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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: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 09 2016, @10:57AM
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
> 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
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]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday December 09 2016, @04:07PM
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
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.