41–50 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have an iPhone, check out vehicle motion cues in the accessibility settings. It helped me be able to use my phone as a passenger in a car.
Whoa! Where's that! Why do they have to advertise the latest Product Green or whatever skin and countless emoji and not useful features like this one!
You can add it to control center, either as its own toggle or via accessibility shortcuts menu
Spyro the Dragon, Half Life 2, Psychonauts, Portal, etc all make me insta-hurl. Meanwhile flying around a space station at a million miles per hour in 50FPS VR, smashing into surfaces and flipping around like an olympic gymnast.... totally fine.
I suspect it has to do with "camera movement I didn't control". I recall some research done by Valve during the VR development days that resulted in the "teleport" movement fix.
Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third person games and having the monitor further away with a high refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.
Narrow FoV ruins me. Even after all these years, Far Cry 2 on PC was one of the worst video game experiences ever for me because it had FoV tuned for couch gaming. IIRC I was able to somewhat fix it with a console command to adjust the FoV, but actions like sprinting which forced the FoV to something even narrower than default would undo that. And for me motion sickness isn't felt in my stomach, it's in my head. The…
Interesting, I thought having a too large FOV would result in motion sickness. Which is why when running you might reduce it, to compensate for the faster movement. I guess to clarify, you're mostly talking about PC gaming where you're sitting close to the screen, or is this something you also experience with console games? In VR, one method of reducing motion sickness is covering the edges of the screen during movem…
What probably happened in Far Cry was they had some stupid narrow FoV like 65 degrees and bump it up wider when sprinting, then when you stop sprinting it goes back to 65 which overrides the wider angle that parent commenter had set.
This even happened on some of the new Harry Potter rides at Universal Park. They have some sections that are kind of like a flight simulator with a wrap-around screen. The ride car is on some kind of articulated arm. The physical roller-coaster parts were totally fine, but this simulator parts made me feel sick. I had to close my eyes to keep from throwing up. I cannot handle a mismatch between my apparent motion and my felt motion. I will never play another first person VR game.
Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to try it, so a bunch of us gathered in his attic to give it a go. We were playing this tech demo where you would swing around on ropes to get between flying islands. Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue. I have…
One of the worst was a roller-coaster simulator. What really did it, I think was the lack of g-forces. If you have ever ridden a roller coaster, you are probably familiar with the crushing feeling after the drop as you go back up again, I was, and braced myself for it. Except... nothing happened, of course, but it felt really weird. Even weirder when looking to the side, the acceleration is all wrong! I lasted about two minutes before getting sick.
I took some time to recover then tried again. Now, I did much better. I wouldn't say it was comfortable, but it wasn't to the point of wanting to stop immediately. But also, the immersion was broken, I went from "I am in a roller coaster" to "I am watching a 3D movie", which made for a pretty boring experience. To be honest, I enjoyed the first two minutes where I had to call stop more than the half hour or so that followed.
I am sure the same thing happen with the rope swings. Like a roller coaster, rope swings alternate between weightlessness and high g-forces, which VR obviously cannot transcribe. But if for some reason, your brain didn't expect these sensations, then no problem.
That's the reason I think motion sickness is a real problem for VR, even if you can deal with it. Because the way you deal with it is essentially by breaking immersion, but immersion is the whole point of VR. It also applies to non-VR immersive games to a lesser extent.
So, yes, I think it is something we should take very seriously, first by fixing the "bugs": low framerates, unnatural camera movements, etc..., by adjusting gameplay to avoid unnecessary motion sickness, and finally by providing accessibility features.
It is a bit of a controversial take, as it may seem "woke" or something, as if caring about motion sickness will make the experience worse for those who aren't motion sick. But it is actually the opposite! Fighting against motion sickness breaks immersion, even at a subconscious level. The general idea is that motion sickness appears when the sensory experience is inconsistent, try to make the sensory experience as consistent as possible, both against motion sickness and for better immersion.
It's very unusual for being a third-person shooter, with a downward perspective (sometimes called "top-down", though you can adjust the angle slightly). This is tolerable for the lightsaber levels, but very annoying when your best weapon is a blaster and you want to shoot a distant enemy that you can't actually see, even if it's not nauseating for you.
[Besides that, it's also notorious for quite a few unintuitive pull/jump/climb puzzles, and an adaptable difficulty system which means that it will get harder as soon as you figure out something that works]
With all that said, I can't find anything there about motion sickness. I must just be missing it, right? Also, the only reference I find to VR are in relation to UI scale.