[haalia]

> The tech works extremely well at making me feel sick.

But you realize this is a you problem, right? Outside the handful of people who get motion sick with VR, the tech is rock solid. Everyone who tries an Index is blown away by how immersive the experience is.

> VR chat is about as interesting as second life, and any metaverse that follows will follow the same path.

You couldn't be more wrong. There's a reason Facebook rebranded to Meta, and Microsoft just purchased Activision with designs on their own metaverse. Big players are putting serious money behind this, and I like those odds.

[dmarchand90]

The literature says it's 22-80% of people get sick using VR. Much more than a handful https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91573-w

[moron4hire]

"Sick" is definitely a relative term. I've given literally thousands of demos to people--some of which were pretty janky, back in the early days--and I've yet to see anyone throw up from VR.

There is a very small minority of people who put on the headset and immediately can't stand it. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 people in the last 6 years, so it's definitely less than 1%.

Depending on content, I've seen about 50% of women and 25% of men experience mild discomfort after using the headset for about 30 minutes. Studies on simulator sickness include that in "feeling sick".

My current project is not able to use every single sim-sickness mitigating strategy available, due to the sort of source data we're using (a lot of flat, 360 imagery in a multi-user tour-like scenario), but even there, we've only had 1 out of 100 people express actual feelings of nausea after using the headset. If people report any discomfort at all, it's on their first time, after they've not heeded our warning to limit their first interaction to 30 minutes, and then they only mention feeling a little light headed.

People report feelings of nausea after playing 1st-person shooter video games on large screen monitors or watching shaky action movies at movie theaters. This is not a problem unique to VR.

[rpdillon]

The study was designed to find factors that correlate with VR sickness, and as such, only studied 83 people, all "highly stressed", and showed shaking videos as their methodology. I think it would be a statistical mistake to generalize from this study.

[pharke]

Anecdotal, but a lot of people seem to be able to get over their VR motion sickness. I personally did by just playing the janky Rocket Mode in Richie's Plank Experience a lot. Same goes for heights in VR, at first it's terrifying but if you repeatedly expose yourself to it it loses its effect. There's also a story of a VR dev who built a demo to get rid of his motion sickness, it involved just repeatedly dropping his POV from a height and then looping back to the top. Granted, some people will probably never get rid of their motion sickness for whatever reason but I think those will be in the small minority.

[bni]

I got rid of VR motion sickness after a while. Same thing with DOOM back in 1994 or so.

There is a problem though with a lot of crap games not implemented with comfort in mind and badly optimised. Stuttering will get you feel bad fast.

[mercer]

To me it sounds similar to all the reports of motion sickness (or worse effects) from playing Doom back in the day. I also suspect most people who do suffer from it can get used to it over time.

OTOH, considering how many people keep having motion sickness in cars (especially when not driving and reading and whatnot), perhaps for some people the issues remain.

[randomhodler84]

Zuck rebranded because Facebook has a bad rep. Microsoft bought AB for their IP and lib, I don’t believe they do any VR stuff. They do online gaming well and will be very successful with Xbox.

I don’t think we will be seeing competitive esports in VR, as we don’t see competitive Wii Bowling as an esport.

[T-A]

> Microsoft bought AB for their IP and lib, I don’t believe they do any VR stuff.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/967490/Microsoft_Maquette...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/altsp...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh

[rejschaap]

It would make more sense that "they" refers to Activision Blizzard. They do very little VR stuff compared to Microsoft.

[T-A]

Doesn't really make sense anyway. If you're building a VR world, you need to fill it with something.