[paperwasp42]

Another requirement that seems to get ignored is that you need to have the overwhelming majority of the public not feel sick when you use it. I recently had a friend bring a VR headset to a party for people to try out. About 15% of the people who tried it felt dizzy or nauseous after using it. (I did not try it because I know from experience I'll have a headache and be dizzy for hours afterward.)

Interestingly, similar to seasickness, the women who tried it seemed waaaaay more likely to be negatively impacted. Which opens up an entire other can of worms, such as: could an office get away with mandating the use of VR tech for meetings, when it has disproportionately negative impacts on women? (As a woman, I certainly hope they would not even try this!)

And as far as voluntary public adoption, having ~15% of your friend group unable to use a product is a fantastic way to kill network efforts. I doubt TikTok would be popular if 15% of the population got horrible headaches and nausea after watching a video on the platform.

Shockingly, no one seems to be talking about this aspect of VR. Which seems to be a really big red flag.

[koala_man]

Most of the VR software I've tried have anti-nausea features like teleportation and unmoving frames of reference, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that no one's talking about it.

I think the hope was that some combination of hardware and software would solve the problem.

[itake]

My understanding of what causes the nausea is the render latency. The brain thinks its been poisoned due to our vision and the vestibular system misaligned, and so it triggers nausea to expel the poison.

I am skeptical we can get hardware fast enough such that these systems don't trigger a false positive for all people.

[greycol]

I haven't suffered from this but anecdotally proper calibration as well as better tracking and frame rate do have a significant effect on whether people suffer such side effects. The Quest series (which if it was bought to a party is my guess on what was used) are great value for money and are competent VR devices (and leading in some ways) but they make compromises to achieve this and I wouldn't rule out the ability to comfortably use VR based on a bad experience with such a device.

Having said that I'd agree network effects for personal uptake are killed by "Just spend 3x as much on the headset and peripherals and have a computer that cost 4x as much and you can use it in a dedicated room you've set up your tracking lighthouses in".

[jhou2]

I agree. I get motion sickness from playing FPS games. The symptoms improve, but it takes a while to adjust. Some people have no problem with it, whereas for some it is completely impossible to overcome. It's hard for me to see broad adoption of VR with the current technology.

[reilly3000]

Nausea is definitely in the spotlight for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom. He’s a performance tuning genius and nausea has been one of the biggest engineering issues he and his team have tackled. A brilliant CTO cannot make a hard problem go away, but he and his team have been able to move it to a far better place than where it was back when I tried the DK1.

You raise excellent points and it’s plain to see that John’s work has put him at the fore of violent masculine tropes as entertainment. The whole idea of endless slaughter of “evil” humanoids feels a bit more wrong than it used to, and certainly wouldn’t be the mark I want to leave in the world. I’m not calling him an infamous misogynist, but he’s no infamous feminist either. I hope that people keep holding people to account, and I hope for their sakes they don’t intend on leaving behind 15%+ of their market simply due to malicious or incidental ignorance. I hope a lot of things for them though lol.

I did some brief fact checking for this and came across an ancient 4chan screenshot. I debated sharing it but I think it’s good evidence that these discussion has been in the public conscience for a long time:

https://imgur.io/yDqMRxw

Research confirms your concern:

https://venturebeat.com/games/a-survey-about-vr-sickness-and...

If some make decision maker forced an organization to adopt VR and it’s women found it unusable, I would think that ADA would be a route through which there should be grounds for protections and accomplishments.

Frankly, it’s not fully fixed, and it might not be fixable. Our bodies are far more clever than the gods of gaming have presumed. We do proprioception with our toes and ears and sense our surroundings with the tiny hairs on our arms. As long as VR creates dissonance for processing info from the nervous system the more the cerebellum starts to get cranky, and tipsy.

[Maursault]

> for John Carmack who’s the progenitor of a shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines, starting with Doom.

First of all, Wolfenstein 3D, which used Carmack's engine, predated Doom by a year, but even Wolf3D wasn't the first 3D game or 3D engine. Activision's 1991 Hunter and Mindscapes's 1988 Colony both had very similar graphics and play as Wolf3D. 3D gaming and FPS goes back at least to Atari's 1980 BattleZone, but most place FPS origin with Maze in 1973.[1]

Second of all, by my count, Carmack developed (or also worked on) six distinct 3D game engines. There are an awful lot of 3D game engines now, well over 100 listed here.[3] I think by "shockingly large percentage," you must have instead meant, "small percentage." Maybe Carmack holds the world record for most 3D engines developed by one individual, but it could never be a "shockingly large percentage of all 3D game engines," even with id's OSS releases and subsequent variants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_(1973_video_game)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

[reilly3000]

I should have been far more specific: FPS, and not quite _3D_ at the outset...

You're quite right, especially relative to what I had stated. Its just that the impact of John's decision to GPL Doom and Quake engines gave rise to a tremendous ecosystem that many people don't realize. For instance, GoldSrc which forked Quake is the foundation for the Source and Source 2 engines which power at least 60% of all hours played on Valve in the last 30 days. https://steamcharts.com/top

His patterns have been wildly studied and reused. The word I did use carefully is progenitor. Id engine's direct impact is relatively small, but its legacy is vast.

[vlovich123]

What kind of VR headset was this? In my experience Quest has the most comfortable experience ever and I’m prone to nausea.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Oculus.

[stephc_int13]

I've tried an Occulus at a salon a few years ago, got very sick after five minutes. The game I tried was SuperHot. I genuinely hated it.

I will only reluctantly try again a VR headset; this is unfortunately not the kind of sickness you forget.

[vlovich123]

Quest/Quest 2 specifically? Rift S? Rift CV1? Or the original Rift? I ask because the software and hardware has improved drastically. I'd be pretty surprised if you get sick from a Quest.

[baby]

I played that game and didn’t get sick at all. It was actually really fun and i was crawling on the floor sometimes

[dk1138]

Additionally, as someone with very small pupillary distance, none of the existing headsets on the market are applicable to me. At this point I've written off VR entirely as I don't think any company will ever design for someone like me.