[flatline]

VR fundamentally conflicts with how the eyes focus, and it will never be solved with the current technology. For some people it's not a big problem, but a sizeable portion of the population will be unable to use VR at all or for any extended period without ending up with eye strain, headaches, nausea, and/or a general sense of malaise. It will always be something of a niche technology IMO - very cool, but of limited use.

It's the same basic problem that 3D films have. There's a reason that films are still shown in 2D. I have only ever watched one film in 3D and it was overall an unpleasant experience that I don't care to repeat.

Application developers could work to mitigate the worst of the effects on the eyes, and that's something that would help adoption. That has, however, not happened with films and I doubt it will with games - everyone seems to want to give people as great a sense of depth as possible, which simply doesn't work at all for many people.

AR largely eliminates these problems, and I'm inclined to agree there is more overall promise there.

[arielweisberg]

Do you own a CV1 or Vive? How many hours do you have in them? How many people have you demoed them to?

The last pair I demoed to spent 3 hours in the Rift, with a single person spending two hours without stopping. This was their first experience ever with VR.

VR sickness is a thing and it's varies from person to person and use case to use case, but I have never experienced (personally or vicariously) issues related to eye strain. The lenses are supposed to take care of that by allowing your eyes to focus at a distance.

One of the reasons room scale is making so much noise is that it's a very different experience in terms of VR sickness. Far fewer people get sick in room scale because positional and rotational tracking are good enough that it feels "right". There are fewer motion cues mismatched with visual cues because you are physically moving and the headset is tracking 1:1.

Room scale also has vastly improved immersiveness (now we are calling it presence) especially when combined with tracked controllers and environments that afford all the interactions you would expect from whatever environment you are in.

[marricks]

I've had similar experiences. Showed Edge of Nowhere to someone a week ago, they spent 3 solid hours in.

Tried talking to them to see if they wanted to go for a walk or something. No response, too engrossed in game.

[ethbro]

> Tried talking to them to see if they wanted to go for a walk or something. No response, [too] engrossed in game.

Future in a nutshell.

[steven777400]

The Fermi paradox has been solved.

[pushrax]

I've experimented with our own game engine and VR sickness. When the view doesn't accelerate relative to your real-world position, there is no issue. The problem starts when you're using external direct movement control, such as a mouse and keyboard. Moving forward and suddenly starting to move backwards is slightly uncomfortable. Rotating your head while rotating the mouse in the same direction is the worst for me.

It's the inverse of car sickness, and affects some people but not others. My coworker has no issue using full FPS mouse/kb controls within VR.

[peatmoss]

Tangential to your comment: In my experience with VR and IMAX 3D, I find VR much more palatable. For me the nearby focusing issues of VR aren't particularly physically straining / nauseating for me.

On the other hand, the entertainment value of 3D movies is greatly diminished for me because the 3D effect doesn't have realistic parallax. With 2D, my brain happily converts to 3D based on other cues. The 3D plus no parallax effect of 3D movies just gets stuck in some sort of uncanny valley for me.

This is just my anecdata for how the two technologies suffer different weaknesses as far as individuals are concerned. For someone else, I'm sure the near-focus issue would trump the fake parallax.

[burkaman]

Do you have some source for this insurmountable eye focusing problem? Even just an anecdotal one? I've never experienced it, none of my friends have, and the worst I've heard about online is motion sickness issues from certain types of games.

[flatline]

They are plentiful - for one example, see the article and comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795913

[burkaman]

That Quora post would be very convincing if I didn't own a VR device, but I don't know how to reconcile it with my own experience. Either I and all my friends (and a few thousand people online) are superhuman, or there are some important technical difference that the author is missing.

Thanks for the link though, that's a perspective I hadn't heard before.

[flatline]

Yeah, I'd be happy to be wrong, I've been casually reading about these devices since the 1980s and understood the problem to be more or less unassailable. I will likely still buy one of the new wave headsets at some point because the tech is really cool. So maybe there is a point that is good enough for casual use by large numbers of people. I had friends that couldn't play Wolfenstein and Doom when they came out due to motion sickness.

[sleepybrett]

I've seen the edges of this problem in elite dangerous. Occasionally they put a message in the top middle of the screen that my brain tells me is too close and I need to cross my eyes to see.. yet i don't have to.

It's a small thing though, but a noticeable one.

[rictic]

Anecdata: My partner can't watch 3d movies comfortably. Even the new, top of the line laser imax theater was unpleasant for him. He'll spend an hour and a half playing Job Simulator without even noticing the time pass, and with no apparent discomfort.

[thescriptkiddie]

The problem with 3D films has nothing to do with focus. It has to do with an incorrect projection method[0], inevitable IPD mismatch, narrow FOV, and the distortion inherent in sitting anywhere except the the exact center of the theater

As far a depth queues go, accommodation is a very weak one that your brain learns to ignore after a few seconds. If that wasn't the case, anyone wearing glasses would stumble into things constantly every time they put their glasses on or off. And this doesn't cause eye strain either, unless the focal plane is too close (perhaps less than 60 cm away), in which case it just feels like sitting too close to a computer monitor. The focal plane of the HTC Vive is approximately 75 cm away, which seems far enough. Obviously infinity would be better but compromises had to be made to keep the optics compact.

The real limiting factors on VR right now are the lack of full-body tracking[1] (you can see your hands but not your feet), the lack of simulated inertia[2] (virtual objects appear massless), and the lack of eye tracking[3] (convergence depth queue becomes incorrect as you move your eyes off center, avatars look dead). Solutions to all of these exist, it's just a matter of cost.

Keep in mind that VR is an extremely compelling experience right now. It's just that every feeling of presence is hard to hold on to for more than a few minutes at a time.

[0] http://doc-ok.org/?p=77

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldQDa-IMo7I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=610iTKlYBVM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRfthZaBBPY

[abelhabel]

In addition to this I think an inherent problem with occulus rift and similar technology is that as humans in the real world our vision is connected with our body. When we move our head, focus and so on we also use the rest of our body. A visual experience is not just visual but a full sensory experience with visual focus. Occulus rift, then, for example, only works with your eyes and so gives you a disconnected experience.

The VR technology tries to eliminate any real world point of reference which makes us use reference points inside the VR which, I believe, is one reason the experience for us gets disconnected.

The most common symptom of this is that you get nauseous. My guess is that the (sensory) disconnected experience makes us lose balance.

What would solve this problem, I think, is to make the VR work with the whole body. So wearing a suit with goggles and standing on a plate that moves as you move which gets translated to in-game movement.

[deelowe]

Actually, as the OP states, the issue is with focal distance.

The military has been using AR/VR in heads up displays for decades now and have had to work around these issues. When a user is forced to focus on a 2d projection of a 3d field, it creates all the issues people have with VR including: vertigo, nausea, eye strain, anxiety, and malaise. Motion exasperates the issue.

[augustt]

Vive has partially solved this problem with room scale - moving your goggles also moves your perspective in game.

[adam12]

> I have only ever watched one film in 3D

what movie?

[flatline]

The one with the blue people.

[SquirrelOnFire]

Lost your cherry to the Smurfs, eh?