First person shooters already make some people feel nauseous. It’s the disconnect between your vision telling you that you’re moving while everything else, especially your balance centers, saying you’re not.
VR kinda makes it even worse if you’re not on some 2D treadmill
there are pros/cons to each brand, plus there are tons of models across each product line. I own many headsets (index, vive original, vive xr elite, oculus dk2, quest 2) and honestly I can’t say any one of them is the best as each is unique from the screens (oled VS not), wired/wireless, full body tracking, standalone VS pc, comfort, etc.
That being said, I personally go for the vive over quest as it has more accurate tracking (laser VS camera), full body tracking, better screens (OLED), and works better with steamvr.
Plus as a VRChat user I can use vive advanced controls which is a godsend for expressing yourself in VR, other controllers just don’t have as much flexibility in terms of mixing expressions and being able to set intensity levels to each expression ingame.
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.
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.
The problem is in a car, your body is actually moving and your sense of movement aligns with what your eyes are seeing. I’m not an expert but there’s something about fluid in your ears moving?
When it comes to gaming on a flat screen, your eyes are interpreting movement but you are not moving. This, from my understanding is what causes the motion sickness.
I can’t use these VR headsets because they make me sick and give me migraines. I’m just fine playing on a TV or monitor though.
Being in a car or aeroplane is totally different from playing a game, VR or otherwise. The motion sickness is a result of a mismatch between the sense of your own motion from what you are seeing, and the sense of your own motion from your inner-ear (which is basically an accelerometer).
In a car or an aeroplane, as long as you are looking at the window then there is no problem. (But often people get car-sick if they try to read a book or something, because then they can’t see the motion - they can only feel it.) But in a game, you can see the motion but not feel it - so that can also give motion sickness.
Many modern first-person games have an option for ‘mouse smoothing’ (or something similar), and that generally help reduce or eliminate motion sickness.
I can spend hours doing VR, prefer standing but some games are sitting. High paced jumping/spinning/flipping games. Elite dangerous, Sorento (sp), robo recall, windlands. No issue of sickness at any point, even with fps drops and frame hangs
Good for you, I could do all that on a ship out at sea using a laptop with a 1070 and a wired headsetand and could also not get sick.
Doesn’t change the fact that literally like half the people I ever tried to introduce to VR have immediately felt violently sick to their stomach within minutes and some did try to get over it. With multiple attempts.
I only play standing games that stick within the confines of room scale, that way all my movements are natural.
When I play other games, it’s teleport or nothing, no other locomotion form works for my, my sense of balance is to sensitive, and I haven’t had the time to work to get used to it… and swinging on vines is way out no.
Curiously I also get severe motion sickness when I drive go karts, but not when I drive cars. Although, sitting in the passenger seat, especially the rear seats, however can be a problem sometimes if I’m going around windy roads)
I’m young and have played computer games since childhood, I never bought a VR headset cause anything more than 20 minutes and I feel dizzy as fuck.
VR needs an overhaul for me to actually buy into it, I honestly just think the headsets aren’t going to work, I don’t think a higher refresh rate will fix this
I’m not sold on the gaming side of it but I loved my quest for movies. I’m planning to buy another one one day and it’s something that I’ll consider essential for old age retirement.
I read this as “40-70% of VR developers don’t know what they are doing”. What needs to be done to avoid motion sickness has been known for a long while now.
You get used to it. It helps to have a good graphics card so that the frame rate is high enough. I am sad many good games don’t support VR. I.e. Start Citizen, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. Yes, there are mods for it, but it should be supported natively (if mods can do it, why can’t the developer?). It is just so much more immersive to be able to look around naturally and see stereoscopic.
the developers don’t do it because they know barely anyone will buy the game just because it also supports VR. it’s just not worth the money.
plus, people will eventually make a mod anyways, and they are completely fine with benefiting from random people’s unpaid work. Who wouldn’t take all the upsides without any of the downsides?
In the case of Star Citizen, they used to support it, but since the game is still being actively developed in the alpha stage it kept breaking. Not worth the time and money to keep fixing it, so they put it on hold. As far as I know, they still plan to support it after the main feature set is stabilized and they go into polishing mode.
But I agree, it would be great if it still/already had native support.
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