Something I've noticed in many comments is its a mix of the game or story with perceptual warping.
My own perceptual warping story doesn't come with a game, but I assure you its super disorienting to spend a couple hours looking thru a low power binoc microscope to work on electronics and then just get up and walk around, your hand eye coordination is all messed up for awhile because what you see your hands do has been times 2 magnified and bent 90 degrees upward for some hours. Putting a key in a keyhole is a challenge for a couple minutes till reality snaps back. Its a form of sea sickness, after all. Your position sense doesn't match your optic sense and that makes some people puke although in low doses you just feel really weird.
Much like there is a difference between the taste of a beer in a relaxed setting vs after a long afternoon of yard work, your blood sugar or hormones or something distort your perception of the taste of the beer. Or DnD / pathfinder / rpg in general seems more fun when candle-lit. And a zillion observations in a hundred comments here about drugs or whatever.
I would think there are more technological opportunities to mix perception alteration with a story or game than just AI or what we've mentioned. Perhaps someone could scientifically calculate a formula to determine the correct music for a game. Maybe there is a type of food that naturally goes with social media use (probably something sugary). Maybe a certain hue of general room lighting is good for certain TV genres. Aside from VR technology, however cool it may be, I have this feeling narrative/game plus perception warping is a large mostly unexplored solution space.
I like to sail. I wonder if, along the lines of the theory above, liking sailing comes from ultra low dose perceptual warping due to subclinical sea sickness combined with the purely mechanical labor of sailing. Could you give me a small dose of anti-anti-sea sickness pills and I'd love basketweaving or something.
I'm getting into boat-sailing, and I'm saddened by the nausea it causes. I'm looking into ways to reduce this, and I'm thinking ways to deal with motion sickness incurred in VR-games is probably applicable to me.
Slightly off topic, but I can't play first person shooters--or, heck, even Minecraft--because I get motion sick from simulated motion with no actual motion. It's so bad that when I used to try to play, I'd continue to be sick if I watched, after I'd get sick and stop, someone play from across the room.
The odd thing is that I don't get seasick, which is (mostly) from actual motion with little, no, or confused apparent motion. Go figure.
I have a decent amount of off-shore sailing experience in small yachts, and like you, I never get sea-sick.
I haven't tried VR yet, but I was hoping my apparent immunity from motion sickness might carry over to a nice VR experience. Now I'm not so sure it will.
It's worth noting that the folks in the article reporting simulator sickness and long term disorientation are pilots, meaning they have been screened and selected for their endurance and resistance to motion sickness. On top of that, the symptoms they are reporting go well beyond seasickness. Have a look at rowanH's comment in this thread for a better idea of the effects we are talking about.
I'd certainly agree that the brain can adjust to using VR, but at what cost? If using VR means losing your depth perception and sense of balance, so that you are walking around bumping into things (or worse driving), then it's probably not going to be worth it for many people, despite how fun it might be.
I agree completely. My personal VR sickness isn't like vertigo or sea sickness, which both afflict me in real life acutely.
Maybe it's a due to a lifetime of playing video games (3d since i was 10), but even VR games with weird detached cameras or games not designed for VR which don't really respond to head movement are totally fine for me. There is a cognitive adjustment I make which is manageable and does not make me feel sick.
Having used gearVR with a scratched phone screen for a year and now real Oculus for a few months, I am fairly certain that my particular sickness comes from the strain of my eyes constantly focusing too close or trying to mentally blur obvious pixel artifacts or struggling to focus on fogged up parts of the lens which is causing me to experience a headache which eventually leads to nausea.
I am not a sailor, but I've done some offshore work for companies like Heerema and other offshore oil companies. I don't get sea sick, ever.
However, I get sick trying to play games with my google cardboard. Nasty, nasty feeling and it takes a good hour to feel normal again... Not a big fan of VR after a few sessions of sickness. I don't think I will play it more to "get over it" either.
You've defined it via the general mismatch in a good way. Sea sickness is your eyes saying, "I'm not moving", but your inner ear saying, "Oh yes we are". VR sickness is your eyes saying, "We are moving" and your inner ear saying, "No we're not"
That's just it, the real horizon will appear to move even though it's the vehicle moving. People tend not to get seasick/motion sick when they can see the outside apparently swaying because that coincides to the bumps they feel. It's when they are entirely inside or focused on on something that isn't moving relative to themselves that there is a difference between feel and vision.
While I don't get seasick at all, I'll add this in so that someone might try it. I noticed that on a rocking boat people stand two different ways. Most people will move their feet apart and assume a rigid stance so their head is always up relative to the boat. Others will keep both feet together and stay upright relative to gravity, seemingly tilting back and forth in rhythm with the ship. I suspect the second might help with motion sickness since you would see the boat move like you feel that it should. It always struck me as funny to have some of both types in the same group having a conversation.
I get horridly and painfully seasick, others don't. Most that don't were "raised on the sea". I suspect younger generations could adapt to VR the way my generation adapted to the spatial awareness required for 3D gaming.
On a side note, this makes me think VR could possibly be used therapeutically to "cure" motion sickness. Something like the 3D gaming tutorials in early 3D games.
I played a stationery FPS vr game and it’s certainly a weird disorienting feeling. I also get motion sick pretty easily. That said it didn’t really effect me much outside of a little disorientation.
Your comments about nausea are interesting, because I am a sailor and I know about motion sickness a little. I know that some people never get it for instance, and I know that I do get sick but only really on the first day of the season or whenever the movement first starts - normally I am ok for the rest of the year if I stay a lot of time on board. Very few people will be sick all the time, but I have heard of people who get sick all the time and still go sailing because they do enjoy something after all (meh, I don't think I would)
I tend to avoid more extreme carnival rides due to motion sickness, and must take drugs to be out on the open ocean and my own experience with VR was a mild feeling of being unwell that persisted for a few hours after the end of a session.
This was only for the first week of owning and using VR, after that I acclimated to it just fine.
> Couldn't it just as likely be the inherent conflict between proprioceptual cues and visual cues causing sickness?
Sure, that's the general concept. OP's two points are specific examples of the causes of mismatch - examples which are well known, and can be mitigated.
a) When a program's framerate is high enough, moving your head causes a corresponding change in visual cue. When the framerate is too slow, the visual cue update is delayed from the motion. A mismatch.
b) When a game allows you to walk forward in a virtual world, your eyes get visual cues that you're walking forward, even though your body knows you're not. VR applications that instead simulate you sitting in place, and give you visual cues to that effect, limit that mismatch.
I think motion sickness in VR is a bit like taking LSD. Set and setting is all I can think about when I hear people's stories unless they are particularly bad.
Its called "simulator sickness" and occurs in a fraction of the population when your inner ear and eyes disagree on your motion. Fun for some, total nausea for others.
My own perceptual warping story doesn't come with a game, but I assure you its super disorienting to spend a couple hours looking thru a low power binoc microscope to work on electronics and then just get up and walk around, your hand eye coordination is all messed up for awhile because what you see your hands do has been times 2 magnified and bent 90 degrees upward for some hours. Putting a key in a keyhole is a challenge for a couple minutes till reality snaps back. Its a form of sea sickness, after all. Your position sense doesn't match your optic sense and that makes some people puke although in low doses you just feel really weird.
Much like there is a difference between the taste of a beer in a relaxed setting vs after a long afternoon of yard work, your blood sugar or hormones or something distort your perception of the taste of the beer. Or DnD / pathfinder / rpg in general seems more fun when candle-lit. And a zillion observations in a hundred comments here about drugs or whatever.
I would think there are more technological opportunities to mix perception alteration with a story or game than just AI or what we've mentioned. Perhaps someone could scientifically calculate a formula to determine the correct music for a game. Maybe there is a type of food that naturally goes with social media use (probably something sugary). Maybe a certain hue of general room lighting is good for certain TV genres. Aside from VR technology, however cool it may be, I have this feeling narrative/game plus perception warping is a large mostly unexplored solution space.
I like to sail. I wonder if, along the lines of the theory above, liking sailing comes from ultra low dose perceptual warping due to subclinical sea sickness combined with the purely mechanical labor of sailing. Could you give me a small dose of anti-anti-sea sickness pills and I'd love basketweaving or something.
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