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by berberous 3740 days ago
What rig? What games?

I got some truly awful nausea that lasted nearly 48 hours! I felt like I broke my brain. But I was running a DK2 on a wayyy underpowered rMBP on early firmware.

I quickly learned: (1) if a game has judder or is otherwise not running smoothly, do not play it; and (2) do not move unnaturally (i.e. no fast strafing or running like in a FPS).

When I followed those two rules, the nausea disappeared and when I felt presence it was mind blowing.

I don't doubt that some people may have unavoidable motion sickness, but I wonder how many reports are due to people like me running early dev kit software on underpowered hardware, and playing games with mechanics not meant for VR. There may be some subset that just can't play without some nausea, but the same is true for riding in cars or on boats.

1 comments

It certainly wasn't an underpowered rig. It has a Titan X GPU and top of the line Broadwell or Haswell CPU. I tried some of the Oculus demos as well as War Thunder flight sim. DK2 was miles better than DK1, but the nausea was still there.

You're right about FPS strafing and some other unnatural movement, that seems to make things worse for some people.

Additionally, I think the situation might improve if you really take the time to adjust the lenses and the headset to match your head and eyes. This makes the Oculus headset a "personal" device in that you can't really borrow or share one, though.

However, I got terrible nausea that lasted for the rest of the day and rendered me incapable of doing any work (fucked up my eyes so I couldn't focus on text) after just 30 minutes of play. I'll need a pretty good reason to try it again.