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posted by janrinok on Friday December 09 2016, @08:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the comfort-of-your-own-home dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by kaganar on Friday December 09 2016, @08:49PM

    by kaganar (605) on Friday December 09 2016, @08:49PM (#439395)
    From conventional mediums (e.g. film, computer games) people can stomach content with viewer movement and cut scenes which is great for content producers because they open up a lot of tools to create interesting cinematography and gameplay. In VR, if you truly respect users health, you will use neither -- especially not viewer independent movement -- but the push to create a "wow" factor is high. The push to make graphics as close to eye candy leads to poor frame rate. The VR industry has known for years that both these mechanisms are how you make people sick fast. The abstract is quite sparse on details -- they could in fact be viewing the rock climbing game demo'd in Best Buys on Rifts which is a hilariously bad game to demo because you fall if you fail. I've seen people tear the headset off their head in the middle of the aisle because of it. I've been using VR (as my day job) for a long time, and I'm susceptible to this phenomenon as well. The feeling of motion sickness does not go away quickly. But I've NEVER gotten sick from properly authored content. Also, the Oculus is more prone to poor tracking than the Vive, and newer users tend to have trouble adjusting the head mount properly -- the devil is in the details. All the abstract really affirms is what everyone already knows: VR is in its infancy. With time, content developers will get better, viewers will become more tolerant due to exposure, and slowly VR will become as common as TV and tablets, and you'll wonder when that happened as you escape from your AR-laden job into your home immersive VR environment for entertainment.
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