Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.
I’m in the other camp. The first time I squeezed my 155m spaceship through the tiny mouth of a rotating space station in VR, I wept like a baby. (An Anaconda in Elite: Dangerous)
First time I logged into the corvette and looked down the ship, it completely changed the game.
Just wish headsets weren’t so heavy.
I put a counterweight on the backstrap of mine, now it feels much less lopsided on my head
Yeah getting a new headset for the Oculus with a battery in the back is a comfort game changer. It’s not the weight of the headset that’s a problem, it’s that it’s all front loaded.
I have this counterweight style on my fpv drone, it is nicer… but that headset is also much lighter overall
Absolutely, ED in VR is indescribably breath taking. Basically an entirely different game
I’m usually fine with motion sickness while playing VR, but Elite man…
Idk about 40-70% that seems ludicrously high. I play all the time, mild motion sickness when I could not run the game well, otherwise no issues.
That seems high to me as well. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I’ve introduced probably 20 friends/family members to VR and none of them have had issues with motion sickness.
Simulation sickness is real, and more common than most gamers (a population that tends to self-select for people without that trait) think. This prevalence doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s not severe for everyone. You might not notice if a friend had it, except that they might play fewer video games with you. (They might not, some people are fine unless in full VR.) People aren’t generally keen on going “You know that thing that you like doing and that I’ve seen 5-year-olds do on the internet? I can’t do it, it makes me vom.” It doesn’t exactly feel cool.
That’s a true statement. They might just be macho, or they might be just sparing your feelings about a really expensive device you own. I know it made me nauseous, but I didn’t say anything because my buddy was excited and spent a lot of money on it. It’s not like I have to play it forever… it’s just that one time.
Mine’s so bad I can’t even play FPSs without getting sick, but being very open about that means I hear from a lot of people with less severe systems who will power through their nausea for short sessions with friends to avoid embarassment, which is why I think the way I do.
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I started by playing while standing and moving smoothly in game and I couldn’t last long before getting sick. Now I play seated with snapping in game movement and I can play for hours without issue. Depending on how you define it, I don’t think it’s surprising to see so many people say VR makes them sick.
40-70% seems reasonable if it includes the people who eventually get used to it.
The statistic quoted is for “users”, so presumably the measurement was made against randomly selected individuals of the general population (though the article frustratingly fails to cite a source). This is important because the effect is not evenly distributed among demographics, per the article:
What’s more, we don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others, but we know that there are numerous markers that make us more likely to experience it. Women, as mentioned previously, are more likely than men to get VR sick. Asian people are more likely than other ethnicities to experience motion sickness in general. Age is another factor—we’re more likely to experience it between the ages of 12 and 21 than in our adulthood… until we reach our 50s, upon which the likelihood increases again.
I feel like all I see in the VR space is endless articles on new hardware and basically nothing on quality VR games. I always thought I’d upgrade my Vive to an Index or something better one day, but so far the only compelling reason is HL: Alyx and I’m not spending that kind of money on a single game.
Ms flight simulator is quite clunky and hard to get good frame rates, but damn if you can put up with that it’s an awesome experience in VR. Also beat saber.
For quite awhile now those have been the reasons for VR. Sad really. Still these two things are compelling.
Beat saber is fun, but you definitely don’t need anything fancy to play that game
Racing games in VR are excellent. It’s all I’ve played in vr for quite some time now.
there are quite a few games out there that aren’t specifically VR games but are still very well suited for it because they put you in the cockpit of a vehicle. I haven’t really used my VR headset much for VR specific games, but I’ve been putting a lot of hours in Assetto Corsa Competizione because with VR and a wheel, I’m completely immersed. Same goes for people who like flight or space simulators
Because If you were going to spend 1 Million to make a game. Do you make a game that only a select few users can buy? Or do you make it so all gamers can buy it?
I see your point and I agree with it but the “opposite” is also true.
“If you have 1 million to make a game, do you make one in a system that is incredibly saturated with other games or do you do in a a system completely starved of good games?”
So it’s a compromise. I still agree that your point has a bigger weight but there is something on the other side of the scale even if lighter
I had the same thought when I had a Vive. I ended up just buying the Index Knuckles controllers so I could play HL: Alyx. It really is the only AAA game available that makes it worth it IMO.
I enjoy VR gaming and I get motion sickness.
The trick is to slowly acclimate, which takes patience and body awareness. Play for a short amount of time, pause the game when you start to feel slightly warm (or ideally just before that point), and go do something else for 20 minutes or so. With time, the play periods will get longer and the rest breaks will get shorter. Eventually you may stop needing the rest breaks.
A couple caveats: my sample size is 1, a hiatus of more than two weeks means retraining again, and you have to be firm with yourself about stopping on time.
I’m just trying to chill out with a game though, not slowly build up tolerance to cyberspace
Fair enough, and I didn’t mean to imply that everyone should. It’s totally understandable to decide the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
That is understandable in the moment, it’s alot if the only pay off is one game. But I would argue it is very worth it overall. It’s a small price to pay to permanently be able to handle it and have no qualms about future VR games/uses.
Plus most games and experiences don’t even cause VR sickness to the most susceptible people, so if you pick and choose your games and stick to ones that don’t cause issues, you can play VR without any conditioning right away too.
My sample size is much larger and indeed that has been the case. I’ve been hosting VR demos for 10 years now, since DK2. DK1 was bad news for people even slightly prone to motion sickness. 3dof is only viable for motion sick prone people if they can keep their head exactly where the game expects it to be, which you can’t.
With each new generation of headset, there has been so much less prep for getting random people into it and making sure they wouldn’t even get mildly nauseous. More software options without translational movement and much less obvious safety nets in games that do. You can always find at least one game/experience that is right up someone’s alley that won’t cause motion sickness even if it turns out they would otherwise have been really sensitive to it.
But I always let them know that when they do want to start branching out from the “safe” choices, that they should treat it like sea sickness, limit exposure at first and build up sea legs. Ideally never get to the point where you would throw up, try to stay as far away from it as possible while still having fun. You will eventually notice one day that you haven’t thought about it in a long time.
I take an off-brand Dramamine then hop in. Best if I know 20 minutes in advance that I’ll be playing since it takes a little time to digest, but I’m not doing chores.
You get used to it. I think people try it for a short while and give up.
Even playing fast-paced shooters on a widescreen will make me slightly “screen-sick” if I haven’t played in a month or two, but it goes away by the next day.
I found VR to be worse for the first couple days, but then it fades, too, and pretty quickly it becomes second nature.
Worst thing I found with VR headsets is the heat. Those displays and sometimes the gpu (depending on headset) get warm, and the HMD is snug on your face so it gets too warm sometimes.
Yea it’s like getting your sea legs. I could only play bone works on the valve index for about ~10 min before the nausea got to the “oh shit I might actually puke” level.
Just playing for 10 - 30 minutes a day basically cured the nausea within 2 weeks. After that I could play till the controllers died.
Truth. My kids pay Gorilla Tag, Population: One and a lot of the Meta Quest games (I use ReVive for my HP HMD), those are kinda tough for me to get used to so quickly, but I also play Elite: Dangerous on VR and that is the absolute shit on VR (except for the on-foot part…WTaF Frontier), takes me very little time to adjust to. I love VR, this is stuff I’ve been dreaming of since I was younger, and sincerely hope it doesn’t go the way of 3D TV. It’s a lot of fun.
I’ve heard games like Elite are less problematic, since you’re sitting still and the vehicle is moving. Apparently that makes it more natural, compared to moving around on foot in the game but standing still in real life.
I remember in the heyday of the N64 3D games would make people nauseous. Especially watching someone play, I remember my mother just couldn’t be in the room while I was playing Shadows of the Empire. She’s a BOTW veteran now. I think there’s definitely some getting used to it.
Yeh, it’s far worse to watch someone else play. I never watch YT vids of others playing. Blergh, can’t handle what they expect their brain to see when my brain is looking a diff direction.
For me, I seem to be one of the lucky people that don’t get motion sickness. I still don’t like VR. Why? Because the stupidly low resolutions they run at in order to achieve better frames makes it hard to even tell what’s going on. You can forget about being able to read any text. It’s like playing the game with a wire mesh separating you and the screen it’s so bad. Last time I used a VR headset was HTC vive though.
With DLSS you can achieve a pretty high resolution when using VR headsets. The HP Reverb 2 have a quite high resolution (2160p per eye) and the screen door effect is reduced significantly, IMO to the point that it’s not noticeable anymore.
The reason the Vive felt low resolution wasn’t because it was trying to get better performance, it was because it wasn’t that dense of a screen, and the lenses it used.
Depends on the HMD. I’m using an HP headset on a 3080 GPU. Framerates aren’t a problem. Screen door effect barely registers. Porthole…better than most, but FoV is pretty good.
It’s what you are expecting on an OLED widescreen vs the HMD you use? Is it going to be perfect in 4K? No…the tech isn’t there yet.
And you even have some vr fans just blindly claiming that all games should use gliding for movement and that having the option to teleport ruins the game even if they don’t use it. even though gliding (they call it natural locomotion) makes people sick because it’s obviously unnatural. They claim there is no need for movement systems that don’t induce motion sickness because it’s a matter of getting used to “natural locomotion” an anyone who doesn’t get better is because they are lying🙄.
That’s why I basically dropped VR, and even when playing, I only played beat saber. Alyx was a very bad experience for me (mind blowing game, but not if I’m sick after 15 mins) and with that, every other game with movements (no mans sky ship is very bad)
Did you play Alex with the free movement or the jump to location? I can’t do the free movement modes but jump works fine. Similar to beat saber in that you are stationary.
I’ve played with both basically, because the jump mode is a bit confusing sometimes, and it doesn’t work if you want to walk backwards. The VR game i played the most (after beat saber) is Elite Dangerous, because sitting in the spaceship actually makes things better, even when dogfighting
Which headset did you use? I had the same experience with my old Rift. Got a used Quest 2 recently and all my problems just vanished. I can even do smooth locomotion now which was impossible before.
Might be worth checking out some newer tech in case your HMD was first gen
I have a quest 2, tried with both standard lenses and prescription.
I’m sorry, hope this gets resolved for you in the future.
I got super sick the first few times I played. I could only manage 20 mins at most and I would be in bed for the rest of the day due to terrible headache which goes away the next morning.
After a couple of times of experiencing that, I could play for 1-2 hours and without a hint of headache. I understand how everyone is different but I’m kinda amazed how the body works sometimes.
What kind of statistic is 40-70%? For women It “goes up to 80%”, where does it start then? The numbers, what do they mean?
Usually when numbers are presented that way it’s because there are many studies they looked at. So I presume there was one study showing a rate of 40%, another showing 70% and the rest of the studies fell somewhere in between those two extremes, with differences likely due to types of games, types of systems, and any number of other factors, including chance. They could have just averaged all the studies and quoted a number like 55% for example, but I think the other way actually paints a better picture of the data. It’s still possible they’re full of shit, but just presenting the numbers like that doesn’t mean they’re pulling it out of their ass.
Yeah, if those numbers are anywhere near accurate I have had a significant outlier in my demos to the public so far. I have had less than 5% of the hundreds of people even get mildly nauseous. To get numbers like they are, I would have to cherry pick the worst possible experiences and not prep anyone at all.
“VR” doesn’t make most people throw up, being a terrible host might, but honestly even in that scenario I find their numbers hard to believe. Considering at least 30% of people are completely immune to it and don’t even need to be eased in at all. And another 30% would take a few hours of worst case scenario to get to a point where throwing up is even on the table. So unless they are specifically trying to provoke the worst possible response, their numbers aren’t even possible.
I wish more people who thought they couldn’t handle VR had come to me first. Or any responsible host.
40-70% and 80% for women sounds insanely high. I got a used HTC Vive to have beat saber parties with people and so far none out of about 20 people have experienced nausea even with heavy drinking.
Yeah, I would say there are definitely specific experiences you could make that make 80+% nauseous(I have pretty good VR legs but moving platforms can still disorient me). But a well designed VR game accounts for that, see something like Beat Saber.
Minecraft, sticking someone in the cockpit of a plane in war thunder are both no-nos from what I learned.
This. There is a reason why I can play beatsaber without feeling anything. But instantly get sick when playing pistol whip. The level moving around me is just disorienting.
I tried a vr headset at a convention where they had it just giving you a virtual tour of a farm to show off what the headset could do.
I had to take it off in less than 30 seconds because it was giving me a migraine and making me feel sick.
People get very stuck on this part, and I genuinely don’t think it’s the issue.
Look, l have very decent “VR legs” at this point, but I’m still not a likely spender and I don’t play long games in VR or crack out my headsets very often at all.
The issue is not motion sickness or space or tracking stations. The issue is having to put something on my face and not being comfortably on my couch, free to go pee or get a snack without removing a thing from my face.
And yeah, it’s uncomfortable. That’s part of it. A version of it that looks and feels like glasses would be less of a problem. But the thing is, those aren’t a thing that exists, they are not even an incremental step that we can get to at any point, and also TVs and monitors look just fine.
VR is a neat trick, and I gladly keep my headsets around for any time when something actually interesting pops up. But it was never going to be the next big thing.
VR continues to make more sense as an arcade-like attraction than as a consumer product.
Except for the part where I would have to wear a headset that 5000 other people have also worn. (And except for the VR sickness that, it turns out, I’m very sensitive to).
Having gone to a VR gaming business (the kind where you book a time slot, not an open arcade) I wasn’t impressed. The hardware isn’t really rugged enough for that kind of commercial use, so it was clear they were struggling to keep the gear in decent condition.
But besides that, the limited time nature of the setup meant that the game options needed to be significantly dumbed down so that anyone could pick it up in a few minutes. And there isn’t enough of a demand to create any interesting experiences, most of what was on offer was neutered VR games I’d already tried on my personal VR setup.
I played a six player zombie shooter at one where you had actual gun controllers, it was fun enough, and a good laugh for the half hour sesh, but it was the most basic game I’ve ever played in itself.
I played a dumbed down version of Arizona Sunshine at mine, which was much less satisfying than the real game
It makes a bit of sense for that, and there are HMDs built for that purpose that are… eh… less gross? I guess?
But mostly it’s a secondary device. A toy you keep on the side and pop out for parties or when something reignites the novelty.
VR is Guitar Hero. Does that make sense? I think that makes sense.
VR is Guitar Hero if Guitar Hero was $500.
I had a full compliment of Rock Band instruments, including the keyboard that came out with Rock Band 3. Also the PS2 and 360 versions of the Guitar and even the modular one they made for the remake on PS4.
So what you’re saying is VR is exactly like Rock Band.
But there are people who think VR is worthwhile. If 40% of those people get sick from it, then that’s 40% of the users gone
I’m in a similar boat. The use case where I really would use it regularly, simming, is hamstrung by two things. One, it’s so damn fiddly and laborious doing settings non stop to make it playable, and two, even if I get the settings right—I start noticing weird crap with my eyes after a couple sessions. Like you end up basically crossing your eyes all the time inside the visor, and I’ll notice fatigue/trouble focusing after using it a lot, what I would imagine it feels like to have a bad prescription or something (don’t personally have glasses).
And as you say, it’s bloody uncomfortable. Something like big screen beyond with good AR/passthrough would go a long way to fixing that I guess.
Bigscreen Beyond is a new vr headset that is a little bigger than pool goggles. It’s manufactured based off of a lidar scan of your face, and is supposed to be very comfortable.
Additionally full color passthrough is becoming more of a common feature so you can see the real world in good definition while wearing the headset. Also some models hinge the display upwards off of your face.
We are getting there. Personally I play for hours a day. Sometimes multiple 4 hour sessions if it’s a free weekend for me. I agree we need more experiences. But it will come.
See? No, this is what I mean. It’s not this. It’s not even Apples insane thing.
It’s not an incremental progression that will take us there. I will not pop out a headset of any kind and put it on my face as my default mode of engagement. Won’t happen. Not a thing.
It could be shaped like pool goggles, it could have color passthrough, it could have perfect resolution and field of view, it could solve the nausea problem, it won’t matter. Because the reality is that anything that straps to my face and substitutes my normal free field of view is by definition and by design a secondary device.
It’s cool that you like what they offer, and hey, unlike the weird people out there mourning Stadia you can still use all of these things.
But a replacement for PCs, TVs or consoles they are not.
Oh. It’s just that you listed these reasons as detractors. I don’t really know what you mean by default engagement. I’m not understanding your use case. Do you expect to be wearing VR goggles while you walk down the street to the convenience store? They are for play right now… not so much work.
Let me put it this way: I reach out for my PC handheld or my Switch to play small indie games all the time. Specifically to avoid even turning on my TV or going over to the living room.
Wearing a headset is an extra step of complication, discomfort and annoyance over turning on my TV, and my TV is losing out to more convenient devices even right now.
VR, no matter how advanced, is currently the third in a list of convenience when I want to play some Tetris Effect.
To be mainstream, VR needs to be at least as convenient as a TV, or ideally a handheld device. And the reason it can’t be that is not the tech, it’s that by definition VR requires a screen strapped to your face and a couple of dangly motion controllers.
Yeah I’ve been interested in replacing my index eventually, this headset looks pretty promising:
https://store.bigscreenvr.com/products/bigscreen-beyond
Each one is custom to your face, and it’s extremely light. I’m sure the future will bring more headsets like this
Summed up my feelings 100%. I love VR and almost every experience I’ve had with it have been great, but I’ve touched my Index probably 5 times in the past two years (and probably 3 of them were to watch VR porn). There’s just a big setup and time commitment required to VR game that a lot of people don’t have time for.
1990s: VR is the future. Put these on!
2000s: VR is the future. Put these on!
2010s: VR is the future. Put these on!
2020s: VR is the future. Put these on!
I easily get motion sick with first person games, so I can’t imagine what VR must be like. My only recourse, however, is imagination because I have a nerve disorder in my face, which makes it extremely sensitive and I can’t wear VR gear because of it. I’m far from alone when it comes to people with health issues and VR.
First person games also make me motion sick, for lack of a better word, because I’ve got permanently screwed proprioception (so less “sick,” more “horribly dizzy”), so I’ve never even dared try VR. I feel like the market is a lot more limited than companies might think it is.
I actually wonder if proprioception has a lot to do with it. We pretty much use all of our senses with proprioception, and they are more limited by VR. No matter how good the eye tracking is, there will still be big blind spots and no matter how good the 3D sound is, it still won’t quite replicate how real sound moves between your ears. And then, of course, you have the illusion of walking without moving your leg muscles. This won’t change for a while. Not without major technological advances in VR gear.
I also cannot play 1st person games for this same reason. But oddly enough, VR games actually make me feel less motion sick than flat 1st person games do.
I’m pretty sure that Meta is the only company that thought there’s a big market for VR, and even they seem to be giving up on it. Apple’s device seems more oriented to giving you a private workspace than a real virtual world - like a big array of virtual monitors to replace actual hardware - and that avoids the worst motion sickness triggers. Of course, their device is also priced far out of mass market.
The most popular applications for VR are all games, and even the gaming companies are doing very little development in that space. Fewer people think VR will be a big thing than thought 3D TV would be a big thing.
Some people even get sick just from the wrong FoV and motion speed combination in 3D games, this is just 10 times worse.
I did have motion sickness at first but got used to it quite quickly. It actually disappeared on the 2nd/3rd day of use I think. I have absolutely no problem driving race sims all day long if needed, I’ve been using my VR gear for 3 years now.
Yup, just gotta get used to it and the feeling goes away after a session or two
It really depends on the person and the hardware. I’ve seen people with PC-VR setups that get sick, but are 100% okay with wireless. I think it’s an issue of FOV, FPS, and overall just getting used to wearing a big box on your face.
I see a ton of people shitting on VR because they get sick, saying that it’s just a gimmick and it’ll pass. I think it’s a neat piece of tech that deserves to get better, hopefully the issues will be ironed out over the generations.
I see a ton of people shitting on VR because they get sick, saying that it’s just a gimmick and it’ll pass.
And that’s such a weird take for them to have, which I have also seen. I get sick real easy from VR and it doesn’t make me mad at VR, it bums me out that I’ll have to wait for something slightly more accommodating to come out first.
