When Working in Virtual Reality Makes You Sick (medium.com) 73
Virtual reality is a modern-day beacon of escapism -- a way to fully immerse yourself in other worlds -- and it's seeing unprecedented applications. The market, no surprise, is exploding, with some industry groups estimating a $60 billion global market by 2022. As business booms, however, people who are using the tech are reporting a growing number of physical side effects -- like VR arm, but worse: eye strain, dizziness, headaches, nausea, and even dissociative experiences. From a report: VR companies recommend that people take frequent breaks and moderate their VR time when they're first starting out. "As you become accustomed to the virtual reality experience, you can begin increasing the amount of time you use Daydream View," reads one line of the health and safety information included with Google's VR platform. But what happens when it's your job to build these escapist technologies? The potential health risks for everyday consumers are compounded for those who make VR products for a living.
When VR bigwig Jeremy Bailenson founded Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in 2003, two items were even more important than the VR equipment he was using: "We had to keep a bucket in the lab and a mop nearby," Bailenson says. Today, he institutes a strict 20-minute limit on headset time for people in his lab. These health effects produce unique challenges for VR developers. "We have to understand not just the good but also the downsides of this technology. There a lot of questions we need to answer," Bailenson says. "The whole point of VR is it takes you out of your space, but you can't be doing that for many hours a day."
[...] Suddenly rotating around a virtual environment using handled controllers or quickly looking left and right in the VR space without any concomitant physical movement in the real world tend to physically affect Jonathan Yomayuza, VR technical director at the Emblematic Group, a creative firm based in Southern California. [...] The feeling Yomayuza describes is common among people who work with or use VR.
When VR bigwig Jeremy Bailenson founded Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in 2003, two items were even more important than the VR equipment he was using: "We had to keep a bucket in the lab and a mop nearby," Bailenson says. Today, he institutes a strict 20-minute limit on headset time for people in his lab. These health effects produce unique challenges for VR developers. "We have to understand not just the good but also the downsides of this technology. There a lot of questions we need to answer," Bailenson says. "The whole point of VR is it takes you out of your space, but you can't be doing that for many hours a day."
[...] Suddenly rotating around a virtual environment using handled controllers or quickly looking left and right in the VR space without any concomitant physical movement in the real world tend to physically affect Jonathan Yomayuza, VR technical director at the Emblematic Group, a creative firm based in Southern California. [...] The feeling Yomayuza describes is common among people who work with or use VR.
Coincidentally (Score:3, Interesting)
I know it's not actually VR but I've just been playing Minecraft. Half an hour is the maximum I can put up with.
Watching the hoglet play, I can just about cope with 5 minutes. He flicks it around like an epileptic breakdancer.
Odd thing is I used to play a lot of flight sims and those never bothered me.
I'm also one of those "can't cope with 3d" dinosaurs.
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Will this help improve the Matrix acceptance rate?
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I installed the Vivecraft mod for Minecraft a few weeks ago, and recently took my headset off after a long session to find that it was suddenly night in my house, and that I'd just spent 7.2 hours playing without a single break. It was definitely an interesting readjustment period for the next 45 minutes.
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It really is weird. I can't figure why evolution would allow for such a thing to have come about, it makes no sense survival-wise. Sitting there chowing down on some food, oh no a lion run, vomits profusely oh well I'm dead now.
Farming and supermarkets are relatively new for humans on evolutionary timescales.
Before that many people were perpetually hungry and shoved whatever they could find into their pie holes. Poisonous shit fucks with your brain creating differences between visual and vestibular senses triggering puke fest so you throw up the poison you shouldn't have been eating in the first place and continue to live.
3DOF VR is especially vile and treacherous. Any translation in real world creates a difference that can't be
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How do you cope with Descent? That was the first game I remember that really caught a lot of people out.
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I know it's not actually VR but I've just been playing Minecraft. Half an hour is the maximum I can put up with.
Did you turn off the bobbing view during movement? Games like shooters and minecraft that have the wobble head movement makes me dizzy but turning that off lets me play them.
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Ooh, I didn't see that. I'll see if I can find it.
Did see the Y axis reverse. Enabled it (so back/down actually goes up, like flying a plane), but realised I'd just got used to it being "wrong".
It's called simulation sickness (Score:2)
I also suffer from this, and can get it in Minecraft, most FPS games, Elite Dangerous when driving a buggy around. I get extreme nausea, cramps, dizziness, and can feel ill for maybe 2 hours. This has meant that I ignore most games that have a first person viewpoint. There are things that can reduce it - such as increasing the field of view shown in the game to wider angles, but this only slightly helps for me.
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It's probably due to an unstable frame rate.
The thing that makes you feel nausea is a kind of vertigo brought on by changing in the frame rate. If the rate suddenly dips the image goes from looking 3D with depth to looking 2D and back again, and your brain feels the mismatch between what the eyes are seeing and what the rest of your senses are telling it.
It's particularly bad with VR but also affects normal games. Some people are more sensitive than others. For VR you really need a rock solid 90 FPS as an a
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I thought the nausea came from your eyes telling you you're moving and/or rotating when your ears are telling you the contrary. They say for carsickness the worst thing is to read a book, you should look outside so the signals are coherent.
That theory about the cockpit might be right, though. Maybe I'm subconsciously fixating on the sight/HUD.
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There are a few different theories. The sensory mis-match one does seem to be related to motion sickness, but that seems to be a bit different to VR sickness. With travel sickness it goes away with exposure. People who get sick on ships tend to be okay after living/working on a ship for a while. Not so with VR.
The other clue is that you get the same thing with games on a normal 2D monitor. It's been happening since the 90s with Doom. It's why a lot of games choose to lock themselves at a lower frame rate th
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In recent years I increasingly have problem coping with even 2D entertainment, especially fast paced movies whose special effect strives to become as 3D as possible. I've problems with Epic battles scenes (where angles switches switches over 30 times a minute) and any long gun and car chase scenes positively disorients me so much that I've to throw up in the restroom every single time I accompany friends to Thriller / Cop-Gangster movies these 3 or 4 years.
As movie effects gets more advanced person the en
Hey, is anyone else hungry? (Score:2)
Have you ever, like thought ... get this - that reality might be ... like literally a holodeck?
Hey, is anyone else hungry?
Ready Player One makes you really wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
I re-watched Ready Player One over the weekend, renting it so I could take a closer look at some of the things stuffed in there...
One thing that occurred to me after watching it again is, I'm not really sure a good VR interface is possible. Just look at the various contraptions used in the movie to try and produce realistic movement in a virtual world. They had 360 treadmills, they had people suspended by against hook in the back (that tried to break your legs when you "died" by pushing you rapidly down into the platform below you), they had people suspended by wires in a van, and at the very highest end of the "immersive" equipment was a Super Lay-Z-Boy, the most comfy recliner ever from which you were somehow supposed to be able to do all kinds of karate moves...
This was a movie with complete freedom to dream up devices that might theoretically work without having to worry about real engineering, yet even the best of them seemed dubious at best as far as letting you experience real movement in VR. Without that movement, it seems like VR use will always be inherently limited because your body is going to be telling your brain something different is going on to what it is experiencing.
I really feel like the HoloLens/Magic Leap approach to virtual content will be the real path forward - augmented/mixed reality makes more sense. It doesn't preclude full VR games since you can simply overlay the whole field of view... but that's what needs to get worked on for AR equipment is a really full field of view.
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I agree that in the end the only real VR will be some form of complete neural takeover, like the approach you are talking about, or the Snowcrash/Matrix "jack in" approach. But it makes you realize that jacking in or any other approach will have to totally block all pathways to and from your brain, they restore it when disconnected... not sure how many people are going to go for that in real reality just for a great VR experience! That's probably just my inner luddite talking though.
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I agree that in the end the only real VR will be some form of complete neural takeover, like the approach you are talking about, or the Snowcrash/Matrix "jack in" approach. But it makes you realize that jacking in or any other approach will have to totally block all pathways to and from your brain, they restore it when disconnected... not sure how many people are going to go for that in real reality just for a great VR experience! That's probably just my inner luddite talking though.
Reminds me of Sword Art Online Mother's Rosario where patients with terminal diseases were being used to test direct brain access to a VR environment.
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My personal perspective is that 1:1 movement is overrated. I play 3d games where the avatar moves in ways that I couldn't, or at least ways I'd rather not bother moving.
That said, redirected walking seems a viable approach, at least for extending a large space to an 'infinite' space.
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My personal perspective is that 1:1 movement is overrated.
I totally agree and you can see a lot of why in the movie itself. These people are doing a lot of karate-style fighting in the movies, in some cases large numbers of people standing outside on fairly crowded sidewalks, each with full VR headsets on and doing things like spin kicks feet away from all sorts of people they cannot see in reality...
On the plus side it seems like everyone in that world would be crazy fit! They even had a few brief real l
Re:Ready Player One makes you really wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. As examples I love to play Just Dance... for about 20 minutes before my fat ass is too tired to continue. Then there's Rocksmith which I can only play for about an hour or two before my shoulders are too tired. Then I retreat, assuming I have the time, to play Factorio for something like 11 hours.
I think it's the augmented reality that will work. Since you can still see your surroundings the "3D effect" won't happen. It won't be the Ready Player One environment many envision. I don't want to say it will never happen, but i don't see it happening and becoming main stream for a very long time.
Imagine playing a top down shooter but it's in 3D on a tabletop? Or you're looking at a wall but the augmented reality make it look like you're looking through the windshield of a mechwarrior and everything "though the portal" is in 3D but computer generated. I think this would help reduce that 3D sickness because your surroundings would align with what your inner ear was detecting.
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While AR is certainly an interesting concept, I wouldn't want to give up the full VR experience. I'd rather feel totally enveloped. Being able to see the boring old drywall and such mixed with the environment can take something away.
Current user of an oculus rift and the experience is simply fantastic. AR may be more practical if well executed for a lot of work related or local multiplayer gaming for board/tabletop type stuff, but for single player immersive experience... VR...
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Ready Player One was super strange. (I know...movie)
They already had AR/VR devices. At any time and without any action (except thought?) you could look at the real world.
They also had wireless connections and during the final battle there were people running through the streets who were supposedly taking part in the battle. I'm not sure how any of this makes any sense at all.
The point is, aside from a brain stem interface like the Matrix...where your brain just 'thinks' it's moving. I don't know how you
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Too simplistic (Score:3)
The difference between AR and VR is the opacity of the visor.
That is part of it, but the other part of a device being AR is sensors that register objects around you so virtual content can either react to it or realistically skin it. That's a big reason of why HoloLens and Magic Leap have such expensive headsets for now, because they are generating a real-time and very accurate internal 3D map of everything around you.
A device without sensors for the external world that projects partially onto your field of
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Oculus is building its standalone 'Santa Cruz' model to have built-in SLAM, using 4 cameras. Microsoft uses a decent 2-camera implementation of it on its 'Mixed Reality' sets. The tracking is astonishingly good for a two camera solution, the only real weakness being the controllers esp. hand presence..
The solutions you come up for each discipline will generally help the other.
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I feel well connected with the VR environment when racing, seated and using my steering wheel, even with the lack of sideways force when cornering etc. Seeing the hands on the wheel matching my movement ties the experience in. Same in Eve Valkyrie, where you are also seated in a cockpit and can see your hands on the controls.
The upright walking games feel a lot less immersive, Skyrim is good to play while standing, mainly because a chair can get in the way when the axes and swords are flying about. Doom
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You don't even need to get fancy: how do normal stairs work in Ready Player One, where you visually step onto something and lift the rest of your body, while in the real world your leading foot ends up at the same height as your trailing foot? There are some pretty fundamental discontinuities that would require extremely elaborate setups to even begin to address.
Simulator Sickness (Score:4, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's been a thing, since the '50s at least.
The solution (Score:2)
Neo: Do you always look at it encoded?
Cypher: Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. II don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head. Hey, you uh want a drink?
Good ... (Score:1)
Good, because I think it's important that devs ride their own vomit comet before foisting it off on the rest of us.
If your developers still puke, it's nowhere near ready to be shipped.
If none of the developers puke, but the admin assistant does, it's still nowhere ready to be shipped.
Now, if only more products actually went through this kind of testing, instead of the broken shit which gets pushed out the door which barely works.
The worst par is... (Score:3)
If you are particularly sensitive to motion sickness, devs will use you as a guinea pig in order to test how nauseating their work is.
I mean, we are not equal when it comes to motion sickness, and it is in best interest for everyone that everything is done to make VR accessible to everyone, possibly through the use of comfort options. But in order to know which parts cause problems and which countermeasure are effective, it has to be tested by someone with a low tolerance, because others won't notice.
BRB (Score:2)
I have to get off slashdot for a bit so I can do some investing in companies that produce Dramamine. /s
I mean if you're paying $2,295 for a VR headset, you may as well pony up a few bucks for some quality drugs.
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Erm... That isn't the cost of a VR headset.
I'm not a fan of VR at this point for various reasons, but you can get a headset and controllers and the latest marvel game for $399
Perhaps you missed the article today:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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That is not a VR headset. That's an AR headset, and a lousy one at that. Plus it can't do VR due to how the optics work.
3D (Score:1)
Design, design, design (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi there. I'm a professional VR developer, I teach a VR development course, and I made a fun little game-jam indie game which I sell on Steam. I'll happily talk about this kind of stuff all day. While I don't get motion sickness of any kind (car, boat, desktop gaming), I do occasionally feel ill in VR, especially in a poorly designed experience. If you have to keep a bucket nearby, you're applying the wrong design principles (either by accident or on purpose).
For the vast majority of users, it all comes down to design:
If the eyes are seeing movement that the body didn't initiate, then discomfort happens.
If the environment does not honor the players' physical body, then discomfort happens.
This is why flying around in Google Earth can make you ill, while making things in Google Blocks negatively affects very few people. Comfortable locomotion is still a difficult/unsolved problem, which is why a lot of games have teleportation mechanisms.
The stimuli that make a person feel ill are VERY personal. For example, I have no problem moving up in VR, but I feel a little queasy any time a game moves me down in VR. The precise stimulus and degree of impact is different for every individual.
There are a lot of camera things (such as shaky cam) that have to be avoided outright completely. Even traditional cinematic techniques such as panning over an environment should be done with care (open the scene at speed instead of accelerating/decelerating, provide audio cues such as rushing air before you fade-in to a aerial pan). Flying about in Google Earth is made somewhat more comfortable by reducing the field of view to just the foveated region, which is generally more tolerant of motion than the periphery.
Other forms of discomfort include when objects pass through where the operators' physical body would be, and the use of inverse kinematics which often shows player limbs in orientations that don't match up with the operators' actual position (and thus proprioceptive system). These often "feel weird", but don't generally make people ill. (Interestingly, often the best solution to this is to not include arms or legs at all, and only show hands, like in Job Simulator)
Honor and respect your players' body. They'll thank you.
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I'm not 'satisfied' with the teleportation mechanics. I think it's a stop-gap solution.
In your experience, what will replace it? "Seated" VR and 'Room Scale' seem to be working fine, but we're going to need to get out of the box. How is that going to happen? Will 'pull the trigger to walk' ever work in VR, or will it always have these motion problems you mentioned as a physical limitation?
Have you been experimenting with other methods?
Re:Design, design, design (Score:4, Informative)
For many genres of experiences, teleportation is a very viable way to go. For anything that focuses on locomotion (such as shooters, walking simulators, or non-archery sports games), it's a big problem.
To be honest, I'm not satisfied with any software-only solutions, and I've seen quite a few. Frankly I've been doing this long enough that I'm skeptical a software-only solution could exists. The industry is seeing a lot of growth in the location-based entertainment and industrial sectors, because their solution is "Get a bigger room"... Which is a rather unsatisfying answer for home use. Some of the passive optical sensors (Windows MR headsets) have promise in terms of tracking volume, but homes have lots of obstructions and other dangers (stove tops, stairs) which would need to be designed around.
Even the hardware solutions I've seen are almost all either insanely expensive, or very gimmicky. Omnidirectional treadmills are a technology still in their infancy, but there's a lot of promise there. Things like the Virtuix Omni treadmill (which is NOT a treadmill) aren't enough, it will likely take something akin to the Infinadeck to actually solve the problem.
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It seems like the important implementation details are either not widely known or not known at all. I've had different applications with similar locomotion modes but one makes me sick instantly and the other doesn't. Flying is like this. Small differences in how the acceleration is treated can be the difference between sick and not. Walking too. For me using the thumb pad to "walk" on a vive always makes me woozy, but using a trigger pull with the direction determined by how the hand controller is held
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I tired room scale about 20 years ago, and it was still possible to make you feel sick. I imagine it's harder than it is with VR, but even room scale holodeck style can make you want to throw up.
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This is exactly right. For me the rule is simple. Any time I'm standing still but the viewpoint moves, I immediately feel sick. The rest of the time, I'm fine. Designers have come up with good solutions to this. Always move and rotate in discrete jumps with a really fast fade to black in between so your brain doesn't interpret it as movement. It totally fixes the problem. Unfortunately some devs don't use these solutions. They have smooth movement even when there's no need. I don't play those games
The sickness can be cured (Score:3)
Well, the sickness can at least be treated by building a resistance.
What I learned from flying, and it seemed to transfer to VR:
Participate until you feel the motion sickness, maybe even until you feel very sick, but under no circumstances should you play until you vomit. That will set you back. Over time, you will be able to participate for longer periods of time, until eventually you don't even think about it anymore.
Causes and solutions of VR sickness (Score:5, Informative)
At VirZOOM we make exercise games that move you around in VR from your pedaling and leaning on a bike. Solving VR sickness has been our top goal, so anyone in a gym can step up and feel exhilarated by VR rather than the opposite. Sorry for the long post but hope to benefit other VR devs and show non-devs all that's involved.
Virtual reality is experienced through a headset which draws two images of the game, from the precise location of each of your eyes to create a stereo effect, in the direction your head is facing. VR has been around for a long time, but the release of the Oculus DK1 marked the first time it was performant enough for a mass audience.
VR before Oculus was released could cause sickness because of insufficient framerate to draw two wide-field images fast and sharp enough, and the latency of measuring your head direction and position. Since Oculus was released these have been solved by having more powerful computers, VR-optimized graphics drivers and rendering techniques, low-persistence LED screens, and better and faster sensors.
Quality VR requires updating and rendering two 100 degree images at least 60 fps, ideally 90 fps, on a screen that flashes its pixels quickly on/off at 1:3 ratio to not look blurry or flickery from the short distance to your eyeballs, with less than 15 ms of sensor latency combined with reprojection that mostly hides the game rendering time. And it has to account for lens distortion which is different for the red, green, and blue components of each pixel, and be antialiased because different jaggies between eyes will make you crazy.
This all takes up to 10x the horsepower of regular videogames, which are single image, usually 30 fps, and undistorted with a smaller FOV. This is why most VR games look a generation or two old. Fortunately GPU and engine makers have been hard at work optimizing drivers and techniques to leverage commonality between eyes and fact that you perceive the most resolution in the center of your field of view, to bring that multiplier down to 2-3x.
Even with the best hardware and rendering, VR can still cause sickness if games move your virtual head much differently from your real head. The difference between the acceleration your inner ears feel and the acceleration your eyes see is the cause of VR sickness. It turns out the pretty much every 3D game requires your virtual head to move around, which is why existing games have been astoundingly difficult to bring to VR.
From all our playtesting and feedback, we believe people have different levels of sensitivity which can trigger their simulation sickness, and they will only feel it 10 minutes after a game has crossed that threshold. Most people will incorrectly attribute their feeling to whatever they are doing at that moment rather than 10 minutes ago. This delay time is also why it's difficult for someone to "discover their limit" and "auto-tune" a game for it. It's true that repeated VR experience can acclimate users, but the amount and degree is again unpredictable, and a mass market product can't rely solely on that.
So games have to be redesigned with VR motion in mind. The most successful but also most limiting way to do this is "room-scale", whereby your virtual head moves the exact same way as your real head. In these games you are only allowed to play from a single location or in a little area, as far as the VR position tracking and your furniture allows.
One common way to allow you to move in virtual space is to put you in a "cockpit" where you can only see out windows. This approach evolved from the idea that you don't generally get sick playing 3D games on your home TV, because your brain can perceive your whole room which is not moving, and accepts that the TV portion is just an image. But that is also what makes this approach less good and immersive for VR. Because VR images aren't as wide as your real eye (100 vs 180 degrees), you have to draw the cockpit right in front of the user, and to the extent that its works make
Hell yeah (Score:2)
I did birdly (HTC VIVE headset with a moving platform you are strapped to) when i was on vacation. After a single session i had motion sickness for at least 4 hours. I won't try that again. Completely not worth it.
Driving (Score:3)
You should also consider the dangers of driving in the real world (and maybe using machinery) after a long VR session.
Decades ago I read that UK military pilots recorded a higher number of traffic accidents after doing a long session in a flight simulator, presumably because it screwed up their perception of motion and distance. When this was discovered the pilots were subsequently given a driver or a taxi voucher to get home.after one of these sessions. I wouldn't be surprised if the same effect occurred with the current, relatively crude VR environments.
Sure (Score:2)
"a way to fully immerse yourself in other worlds"
Oh for sure, it's that realistic.
"and it's seeing unprecedented applications."
Yeah, sure.
"some industry groups estimating a $60 billion global market by 2022."
Sigh.
it's 2018; no mop, no limit (Score:2)
My own experience has been that I played a number of VR short films, worked on a number of them, and then eventually set up a Vive at home (when the price of a used Vive dropped to within my budget -- I already had the fast GPU for other work). At the VR post facility at which I freelanced, I don't recall hearing of anyone (man, woman, child) getting sick while using a headset –and we had every variety of headset on hand. I used them all, no mop no limit.
There were a few general rules that seemed to h
My prediction (Score:3)
If the VR really catches on this time, someone will write a virus that makes the user throw up.
We'll see AV programs especially boasting that they block "tilt-a-hurl" and "Mary-go-ralph". Some kids will deliberately infect a copy of a game so they can try for a day out of school.
good configuration (Score:2)
Biggest problem with VR is that people just take the headset (from another person) and start using it. You should first configure the headset (if possible ofcourse) as good as you can (IPD, Focus), doing that reduces the effect of motion sickness in a big way.
But if you keep getting sick, than you should look for another job/position.