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

[gumboot]

What? Like how knowing that you're on a boat cures seasickness?

Yeah. Works for me. You have to watch the horizon to keep a grip on what the boat is actually doing.

Well if you need a gravitationally-consistent reference in your field of view then you might as well use a huge TV with head tracking to make it behave like a window.

[gumboot]

Come to think of it. If you want to support "any pre-existing game", you might just as well do a virtual really-cool-gaming-rig with a conventional (but awesome!) monitor which you can turn away from to look around your conventional (but awesome!) bedroom, with your supermodel girlfriend(s) cheering you on, or whatever.


Problem solved.

[pogo]

Yeah. Works for me. You have to watch the horizon to keep a grip on what the boat is actually doing. The horizon is quadrillions (or more, I don't know exactly) of tons of the earth, and it's not moving, all motion is relative to that, once you sort that out in your head, it all works, for me. There are people who just don't get seasick, and there are some who can't avoid it, I'm sort of in the middle, and knowing what's going on works for me.

Problem is 'looking at the horizon' isn't an option with VR. Unless the headset only takes up part of your view and you can see the room around you just as well. It which case it's not immersive VR and you may as well just use a monitor.

Motion sickness arises when the information from your eyes and balance organs (inner ear) disagree. Which is why looking at the horizon works. The solution with VR may be to be careful to accurately and realistically track the user's head for camera direction. Which may sound obvious but developers are used to putting in camera shake for head bob/weapon recoil/explosions, having players ride horses/vehicles/elevators, which they'll have to tone down.

There's also lag, from the device's sensors and as it takes time to draw and put things on screen. That should be fixable with prediction: use the current head position and speed to work out where it will be when you render stuff. The head is big and heavy and can't rapidly change direction or accelerate.

[pogo]

Samsung is making a VR headset for its phones and tablets

Wot? Technically why not, but why? A phone's going to be underpowered compared to a PC and console, especially as you'll have to deal with different spec devices. A smartphone's advantage is it's a powerful for its size computer you can keep in your pocket and use on the move. But that all goes out of the window with VR headset which will be bulkier even than a tablet and pretty hard to use while out and about.

It does open up some augmented reality possibilities. Maybe make it with a slot for a phone, and then the phone's camera combines with the device to present an enhanced version of what the phone camera sees. It would also be safer. Still you'll look a right dork, worse even than Google Glass, using it in public.

[Harlequin]

Yeah. Works for me. You have to watch the horizon to keep a grip on what the boat is actually doing. The horizon is quadrillions (or more, I don't know exactly) of tons of the earth, and it's not moving, all motion is relative to that, once you sort that out in your head, it all works, for me. There are people who just don't get seasick, and there are some who can't avoid it, I'm sort of in the middle, and knowing what's going on works for me.

Problem is 'looking at the horizon' isn't an option with VR. Unless the headset only takes up part of your view and you can see the room around you just as well. It which case it's not immersive VR and you may as well just use a monitor.

It sounds to me that having partial view might be the least nauseous solution. It does not take long for people prescribed glasses to adjust to consciously ignoring our uncorrected peripheral vision. Perhaps a new generation of headsets could be open around the edges to provide our brains with the consistent visual information they require. That would not be the same as using a monitor. Well... perhaps a stereoscopic monitor attached to a fixed point in front of one's eyes.

[zip accident]

What? Like how knowing that you're on a boat cures seasickness?

Yeah. Works for me. You have to watch the horizon to keep a grip on what the boat is actually doing.

Well if you need a gravitationally-consistent reference in your field of view then you might as well use a huge TV with head tracking to make it behave like a window.

I took your original quote for sarcasm. If that wasn't the case I apologise.

I do believe that the user has to knowingly co-operate in their suspension of disbelief in order that they don't have a real case of their inner ears telling them something different than their eyes with vomiting the result.

[Deckard]

Funky and related

http://gravitysketch.com/tablet/index.html

[gumboot]

I took your original quote for sarcasm. If that wasn't the case I apologise.

Yeah, it was sarcasm. I don't think just knowing you're on a boat helps at all. No matter how hard you know it. You need strong correlation between senses, and the only control you have over that is, as you say yourself, when you choose to focus your senses on things that correlate.

But the horizon is not the thing you want to focus on in an immersive game.

I would guess that if your head tracking is reliably anchored to the room (and presumably stable gravity) then all you'd need to worry about is keeping scenery full of anchor points to correlate to that. If the head tracking, or that data, is vulnerable to any kind of drift then that's where things are guaranteed to become awful quickly. It doesn't seem like it should be a hard problem, but I'm still frequently amazed at how people make hard problems for themselves out of nothing.

There's also lag, from the device's sensors and as it takes time to draw and put things on screen. That should be fixable with prediction: use the current head position and speed to work out where it will be when you render stuff. The head is big and heavy and can't rapidly change direction or accelerate.

Kalman filters are what the cool kids use.

[zip accident]

But the horizon is not the thing you want to focus on in an immersive game.

I would guess that if your head tracking is reliably anchored to the room (and presumably stable gravity) then all you'd need to worry about is keeping scenery full of anchor points to correlate to that. If the head tracking, or that data, is vulnerable to any kind of drift then that's where things are guaranteed to become awful quickly. It doesn't seem like it should be a hard problem, but I'm still frequently amazed at how people make hard problems for themselves out of nothing.

Actually, there are a lot of senses besides the traditional five. We've mentioned the inner ear, there's also the sense of how far your limbs have moved when you moved them yourself, and there are others but I certainly don't remember any of the names. However, the inner ear and how far your limbs have moved are enough to completely mess up VR. If the player doesn't admit that they are playing a game, then their inner ear will mess up, because it deals with acceleration in all three dimensions as well as rotation, and with a FPS or anything like that you are going to need to move, and if you don't have the room to walk around then the headset will be showing things that the inner ear knows aren't happening.

[gumboot]

Actually, there are a lot of senses besides the traditional five. We've mentioned the inner ear, there's also the sense of how far your limbs have moved when you moved them yourself, and there are others but I certainly don't remember any of the names.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception

I've never heard anything about nausea in relation to that. Lots of phantom limb problems for amputees[*], and maybe links to sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences, but not so sure about nausea.

That raises a question, though. Is nausea the only problem? Are some people going to be more unsettled by the other issues? Maybe that's all part of the fun.

I wasn't kidding when I said I looked forward to the moral panic around VR psychosis. I think that there's enough potential for odd effects to push somebody marginal just a little too far (just as a bad seafood salad might do the same!), with ensuing "protect the children!" mania.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's all eyes versus inner-ear, and there's no circuit through the conscious mind to mitigate that. If I get car sick while fiddling on a smartphone then I do not think "I am in a car", I stop what I'm doing and look out the window. I have to physically change what my senses receive to stop them fighting; meaning that I can't use them for what I want to do.

It'd be interesting to equip these devices with accelerometers which tried to mimick the sensitivity of human inner ear. Then one can start hunting for the cases where humans aren't equipped to notice disparity, and that could be exploited to expand the scope of the game within the constraints of the simulation.


[*] things like losing your leg when its last (signalling) position was bent at the knee, and finding that your leg seems to stick down through the bed when you lie down, and you have no means to straighten it. Which raises another question -- could VR draw a virtual leg over their phantom leg and help them to alter their perception of it?

[pogo]

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's all eyes versus inner-ear, and there's no circuit through the conscious mind to mitigate that.

It seems it can be trained. Car sickness is often something you grow out of. Sea sickness you maybe experience for a short time on your first trip but then don't experience again. So whatever part of your brain responds to it (and it's in the brain your inner ear and visual senses meet) can over time get used to it.

Doing that for a trip you have to make is one thing though, especially when you can mitigate it by looking out of the window/looking over the side. It's a different matter for entertainment, especially as you can't just 'look out of the window' of VR goggles. You can rip the things off and take a break but you'll get tired of doing that very quickly and it will destroy any sense of immersion and game continuity.

The key might be how long it takes for the nausea to go away. A few minutes might not be a problem. But an hour, or several hours? That's more than you spend playing many games. Trying to estimate it someone here who recently got over car sickness had it for probably years before, and still gets it on long uncomfortable rides. It may be the same for VR: you can get used to it so it becomes easier but it never goes away completely.

[gumboot]

Sea sickness you maybe experience for a short time on your first trip but then don't experience again.

That hasn't been my experience at all. While I've never thrown up from seasickness, and I have suffered various degrees of rough sea in various-sized boats, and across 30 years I've seen some decline in my sensitivity but there are still be occasions which I find very unpleasant.

[Istar]

Which raises another question -- could VR draw a virtual leg over their phantom leg and help them to alter their perception of it?

Well now, that IS an interesting question. And opens the door to possible treatments for a whole range of body integrity-perception disorders.

[gilesgoat]

Sea sickness you maybe experience for a short time on your first trip but then don't experience again.

That hasn't been my experience at all. While I've never thrown up from seasickness, and I have suffered various degrees of rough sea in various-sized boats, and across 30 years I've seen some decline in my sensitivity but there are still be occasions which I find very unpleasant.

BOLLOCKS

6 months on board of a ship during the army working day & night in that )**)(£*"$)(" ship .. .. when the sea moves .. it moves .. and I don't know about horizon but I can tell you trying to work and cook and being closed in a damned kitchen for sometime even 3 days in a row without any contact with the outside not even a window after 24 hours you are constantly with shifting gravity all the time it gets really MENTAL.

I remember the stages go from nausea to really a terrible headache to "kill me here I can't go on like that"/I feel like I have a fever/cold/flu all time.

"Solutions" that we found working ( to an extent - it does not remove it completely ) :

- eat dry stuff
- eat salty stuff
- DO NOT drink any significant amount of fluid - no water at all
- drink very strong coffee ( gives you 'a sort of boost' that keeps you 'ok' for 25 mins or so )
- possibly go to lay down in a horizontal position BUT when you get up it's like "the hammer of dawn" on your head/body, horrible feeling

.. this is how I became "Mr 13 espressos a day don't get close to me or I'll bite you".

But no .. I can tell you "it does not matter how long you been into that, it's ALWAYS BAD" and it continues to be bad quite a long after.

Just "simple sea" ( Adriatic ) you do 3 days out then you get finally on land for other 3 days at least you can't still walk straight and your head is wobbling all the time.

You can get a bit used to it, but if/when the sea is really bad NO ONE I talked to even people that been really 30 years on boats or so told me to be immune to it, they
ALL told me that to various degrees you are always going to feel it.

[gilesgoat]

Besides VR is ALL about motion prediction, useless I repeat here what been already quite studied an explained ( read the OR docs ) in essence you have a sensor that tells you where you are at X .. but then you should read this, put it into a PC, generate an image, send it to the display .. between this and that it ends up you ALWAYS have something that is NOT 'AT X' but 'AT X + time' and in that moment your head/eyes are already somewhere else.

Without motion prediction "nothing would work" part of the blur/problem is exactly be able to have "the best possible prediction and the smallest possible lag" this is why VR is ALL about "60 fps OR NOTHING" .. less than that .. it's problem.

Studies says that "to be real good" you would need 300 fps or so.