Look for sea sickness remedies, you should find ginger chewing gum. Chewing gum itself reduces motion sickness and at least if you follow this study peppermint is actually more effective – though ginger itself (without the chewing part) is known to be effective so have you salt shaker ready to sprinkle on their sample size.
Try stuff and see what works for you, it’s not like you’re injecting chemotherapy meds.
As you get older, ginger is basically a cure for most things, and I’ve gone from hating it to craving ginger whenever I feel down.
Ginger candy and ginger beer are fantastic, as long as you’re using the stuff without sweeteners. Sadly, some brands load their stuff with lots of additives and artificial sweeteners to save costs/reduce sugar.
Meanwhile I’m over here still wanting to try it out.
The closest I’ve ever gotten was trying out virtual boy when it was brand new in stores and had one set up for people to try out.
I’d love to try it before buying. Not really interested in buying without it, but that’s not how things work anymore. So I guess I’m just gonna skip it unless it gets massively popular and it’s just everywhere and I’m stuck missing out on something huge if I don’t have it.
Some best buy stores have demos in the US where you can try it out for a bit. I honestly find the social aspects to be the most interesting part of VR (and I’m not a people person). A 10 minute demo isn’t probably going to completely sell you on VR but they can answer questions etc.
Well apparently mine doesn’t. But I really don’t go there anyway. I went there for something specific a while ago to buy for someone else, but in general everything they would have I can get cheaper online somewhere else. Their online store occasionally has a good deal tho. If they had a demo for it I’d go to check it out tho.
I see VR arcades in suburban malls fairly often, maybe give that a shot first. The VOID experiences were great but they went out of business during the pandemic.
You just need a bit of knowledge that is tough to get without knowing it exists.
The main component of VR games that causes problems for people is when the motion in game doesn’t match the motion you are really doing. There are plenty of games that don’t have any of that. And even when you are ready to start trying games with that, you can overcome it if you experience it bit by bit. Just play until you start to get a warm/sweaty face or a bit dizzy feeling, then go do something else for a bit. You will build up the time it takes to trigger that feeling and it will be more mild as you keep training out of it.
I’ve been demoing to people for 10 years and have had less than 5% of people even get mildly nauseous during a demo, even fewer recently. The methodology of the test in the article can’t have been anything other than them picking the worst possible experience and having people endure it for an hour or until they felt sick with no explanation of what to look out for. Since 30% of people are literally completely immune no matter how bad their test could have possible been.
Even back with the DK2 and the crappy choices for software back then it was still pretty uncommon to make someone sick, and usually it was either my fault or a hardware issue rather than something that could be attributed to VR as a whole.
I am never sick when doing roller coasters or reading in a moving car, but I was really nauseous after my first 15-min VR session. I was pretty scared I fucked up buying a Valve Index only to get that much sick playing… But I had a feeling (hope?) that I could get used to it: After about 2 weeks of playing a bit every night I was no longer getting sick at all. I can go until the controllers run out of battery now.
To me the effort was worth it, but I have a friend that was the opposite and didn’t enjoy experiencing virtual worlds that way…
My advice: If you ever try it then try to ignore the sickness -as you can get used to it- and focus on how much you enjoy being immersed in virtual worlds.
Posted this reply in another instance, but several years ago researchers found that adding a virtual nose dramatically decreased motion sickness. However, I haven’t seen any developers adding one in games. I wonder if it’d help.
Ok that sounds interesting. I just though that glasses wearer might not have motion sickness as often due to the glasses being similar to the VR(or keeping the glasses under the Headset
I wear glasses (which I keep inside the helmet) and have mild motion sickness when moving in VR. The faster I move in-game, the worse it gets. Racing games are OK because I don’t move inside the car, I suspect having a static dashboard is similar to a virtual nose.
Glasses wearer here, I still see my nose with the glasses on. VR gives me mild motion sickness but only when moving around in a “smooth” way (Teleporting or walking irl is fine but using regular controller movement makes me want to throw up after ~30 minutes)
Glasses wearer here. VR makes me nauseous af. And not just during, for hours afterwards. Its not an intense ‘I have to vomit’ but a queasy feeling that persists. I’m old though, and my kids have zero issues with it.
Surprisingly, subjects did not notice the nasum virtualis while they were playing the games, and they were incredulous when its presence was revealed to them later
Our nose is cleverly edited out of our our awareness but it’s most certainly there. Apparently the virtual one is capable of straddling the same fence.
Ye! Tbh one of my biggest pet peeves with VRChat is the fact that they shrink your head to avoid it interfering with the player camera, but the result is that you don’t have a nose. It’s not as obvious with human/humanoid avatars because, like you said, it’s normally “edited out” by our brains (though you can probably see it if you want to by crossing your eyes, I know I can see mine); but it ends up being super obvious with furry avatars due to the lack of a snout/muzzle. That said, I’ve seen a few furry avatar creators starting to add a snout (not sure how they do that, I think they parent a copy of the face onto the head bone), and it’s pretty neat. Maybe other avatar creators will follow suit.
Findings showed the virtual nose allowed people using the Tuscany villa simulation to play an average of 94.2 seconds longer without feeling sick, while those playing the roller coaster game played an average of 2.2 seconds longer.
Yeah instead of throwing up immediately, you won’t throw up until 2.2 seconds in. Problem solved!
The “Tuscany Villa” is an ancient demo that I tried in the Oculus DK1 in like 2014 or so, and it made me sick for hours. It uses very fast continuous movement instead of teleport, and it has a set of stairs that will make you instantly throw up if you try to climb them.
It’s is perfectly possible to create VR experiences that will not make anyone nauseous, Moss being a good example.
So you are saying that 90s is a remarkable improvement?
I would expect a huge difference in the usefulness of a simulated nose, depending on the content. In a roller coaster the movement of your head (rotation) and the movement of the carriage (translation) are separate and clearly defined this way. You control the Rotation while the game controls the translation. I don’t know what this villa demo is, but depending on how the movement is controlled, an unintuitive and unnatural system is bound to make almost everyone nauseous.
Any app that moves the camera (or thw whole world) without user input will make people sick, it’s just a law of good VR. Any app that doesn’t render at a stable 72fps+ will make people sick. Any app that simulates things that make people sick in real life, will also make people sick in VR.
On the other hand, any app that keeps a stable 90fps, that uses teleport with a very short fade instead of thumbstick movement, and that never messes with the camera position, will not make people sick.
Most people who have tried VR and have felt sick, were basically victims of awful, non-optimized VR experiences, and awful VR hardware like Google Cardboard and variants.
Like with everything, it would cause an uproar in the game world unless it were controllable. I wonder if it would also require sacrificing some usable pixels? If virtual noses take off, I can see video games being designed around them, but it’s possible that integrating one into existing games is harder. Games have a development lead time measured in years so fundamental changes take a while to integrate.
This isn’t even lies, damned lies, and statistics territory - it’s just nothing. I know VR motion sickness exists (I still get it even after an uncomfortable amount of time in SteamVR sometimes) but that’s… that’s not anything
There’s also different levels of VR. I can get sick with 3 degrees of freedom (pitch, yaw, and roll) if I move around with it on. But with 6 degrees (also includes movement along all 3axes), I’m peachy.
My best friend gets sick watching video games on a TV, but she does fine with 6DOF VR because it’s the disconnect between the motion she sees and what her body experiences that’s the problem
Yeah, if those numbers are anywhere near accurate I have had a significant outlier in my demos to the public so far. I have had less than 5% of the hundreds of people even get mildly nauseous. To get numbers like they are, I would have to cherry pick the worst possible experiences and not prep anyone at all.
“VR” doesn’t make most people throw up, being a terrible host might, but honestly even in that scenario I find their numbers hard to believe. Considering at least 30% of people are completely immune to it and don’t even need to be eased in at all. And another 30% would take a few hours of worst case scenario to get to a point where throwing up is even on the table. So unless they are specifically trying to provoke the worst possible response, their numbers aren’t even possible.
I wish more people who thought they couldn’t handle VR had come to me first. Or any responsible host.
Usually when numbers are presented that way it’s because there are many studies they looked at. So I presume there was one study showing a rate of 40%, another showing 70% and the rest of the studies fell somewhere in between those two extremes, with differences likely due to types of games, types of systems, and any number of other factors, including chance. They could have just averaged all the studies and quoted a number like 55% for example, but I think the other way actually paints a better picture of the data. It’s still possible they’re full of shit, but just presenting the numbers like that doesn’t mean they’re pulling it out of their ass.
It isn’t a problem with screen technology or processing technology or anything like that. We aren’t going to “tech” our way out of this.
It is a biological problem and as such, I think the appeal of VR will always be rather niche.
Even the best selling VR headset that I found online was the Quest 2 and it “only” sold like 15M units (honestly way more than I ever expected) with everything else being considerably lower volume. Compare that to the number of Nintendo Switches sold (130M) and you start to see how small the VR market is. I am very curious to see how the Sony VR2 will end up selling. I would love to get a pair, but I think all these headsets will be short lived.
VR has been around since the 20th Century. It is still here, and the market is expanding with more options as time goes on.
I wanted to play VR games since I saw the first VR stuff in the 90s. Finally got a Valve Index set this year, and it’s fuckin’ awesome. For all the Quest and Vive users on here saying VR sucks - it’s your gear that sucks.
Here’s a list of VR games that are fuckin’ awesome:
<span style="color:#323232;">HL Alyx (as everyone already mentioned)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Into the Radius (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in VR)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Grapple Tournament (UT2004 with grappling hooks in VR)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Dragon Fist Kung Fu (kung fu fighting in VR duh)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Blade and Sorcery (swords and sorcery)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Battle Talent (ripoff of Blade and Sorcery that is also cool)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Assetto Corsa (racing sim)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">DCS World (flight sim)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Beat Saber (music chopping)
</span>
I don’t know man. Feels like the whole damn field of medicine does just that. It fixes body problems with (medical) technology.
I would not at all be surprised if later we find a certain framerate or fov reduces motion sickness. Or maybe there’s some device that will go over our ears to trick our equilibrium from getting confused. Or maybe really good head tracking fixes it…
I think it’s more likely than not that we do “tech” our way out of it - just in some unforeseen way.
Only one way to find out, I guess. But still, a lot of this stuff comes from the high end that eventually trickles down, and I’ve never heard any discoveries that claim to have solved the problem. You’d think that since the military would be all over this tech, their limitless budgets would have stated they have sickness-free headsets. But in all these years, nothing.
In my mind they look like little Goblins or Ferengi who dream about all the other VR related stuff people can start buying when finally VR headsets become common.
It’s almost as if we shouldn’t listen to the marketing types that are trying to sell a product, but rather what the end users say.
I remember trying VR in the 90s: from the VirtualBoy to expensive and bulky setups in malls. I’ve tried 3D TV, google cardboard, and the range of consumer VR across the decades. They were all fundamentally flawed and like everyone else I was jaded. Then I tried what the 2020s had to offer.
My take away is that the technology available has finally reached the point where consumer VR is starting to become viable. We’re seeing the first real prototypes that have the capacity to evolve into something practical. It’s still expensive, bulky, and limited – but the fundamental issues that plagued previous generations of VR have mostly been addressed.
I feel like all I see in the VR space is endless articles on new hardware and basically nothing on quality VR games. I always thought I’d upgrade my Vive to an Index or something better one day, but so far the only compelling reason is HL: Alyx and I’m not spending that kind of money on a single game.
I had the same thought when I had a Vive. I ended up just buying the Index Knuckles controllers so I could play HL: Alyx. It really is the only AAA game available that makes it worth it IMO.
there are quite a few games out there that aren’t specifically VR games but are still very well suited for it because they put you in the cockpit of a vehicle. I haven’t really used my VR headset much for VR specific games, but I’ve been putting a lot of hours in Assetto Corsa Competizione because with VR and a wheel, I’m completely immersed. Same goes for people who like flight or space simulators
Ms flight simulator is quite clunky and hard to get good frame rates, but damn if you can put up with that it’s an awesome experience in VR. Also beat saber.
For quite awhile now those have been the reasons for VR. Sad really. Still these two things are compelling.
Because If you were going to spend 1 Million to make a game. Do you make a game that only a select few users can buy? Or do you make it so all gamers can buy it?
I see your point and I agree with it but the “opposite” is also true.
“If you have 1 million to make a game, do you make one in a system that is incredibly saturated with other games or do you do in a a system completely starved of good games?”
So it’s a compromise. I still agree that your point has a bigger weight but there is something on the other side of the scale even if lighter
I did have motion sickness at first but got used to it quite quickly. It actually disappeared on the 2nd/3rd day of use I think. I have absolutely no problem driving race sims all day long if needed, I’ve been using my VR gear for 3 years now.
The trick is not forcing it – the instant someone feels even remotely nauseous they should stop. If you the user starts actually feeling sick they’re liable to sensitize themselves to motion sickness.
So glad I didn’t but an oculus. All of my friends got themselves and their kids headsets and I’ve yet to hear about them being used often. Everyone I know that has a vr headset told me to never buy one. Complete waste of money.
Yeah of all the people I know that rushed out to get vr none of them mention it now, a lot of streamers I watch did a video or two then have never done another one. It’s such a great idea but also so many issues to work around.
I think most people don’t really want to be totally immersed, I like just relaxing watching some YouTube and playing games, having a snack and a drink, chatting to friends on my phone… a game has to be so much better if it’s going to hold my full attention but pretty much universally vr games are far worse than their screen based versions - hitman vr for example, there’s a million videos of people playing and laughing at how bad it is and almost none actually playing properly
IMO, the biggest limitations are the fact that it’s not quite there yet for resolution/graphics, and the devices are still a bit oppressive. If I could read text in VR and the goggles weren’t much more than my prescription glasses, I’d be using it a lot more. Would be cool to even just get rid of monitors and have all my workspaces VR.
But now, I have to don this unwieldy wired thing on my head, fiddle around for the wands blindly, and everything is kinda fuzzy. It’s an exhausting experience.
The OG Vive is pretty bad to read things with, I can attest to that. My brother had one and I know what it looks like. Screendoor effect, text difficult to read, and for some games the platform you’re standing on moves below your feet making dizziness worse.
I have the Vive Pro 1st-gen w/ Eye-Tracking, while I wouldn’t recommend buying it retail for the price it is, I would say it’s a huge upgrade over the OG Vive. The screendoor effect is nearly gone, text isn’t perfect but easier to read, and I’m not that upset about the resolution or refresh rate, I don’t get dizzy and the platform stays put below my feet in all of my games. Now, to be fair, the platform moving in some games may have been a difference between my brother’s and my PC, either drivers or the headset itself, and not the games, since it was Linux vs Windows. I never tried the OG Vive on my PC.
I’d recommend the Valve Index if you were to buy right now without doing some looking around. If you want to wait, there are some newer headsets coming soon that look promising, the next 2 months should be interesting as that’s when new hardware typically becomes available.
That’s my problem too… it promises so much, but massively undedelivers, and just ends up being a heavy weight strapped to my face when I could get a better experience by just looking at a monitor… better games too.
Manufacturers (especially Meta) are trying to sell it as if it’s Ready Player 1 level immersion, and it’s just not, and never can be.
I'm in the other camp. The first time I squeezed my 155m spaceship through the tiny mouth of a rotating space station in VR, I wept like a baby. (An Anaconda in Elite: Dangerous)
Yeah getting a new headset for the Oculus with a battery in the back is a comfort game changer. It’s not the weight of the headset that’s a problem, it’s that it’s all front loaded.
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