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Wearing a VR helmet seems to cause motion sickness in a majority of people and it affects women more frequently than men.
In a test of people playing one virtual reality game using an Oculus Rift headset, more than half felt sick within 15 minutes, a team of scientists at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis reports online December 3 in Experimental Brain Research. Among women, nearly four out of five felt sick.
So-called VR sickness, also known as simulator sickness or cybersickness, has been recognized since the 1980s, when the U.S. military noticed that flight simulators were nauseating its pilots. In recent years, anecdotal reports began trickling in about the new generation of head-mounted virtual reality displays making people sick. Now, with VR making its way into people's homes, there's a steady stream of claims of VR sickness.
"It's a high rate of people that you put in [VR headsets] that are going to experience some level of symptoms," says Eric Muth, an experimental psychologist at Clemson University in South Carolina with expertise in motion sickness. "It's going to mute the 'Wheee!' factor."
Abstract: The virtual reality head-mounted display Oculus Rift induces motion sickness and is sexist in its effects. (DOI: 10.1007/s00221-016-4846-7)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @03:25PM
I don't think so. Worst case scenario, we forget about the headset era and pursue brain-computer interface VR, with the computer hijacking your inputs and outputs Matrix-style. Best case scenario, aggressive latency improvements and other little tricks make VR headsets good enough to fool the human brain. Untethering the headset will also be necessary to make the experience worth a damn, and that could require packing much better low-power CPUs/GPUs into the headset.
Programming for VR seems to have some advantages over AR. The VR view is just an evolution of what we already do: stare at a screen. VR just puts the screen in our entire field of view. Lazy programmers can easily port an older game to VR without much modification. AR on the other hand requires some careful UI and interactivity considerations, and very good machine vision algorithms.
The see-through AR screens also seem to be of a lower quality than VR screens, and cover a smaller field of view at this time. I'm sure they will improve, but I have no interest in stupid implementations like Google's dead one, which put a tiny display in the corner of your FOV where you would strain to see it. HoloLens also has a disappointing FOV.
As always, I will let chumps with too much money work out the kinks and fill the barf bags.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/uncross-those-eyes-researchers-solve-vrs-depth-of-focus-headaches/ [arstechnica.com]
https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee368/Project_Spring_1415/Reports/Konrad.pdf [stanford.edu]
I wouldn't rule out better body tracking either. Having an external Kinect/Leap-like sensor could be a latency issue, but a couple of electrodes on the scalp might be able to anticipate movements before you make them (yes, I am being very generous here).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]