something similar in California since I was in a quake there several years back; my lizard brain is oversensitive to movement, such as floor vibration, and once it sets in I never feel completely steady on my feet. But that's a completely unconscious reaction, it's not really something I'm actively thinking of.

[gumboot]

Funnily enough, I often get something similar in California since I was in a quake there several years back; my lizard brain is oversensitive to movement, such as floor vibration, and once it sets in I never feel completely steady on my feet. But that's a completely unconscious reaction, it's not really something I'm actively thinking of.

I'm fully acclimatised to earthquakes and I find the floors in California to be outrageously bouncy. It's just the way they're built.


I look forward to the moral panic about the stage beyond VR sickness -- VR psychosis.

[Dio]

Yeah, that's a big contribution. However, I get it standing outside, on concrete, too .