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Motion sickness accessibility in video games

madelinemiller.dev

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were talking specifically about the VR mechanics though, not gaming in general.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#72

Microsoft has amazing resources[0] for gaming accessibility and also provide services for auditing accessibility during development. While I haven't been directly involved in a project using them I did take part of their report for one of the games developed at my previous job (Thunderful) and was really impressed by how thorough it was. With all that said, I can't find anything there about motion sickness. I must ju…

A friend, whom works in accessibility, has also spoken highly of there efforts. Strange they don't have motion sickness included.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#73
post #2

Add a nose? https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2015/Q1/vir...

I work in immersive video, and the tiniest of vibrations can be a problem. The idea of adding a nose is fascinating, and could be easily accomplished with a layer on top of the video. I have an experiment to try...

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#74
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 e…

The reason that Jet Island doesn't make you sick is mostly that it does a lot of work to tie the movement to your physical actions. Games like Gorilla Tag have done well here also. The major insult to our vestibular system via visual input is when visuals change without any corresponding physical action... the classic example is vection when a train moves and your car stays still. You have no other physical inputs so the brain says "hol up".

Ironically, we don't puke every time we accelerate a car, and that's because we get to feel the pressure of the seat against us, maybe the decision to push the accelerator pedal, etc.

It doesn't hurt that Jet Island puts your hands right in front of you so you have a frame of reference. Frame of reference is another cue to helping with VR sickness. Cockpits are our friend.

But yeah, it sounds like you've pushed your personal boundaries pretty far. To be clear, I have no problem with enthusiasts testing themselves. The issue is when giant companies like Meta try to mainstream things and they flip the responsibility onto players. I don't appreciate that.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#75
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…

Hi, I'm the author of the article, thanks for your comment. I definitely agree I didn't mention as much around VR as I would've liked, mostly as it's an area that I've paid a lot less attention to in recent years. I was an early adopter of it (as a developer), but mostly dropped off when the industry moved away from teleport-style locomotion. I'm honestly really glad that research is actually going into this in the VR/AR space.

The article was primarily focused on non-VR games and the various accessibility settings that can greatly diminish the problem, but are often an afterthought even in games that are praised for pushing accessibility. Eg, the recent Indiana Jones game inspired me to write this article, as it's being heavily praised for pushing accessibility standards in many ways, but lacks accessibility options to disable the head bobbing and weapon sway when moving.

Something I've become fairly aware of are all the little "quirks" in the ways I like to play games that I've developed over the years, that I hadn't realised were actually to reduce motion sickness. I do definitely plan on going back and updating the article to include some of my learnings since writing it. Eg, I always play in windowed 1440p on a 27inch 4K monitor because it then takes up less of my total vision, which I guess is a workaround when having a display that's too large for the sitting distance.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#77
In the 90s I had a 14" monitor, so one wouldn't think that gaming would be a problem but some FPS games (Hexen I believe was one of them) would just make me feel nauseous after just a few minutes of play, while others never caused it (I played way too much Rise of the Triad and DN3D, then later HL and Counterstrike)

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#78
Thought I was entirely immune to this. Until I played Mirrors edge.

Whatever they did there with the parkour movement emulation triggers something.

Not bad so could still play but definitely some unpleasant sensation undertones in there.

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