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Motion sickness accessibility in video games

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Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#61

Post by sumtechguy »

mystified5016 wrote: post #59
donatj wrote: post #10

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…

With a lazy eye, the brain tends to just outright ignore the conflicting signals and you end up only seeing out of one eye. My guess is that the IPD was the primary problem for everyone else. That's real easy to get wrong and it can cause massive eye strain as your brain tries to force your eyes to focus on an image that is geometrically impossible to focus. In your case, you probably ended up just using one eye and…

I too have lazy eye. I get wicked motion sickness from most FPS games. So I would not equate too much to that hypothesis.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#62

Post by nottorp »

foxyv wrote: post #57
nottorp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I haven't tried any flight sims. I guess those would be much easier on the brain because they don't really simulate your head moving but an enclosure you're sitting in moving. I also hear VR is great for Euro Truck Simulator. Which simulates the same thing, vehicle driving. Maybe I'll even try one day, but the only PC option left on the market requires a Facebook (or Meta, I don't care how they call it so don't c…

When you first use VR for flight sims it is WILD. When you roll the plane you actually feel it in your vestibular system. Eventually you learn that it's not real and you don't get that vertigo feeling anymore but until then it's exhausting. You only need Facebook for Oculus products. The rest mostly use SteamVR. I originally used an HP Reverb G2 but it was discontinued and now I'm looking into a PiMax Crystal. I hear…

Oh right. Valve Index. I forgot there are some non Occulus products still in the market.

But I also remembered why i stopped looking. Everyone thinks you want those motion controllers and want to clear a space in front of the pc/tv to dance around.

I just want to sit in my chair and command my spaceship/giant mech/truck. I don't want the fancy controllers and I especially don't want to rearrange my house around a VR headset.

And yes, they're -ing expensive. And they probably require an even more expensive video card (i have a 4060 now and i'm not willing to pay more than that for pretty poligons).

Add to that my motion sickness that means short sessions.

Maybe in 5 years...

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#63

Post by conductr »

Triphibian wrote: post #11

I have found that third-person games that involve a lot of looking up and down -- largely anything with crafting/building or picking up loot -- really hurts me. On the other hand Death Stranding worked great -- largely because you don't have to angle the camera up and down to pick stuff up off the ground. I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any trouble.

> I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any trouble.

Could also be the “problem”, your eye muscles are weak in the up/down direction. You can do exercises to build it up

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#64

Post by conductr »

rob74 wrote: post #39

Interesting that this is always a big topic when discussing VR, but never really mentioned in connection to "traditional" games. I guess more people get motion sickness from VR, but unfortunately the article doesn't contain numbers on either...

I don’t know if it’s motion sickness for me but I just don’t like having a bright screen right in my eye. Bad memories of burnt feeling retinas from CRT monitors back in the day.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#65

Post by seabass-labrax »

fatnoah wrote: post #40
donatj wrote: post #10

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…

> To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know. I find this fascinating. Reading in cars, riding in boats in heavy waves, and anything like that does not give me motion sickness. I made it through 45 years of life without even knowing what that was. However, ten minutes of Minecraft in VR was enough to make me sick to my stomach. (It was also amazin…

I believe (as a layman) that motion sickness in vehicles is caused by a mismatch between what the vestibular system perceives and what the eyes do. However, headset-based VR systems have an additional issue called vergence-accommodation conflict, which is where the focus of each individual eye isn't at the same distance as the stereoscopic vision of both eyes together.

My prediction is that one day (in twenty years, perhaps) we'll have miniature holograms for displays and thus get a proper match between accommodation and vergence!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#66

Post by extraduder_ire »

dni0 wrote: post #42

Does anyone else have a backwards brain when it comes to traditional games vs VR? 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 think VR sickness is very different to motion sickness in traditional games. I've gotten VR sickness a few times. (first time on a DK2 in HL episode 2 during the car toss sequence because the FoV changes)

Watching a streamer play Hyperbolica gave me motion sickness, but playing the same game myself in VR gave me no issues at all.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#68

Post by quag »

ziml77 wrote: post #20

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…

Motion sickness in Far Cry is why I stopped playing first person or any 3D games. It has taken about 20 years before I seriously tried again and figured out that with higher frame rates and wide enough FoV I could actually play them again.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#69

Post by bentt »

This is an important topic and I don't think this article is really getting into all the important things that have been learned about it over the past few years, primarily by VR developers.

Too much of the current dialogue is about how players can "get over" it. This is silly. There are demonstrable, proven things which cause motion sickness via the visual system. Unfortunately there are some irreconcilable issues with doing certain activities (ie moving/turning without player input) in VR games so it's either abandon those activities or blame the users. Considering Meta has now poured nearly $85bn into their AR/VR effort, there's a lot on the line and the last thing they're going to do is admit that the technology is fundamentally limited to certain activities.

Here's an early video from Oculus when it was still a bunch of enthusiasts chasing something magic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DgfiDEqfaY&t=1356s

But nowadays you have people that play VR and have "VR Legs", and then you have the rest of us who have normal human brains and normal human eyes and don't want to take it upon ourselves to relearn how the world works so we don't puke when playing an FPS.

The bottom line is that the human visual system is very sensitive to acceleration, especially in the peripheral vision. Acceleration can be linear, angular, or even in odd dimensions like during an FOV shift which god forbid a game would do without telling you.

The easiest thing you can do to save yourself is get a smaller display or sit further away so that your peripheral vision is spared any of the motion and your fovea is gathering the majority of it. This is why "tunnel vision" in VR works for some people.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#70

Post by gamedever »

bentt wrote: post #69

This is an important topic and I don't think this article is really getting into all the important things that have been learned about it over the past few years, primarily by VR developers. Too much of the current dialogue is about how players can "get over" it. This is silly. There are demonstrable, proven things which cause motion sickness via the visual system. Unfortunately there are some irreconcilable issues w…

I think there's a middle ground

Provide options for people that get motion sickness the same way we provide accessibility options. Let those of us that get less motion sickness get the "full experience".

So far I'm lucky. I've only got sick in VR twice. Once from trying Breath of the Wild via the Labo VR kit. Once trying a hacked GTA-5 VR. Both made me feels incredibly sick, far beyond what I'd have expected before experiencing it. So, I'm super sad that some people experience this more and I hope we can find ways to accommodate them.

That said, I played Half-Life: Alyx back when it came out. In my mind I assumed teleporting, the default, was the way to play because I assumed stick motion (normal joypad controller based FPS motion) would be more sickening. But, for me, it turned out after a few levels, teleporting felt worse than sliding. I think because each teleport was so disorienting.

Strangely, I got zero motion sickness from Jet Island. One of my top 5 VR experiences of all time and at a glance would also seem to be the most likely game to make people sick. Why it doesn't I'm not sure other than the obvious (fast framerate)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/587220/Jet_Island/

To add, I got a 38inch wide monitor. Playing any first person came on that screen full screen makes me sick. I have to play all PC games in a window now. I think if I switched back to a 27inch monitor I wouldn't have that issue.

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