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by 6stringmerc 3339 days ago
VR is the Virtual Boy all over again until the physiological hostilities of humans to reject the thing after 30 minutes can be mollified with 80% applicability to the population at large. From what I gather, only about 10% of the population can stand being in a VR environment between 15-30 minutes, and even then have to break.

Very limiting in use-case scenarios for "grand worlds" if you have to pause every 15 or 30 minutes to not puke and/or go cross eyed.

4 comments

> From what I gather, only about 10% of the population can stand being in a VR environment between 15-30 minutes, and even then have to break.

I get intense motion sickness normally but can spend an hour or two in VR just fine. 90fps and teleport mechanics go a long way towards comfort. Considering there are almost 1m owners of Vives, PSVR's and Rifts combined I seriously doubt there was a 90% return rate here.

> only about 10% of the population can stand being in a VR environment between 15-30 minutes, and even then have to break.

From my personal experience it's much much higher than 10%. Just about no one who has tried my vive reported motion sickness at any length of time. Something I do commonly hear from people who have just used vr for the first time is that for a brief period after the real world seems to take on a surreal quality, but as far as I can tell that effect stops happening fairly quickly with experience.

It's quite possible that "vr-sickness" is something you get over with more experience, like how most children grow out of car sickness. In any case there's a whole bag of tricks to help with vr-sickness that haven't been commonly applied at all yet (virtual noses anyone?). The field is in its infancy and it's unfair to judge it's future by fairly small and solvable problems that only exist right now.

Could be; I can play for many hours and I love it. I see what is great about it. Are there any non anecdotal sources for this by the way; anecdotally, non of my friends have that issue. With the Virtual Boy (I have a few of them in working condition) I definitely feel bad.

With the PSVR or the Oculus no problems at all. The helmets can get annoyingly heavy after long play but besides that...

> only about 10% of the population

Isn't that due to the latency of the current generation VR? I think I remember Carmack tweeting something similar to that...