The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"
The bad news is that while better tech and better design can significantly reduce motion sickness, I doubt we will ever completely eliminate it.
The really bad news is that nausea is funny. It's great for catchy headlines and quippy comments. I'm really afraid that the Rift will get a reputation as a "vomit helmet" and that will lead the masses to dismiss it. That would be a tragedy.
It's really important PR for VR to get the word out: If you feel sick, stop. Don't try to push through, you'll make it really bad. Try again much later. With practice, it will get better and better. When you get over VR sickness, all kinds of awesomeness awaits!
> The good news about VR sickness is that most people get over it with practice. Not only that, but there are many reports from Oculus users that warming up to VR cured their motion sickness outside of VR! As in "I can read in the car for the first time!"
I think this is might be correct, I remember getting motion sickness from playing Doom on a big monitor the first time. And several years later I was playing a lot of FPS games with no ill effects at all.
But it takes a person with strong willpower to practice! I got pretty bad motion sickness from the Rift, and it left me completely incapacitated for hours afterwards. Not only did I feel like puking but I couldn't do any work because my eyes couldn't focus on "2d" text on a monitor (we have a Rift devkit at the office, I made the mistake of using it in the middle of the day).
And I'm not a person with particularly bad motion sickness problems. There are sensitive people who will definitely not touch any VR helmet after the first time they've tried it and become sick for the rest of the day.
There will have to be improvements to the Rift hardware itself, the driver and peripheral software and the games that support it. And more games will have to be concerned about the physical correctness of movement, because it seems to be a factor in VR sickness.
The bad news is that while better tech and better design can significantly reduce motion sickness, I doubt we will ever completely eliminate it.
The really bad news is that nausea is funny. It's great for catchy headlines and quippy comments. I'm really afraid that the Rift will get a reputation as a "vomit helmet" and that will lead the masses to dismiss it. That would be a tragedy.
It's really important PR for VR to get the word out: If you feel sick, stop. Don't try to push through, you'll make it really bad. Try again much later. With practice, it will get better and better. When you get over VR sickness, all kinds of awesomeness awaits!