I have a 3090 with HP Reverb G2 and very high tolerance for motion sickness. I’ve noticed in Elite Dangerous that lower framerates cause less motion sickness. The stuttering between frames makes my eyes/brain not treat the visual motion as “real”.
So I crank up the details to super high and enjoy the awesome rendering detail and save myself from motion sickness.
Elite Dangerous is the only VR app that gives me any motion sickness at all and is also my favorite app in VR so far.
You're probably right on Elite. I never found it a problem because the pace of gameplay is fairly slow and the cockpit takes up a lot of your field of view but experiences of motion sickness are highly subjective.
- Start with games or experiences less likely to trigger it. This means ability to run at high frame rates, 6dof, and ideally optimized for a seated experience in a cockpit. Your body expects the world to move around you when you're in a cockpit or car.
- If doing PCVR make sure your system is beefy enough. Elite: Dangerous is just barely playable on low settings with my potato gtx 970M. And that's with low frame rates that can cause discomfort, and some situations like in stations where I max my card out and it starts doing a seizure inducing level of flickering and jumping of frames.
- Munch on some ginger root or drink ginger tea or chew ginger gum.
- Open a window and have a fan blowing at you.
- End your session the moment you feel nauseous. Do not power through. Over time you'll be able to go longer and longer but training your body is not instantaneous.
FWIW, I would not recommend Elite: Dangerous as an experience without motion sickness. The game features artificial yaw, pitch, and roll. Even though I'm fairly experienced with VR, and fairly resistant to motion sickness, my first few sessions with E:D were notably disorienting. Yaw in particular is discouraged for comfortable VR experiences.
Once that's passed, E:D also features a lot of small text. Also, the default behavior of the cockpit control panels in VR - appear when you look at them, disappear when you're not looking exactly at them - encourages some head movements that will give you neck pains really quick.
All that said, there's something really compelling about feeling the tight cockpit of a Sidewinder, being able to stand up and walk around the cockpit of an AspX, or looking through the glass floor to line up a landing in an AspX.
I thought the resolution was also tied to motion sickness, but I could be wrong.
I've noticed on benchmarks that the relationship between resolution and framerate is exponential - so a lower resolution will go a long way to a higher framerate.
Motion sickness is mainly caused by framerate and given that VR is extremely taxing compared just displaying on a monitor is often the issue. It is hard to drive two screens at once at 120 or higher FPS
Have you tried one of the newest generation headsets? Supposedly the higher frame rates counter motion sickness quite well. I haven't had anyone mention motion sickness when playing on my Valve Index (only when looking on a monitor how someone else plays, because the screen shakes so much then).
(The price of the Index definitely doesn't make it mainstream though. Just trying to get a sense of this issue)
I remember playing VR games with my HP Reverb G2 years ago and I did initially power through the motion sickness for a bit, but it did get better over the weeks until it just wasn't an issue at all.
I own a Vive. Zero motion sickness on room scale games, zero when flying around in Elite:Dangerous. However, get me in something with wheels and it's hell. Rolling in the buggy in Elite is bad, driving in Project Cars is worse.
I've learned that, in Elite, if I look at where the buggy is going (it power slides a lot), then I almost avoid motion sickness. Project Cars, though, I can't play. Cornering, at high speed, completely immersed, with no lateral acceleration, triggers some alarm in me.
Also, while most games are fine with losing a frame or two every few minutes, in VR dropping frames will cause motion sickness really fast. FPS is, from what I've observed, the most important part of a VR game. If you're dropping frames or stuttering, the experience will suffer greatly
When I was developing a VR game, my team noticed that some ultra-sensitive people started to get sick when we would drop around five frames (the vive displays 90, so this is only a ~5% drop). There was more to it (dropping a few frames every few minutes was usually fine, but consistently dropping frames every second or two is an issue).
1-to-1 motion certainly seems to eliminate motion sickness. I can't remember a single instance of getting nauseous with a room-scale Vive experience and I've been in that headset for numerous hours.
I've tried a couple seated flight-sims. You simply can't see distant objects as well as you'd expect due to the low resolution of the panels, which is far more important in flight sims than with most other things. I can't say I got sick, but it didn't feel real to me, and I can see how others might get sick.
Frame rate plays a role - especially when it drops down below targets and stutters, which does happen irl, but designing the experience to avoid motion sickness from the ground up is what makes the difference. Keeping something stable in the view that moves along with head pose like a HUD element while everything else around you is moving makes a huge difference. Seeing the world around you in motion from inside a car with the stable windscreen will be much easier than zooming around through freespace even at 120hz for most people until they get comfortable with the sensory mismatch. I have heard several interesting approaches to acclimatization and can recommend this [1] if you are affected & am told positioning a real fan blowing air on you while in the headset will orient your proprioception in a way that helps.
As a DK1&2 owner, I had a similar experience, but what brought VR back to me was Elite: Dangerous, a space sim. FPS's are a horrible VR experience currently and likely will remain so until we redefine FPS for VR. With Elite + joysticks, I've not experienced any of the motion sickness in the DK2.
So I crank up the details to super high and enjoy the awesome rendering detail and save myself from motion sickness.
Elite Dangerous is the only VR app that gives me any motion sickness at all and is also my favorite app in VR so far.
reply