Comment by Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social on VR still makes 40-70% of players want to throw up, and that's a huge problem for the companies behind it

Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.

Posted this reply in another instance, but several years ago researchers found that adding a virtual nose dramatically decreased motion sickness. However, I haven’t seen any developers adding one in games. I wonder if it’d help.

When the camera movies without me physically moving, I am throwing up immediately. Do you mean a virtual nose would fix that?

Potentially, yeah. Here’s an article I found talking about the research: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q1/virtual-nose-may-reduce-simulator-sickness-in-video-games.html

Ok that sounds interesting. I just though that glasses wearer might not have motion sickness as often due to the glasses being similar to the VR(or keeping the glasses under the Headset

I wear glasses (which I keep inside the helmet) and have mild motion sickness when moving in VR. The faster I move in-game, the worse it gets. Racing games are OK because I don’t move inside the car, I suspect having a static dashboard is similar to a virtual nose.

Glasses wearer here, I still see my nose with the glasses on. VR gives me mild motion sickness but only when moving around in a “smooth” way (Teleporting or walking irl is fine but using regular controller movement makes me want to throw up after ~30 minutes)

This is the detail I wanted to know:

Surprisingly, subjects did not notice the nasum virtualis while they were playing the games, and they were incredulous when its presence was revealed to them later

Our nose is cleverly edited out of our our awareness but it’s most certainly there. Apparently the virtual one is capable of straddling the same fence.

Ye! Tbh one of my biggest pet peeves with VRChat is the fact that they shrink your head to avoid it interfering with the player camera, but the result is that you don’t have a nose. It’s not as obvious with human/humanoid avatars because, like you said, it’s normally “edited out” by our brains (though you can probably see it if you want to by crossing your eyes, I know I can see mine); but it ends up being super obvious with furry avatars due to the lack of a snout/muzzle. That said, I’ve seen a few furry avatar creators starting to add a snout (not sure how they do that, I think they parent a copy of the face onto the head bone), and it’s pretty neat. Maybe other avatar creators will follow suit.

Findings showed the virtual nose allowed people using the Tuscany villa simulation to play an average of 94.2 seconds longer without feeling sick, while those playing the roller coaster game played an average of 2.2 seconds longer.

Yeah instead of throwing up immediately, you won’t throw up until 2.2 seconds in. Problem solved!

What about those, um, VR videos you can find online? I think 94 seconds is all I really need.

I don’t think you want a nose for those videos.

Don’t kink shame me

The “Tuscany Villa” is an ancient demo that I tried in the Oculus DK1 in like 2014 or so, and it made me sick for hours. It uses very fast continuous movement instead of teleport, and it has a set of stairs that will make you instantly throw up if you try to climb them.

It’s is perfectly possible to create VR experiences that will not make anyone nauseous, Moss being a good example.

So you are saying that 90s is a remarkable improvement?

I would expect a huge difference in the usefulness of a simulated nose, depending on the content. In a roller coaster the movement of your head (rotation) and the movement of the carriage (translation) are separate and clearly defined this way. You control the Rotation while the game controls the translation. I don’t know what this villa demo is, but depending on how the movement is controlled, an unintuitive and unnatural system is bound to make almost everyone nauseous.

Any app that moves the camera (or thw whole world) without user input will make people sick, it’s just a law of good VR. Any app that doesn’t render at a stable 72fps+ will make people sick. Any app that simulates things that make people sick in real life, will also make people sick in VR.

On the other hand, any app that keeps a stable 90fps, that uses teleport with a very short fade instead of thumbstick movement, and that never messes with the camera position, will not make people sick.

Most people who have tried VR and have felt sick, were basically victims of awful, non-optimized VR experiences, and awful VR hardware like Google Cardboard and variants.

I wonder if that is why Voldemort is so angry all the time. It’s because he’s nauseous.

Outside of that news article, I have literally never seen a single VR game use a virtual nose.

Eagle Flight uses it, but it is a beak instead of a nose.

Like with everything, it would cause an uproar in the game world unless it were controllable. I wonder if it would also require sacrificing some usable pixels? If virtual noses take off, I can see video games being designed around them, but it’s possible that integrating one into existing games is harder. Games have a development lead time measured in years so fundamental changes take a while to integrate.

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

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VR still makes 40-70% of players want to throw up, and that's a huge problem for the companies behind it(www.pcgamer.com)

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