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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:53AM (#439078)

    You just don't have legs.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @09:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @09:11AM (#439084)

    Abstract: The virtual reality head-mounted display Oculus Rift induces motion sickness and is sexist in its effects.

    Expect it soon to be forbidden on the base of anti-discrimination laws!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:00PM (#439170)

      Bleh. Skimmed right over that part but there it is. And yep, that's the death knell for VR. Can't upset pwecious women. Damn.

  • (Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday December 09 2016, @10:41AM

    by Rivenaleem (3400) on Friday December 09 2016, @10:41AM (#439099)

    Do women tend to suffer more motion sickness in cars/planes than men?

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:57AM (#439103)

      Women are bad drivers, irrational, hysterical, should stay in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

      Does that about cover it? .... no, one more thing. Cumdumpsters.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @01:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @01:34PM (#439142)

      I was wondering the same thing.

      Seasickness is related to the body's physiologic response to poison (uncertain sense of balance, then vomit to get rid of the poison causing it). Women are supposedly more sensitive to the smells of poison or spoilage (and it increases when pregnant), so it may make sense if they were also more sensitive to balance/motion sickness.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @06:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @06:18PM (#439287)

        While I like the poison theory of motion sickness (as in, it is a good idea to vomit after accidentally eating that magic mushroom...), I don't think there is any proof that this is the only/correct explanation of the problem.

        I've been testing driving games (simulators) since the mid-1980's at gaming companies, and never had any simulator sickness. After all those years I thought I was either a tough guy or lucky to be unaffected...until a few years ago when I was in an unfamiliar driving situation behind a big surround screen, high def, very low latency. The nausea hit me like a hammer to the stomach, it took about 24 hours before I was mostly feeling back to normal.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @07:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @07:07PM (#439328)

          I don't think there is any proof that this is the only/correct explanation of the problem.

          You seem to be correct. I guess the only evidence is fMRI of the poison-vomiting-response portion of the brain being active, but it may light-up as a general response.

          Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 09 2016, @08:29PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 09 2016, @08:29PM (#439383) Journal
          Well, what would be the evolutionary advantage of throwing up when you have conflicting motion cues? If it's not some more important (to survival) system triggering on bad sensory data, then what is causing it?
          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 09 2016, @08:35PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 09 2016, @08:35PM (#439388)

            If food poisoning caused middle ear infections it would totally be worth it.

            Going back to OPs original post WRT sailboating I've noticed no trend WRT male/female seasickness.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:06PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:06PM (#439426)

            > what would be the evolutionary advantage of throwing up

            Sorry, I guess mentioning the magic mushroom wasn't clear enough? If you eat something and start to hallucinate or otherwise have vision problems, then your optical sensation is not agreeing with vestibular and haptic/tactile senses -- and you might have been poisoned. Simulators give you one set of optical stimulation and no motion inputs (or incorrect motions in the case of most motion bases). So the theory equates these two situations.

            Interestingly, for the professional racing simulators (Formula 1, $M installations), I've heard that when a test driver gets simulator sickness, one common cure is to go outside and ride a bicycle around. On a bike all the visual and motion cues are real and somehow this relieves the symptoms.
               

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:46AM (#439101)

    I have a PSVR and found I get sick really easily. It's full on travel sickness like I used to get in the back of cars as a child and on ferry journeys, combined with headache and profound discombobulation which can last all day. Some things which help:

    * Smoking weed before a VR session
    * Chewing ginger sweets - these are sold as natural travel sickness aids
    * Direct a fan on your face while playing - this also helps with immersion. Standing on a rooftop of Gotham city with a breeze blowing on your face is awesome. A fan also helps prevent fogging up of the lenses which can happen before the headset warms up.
    * Choose which types of game to play carefully and ease yourself in. Don't overdo it when you first start or you'll turn yourself off VR.

    I think you gain your VR legs over time and I'm not expecting VR sickness to be a problem for me in the future. I can play games now that I couldn't on day one.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 09 2016, @10:57AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday December 09 2016, @10:57AM (#439105) Journal

    I used to fly aerobatics with no motion sickness problems, but 5 minutes in an Oculus Rift had me pulling off the headset to avoid throwing up. The human brain uses a large number of visual clues to build a 3D map of the surroundings. These include focal depth (your lens is constantly flexing slightly to move your focal depth to scan for depth), which no modern VR system can emulate. If this doesn't match the coarser signals (e.g. stereoscopic separation) then your brain gets signals that something is subtly wrong and the evolved response is to trigger vomiting because a probable cause for this in our ancestors was eating something bad.

    One of the big issues with Oculus Rift is that it doesn't track your arm position. Seeing parts of your own body is a very important clue. If you see parts of your body and they're not where you think they are, then this can very quickly make you feel sick. In their roller coaster demo, for example, putting my arms out in the air where they were in the simulation put off the feeling of motion sickness for a little while.

    Even motion is a big one. You see yourself moving, but your body doesn't feel motion / acceleration. This is the exact thing that causes motion sickness in ships - your body feels motion but your eyes don't see it.

    VR is a fad. Incremental improvements of the current tech will never give something that works well. Augmented reality, on the other hand, has a huge number of interesting applications.

    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Friday December 09 2016, @01:44PM

      by coolgopher (1157) on Friday December 09 2016, @01:44PM (#439145)

      > VR is a fad. Incremental improvements of the current tech will never give something that works well.

      I suspect history will prove you wrong on this one. People love escaping from reality, and we'll keep on plugging away on this tech bit by bit until it's as immersive as the "real world" we know today. And why shouldn't we? Reality is all a matter of perception, and unless your religious (or other) persuasion anchors you to our current one, why not take the chance to experience things not possible on this plane of existence?

      Actually, I'll provide a counter argument right here - because likely it'll be only accessible to the rich, and it'll further increase the divide between the haves and have-nots, and that's a bad idea both morally and practically. But other than that, what has the romans ever done for us? ;)

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @03:25PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday December 09 2016, @03:25PM (#439186) Journal

      VR is a fad. Incremental improvements of the current tech will never give something that works well.

      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.

      These include focal depth (your lens is constantly flexing slightly to move your focal depth to scan for depth), which no modern VR system can emulate.

      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]
    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday December 09 2016, @04:07PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday December 09 2016, @04:07PM (#439208)

      I used to get sick playing DOOM in the 90's. The more I did it though the less it would affect me. Improved graphics in more recent games seems to help as well, so I expect that as resolution, framerate, and response speed improve with future headsets this issue will diminish.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Friday December 09 2016, @05:29PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 09 2016, @05:29PM (#439256)

      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.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by rob_on_earth on Friday December 09 2016, @11:03AM

    by rob_on_earth (5485) on Friday December 09 2016, @11:03AM (#439108) Homepage
    I have been using an HTC Vive for a while now and apart from the "roller coaster" and "on-rails" experiences I do not get sick. And that is a big deal fro me because I get sick within a few minutes of being in car and not being able to see out the front clearly.

    I did try some Unity 3D work for the Vive and I had two experiences that left me quite ill for some hours afterwards. The first was trying to play a 4k video inside the world I created on a sphere, the frame rate went well below 90fps the lag was nasty. The second time was when one of the sensors was blocked and the world started to tip to slowly up to 20 degrees as the headset tried to compensate.

    So from my single point of view, keep the frame rate higher than 90fps, mkae sure sensors are not blocked and avoid experiences that would make you sick in real world.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @12:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @12:37PM (#439128)

    What about using VR technology to "lie" to the brain to help alleviate or counter motion sickness?

  • (Score: 2) by VanderDecken on Friday December 09 2016, @03:38PM

    by VanderDecken (5216) on Friday December 09 2016, @03:38PM (#439190)

    Nausea due to VR is nothing new. When I was in university in the early 90's and taking my computer graphics courses, we were just then at the transition point where computers were getting fast enough that you could have VR without motion sickness. Prior to that, nausea was a given. And keep in mind, to avoid it the graphics were limited to coarse wireframe. Even so, it was a mind-blowing experience despite the heavy goggles, gloves, and bundle of cables.

    Ever since then, it's just been a balancing act between resolution, amount of motion, and avoiding nausea in most people. I guess these guys pushed it a bit too far this time.

    --
    The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by WillR on Friday December 09 2016, @04:11PM

      by WillR (2012) on Friday December 09 2016, @04:11PM (#439214)
      You don't even need goggles, first-person games on a big enough screen can do it for some people.
      There was an arcade I used to go to (kids: ask your parents what an "arcade" was) that had a 4-player Quake machine where each player had a chair with a trackball for looking around on one arm and move/shoot buttons on the other, and a huge curved projection screen right in front of them where it took up almost their whole field of view. It was immersive as hell for the 1990s, but I could only play 1 or 2 rounds before the feeling that was about to hurl set in. Spending hours playing the same game on a crappy 13" CRT was somehow never a problem...
  • (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.
  • (Score: 1) by Tara Li on Friday December 09 2016, @09:08PM

    by Tara Li (6248) on Friday December 09 2016, @09:08PM (#439400)

    http://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/ [qz.com]

    This article from 2014 details work started in 1997 that covers this issue - and identifies at least one cause of it ("shape-from-shading").

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Saturday December 10 2016, @05:38AM

    by deimtee (3272) on Saturday December 10 2016, @05:38AM (#439594) Journal

    Has anybody tried playing these games while taking anti-seasickness pills, such as "Kwells" ?
    How much difference does it make to the nausea?

    --
    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.