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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: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Friday December 09 2016, @05:29PM
Actually, pretty much all your objections already have potential solutions being worked on, they just haven't been integrated into first-generation systems. Light-field displays *do* display depth of field and require focal adjustments to bring near/far objects into focus. Pupil tracking offers more accurate stereoscopic separation. Heck, the Kinect has been doing whole-body tracking for years, probably well enough to offer convincing virtual presence, especially when combined with the more accurate hand tracking from motion controllers.
>Even motion is a big one. You see yourself moving, but your body doesn't feel motion / acceleration.
Even nothing, that's probably the single largest ones, and is closely related to lag issues as well - if you move your head, and your view of the world doesn't immediately move to match, you've got issues. A similar effect to having an inner ear infection that prevents your accelerometers from accurately detecting your actual motion.
Assuming lag is acceptable though, the rest can be worked around. The Vive's room-scale VR is an obvious solution - if you're actually moving around, then the VR world only needs to reflect the same motion. Obviously there's a limited range of games that can be played in that manner for now, but it's basically an early-version holodeck experience. There's also a number of variations on the theme of omnidirectional treadmills that allow for more traditional FPS-style gameplay, though I haven't heard if they have a notable impact specifically on nausea.
And then there's the ability to restrict the kinds of motion your virtual avatar is subjected to - like a suspension roller coaster, you can subject people to considerable accelerations while making sure that their experienced acceleration is almost entirely "up", i.e. experienced primarily as variations in the strength of gravity. That might well dramatically reduce nausea as well. And of course it seems that having extremely visible cockpits helps dramatically as well - if your immediate virtual environment is stationary, what's happening on the other side of the windows seems to have far less impact on motion sickness.
Basically we're in the very early stages of VR - the hardware still has lots of room for improvement, and developers are only just starting to learn how to use it effectively. It's completely to be expected that there will be considerable issues. Give it 5-10 years of actually having a market for VR content, for developers to unlearn a lot of the screen-based content development wisdom, and for gen 2 and 3 hardware to come out. Then tell me VR is doomed.
Right now it's not yet ready for mainstream adoption, but then there was never any realistic possibility that it would see such adoption anyway - it's still too expensive, the content too limited, and the experience too crude, to appeal to much more than the hard-core gamer segment, which has already trained themselves once to get past the nausea of immersing themselves in the visual feedback of a jerkily moving screen. The professional applications are also already taking off, and may well provide enough of a market to maintain both hardware and software advancement even if consumer uptake of early-gen hardware falters.