Crowds are so funny. I swear there was one HN thread recently where the majority of comments declared the Oculus a mere substitute for ipecac syrup. In this thread, it's the coming of the New Earth. As someone who luckily doesn't experience motion sickness at all, is greatly looking forward to the hi-res Oculus, and frankly to a time when I can spend more time in VR than not, the optimism in this thread makes me happy.
This is speculative, but it seems to me like 99% of the motion sickness that happens in the Rift is because there's only rotation tracking--no motion tracking.
When we look around, we move our head subtly side to side and forward and back. The Rift dev kit doesn't do that--it just tracks what direction you're pointed in. My feeling is that causes a big chunk of the motion sickness.
The production unit will include motion tracking. As long as game titles take advantage of it, and don't do stuff like shake the camera, or move it too much, or do too many cuts, then I think 99% of people will be fine. For those titles at least. Other titles will push the limits.
I've had a lot of time with the development version of the Oculus Rift, and there's more things than just that which will cause headaches/motion sickness. Many things where the eyes and other sensors disagree will cause headaches.
In game side to side motion, rapid changes in heights, UI that is not fixed in world space, things that are too bright, taking camera control away from the player (slow horizontal rotation seems to be okay, vertical rotations cause immediate headaches in my testing), FPS lower than 60, etc. The FPS one is particularly interesting I was mirroring on a monitor, and I couldn't tell that the FPS was low(it was running at around 35fps), but in the Rift is was super obvious something was wrong.
I attended a talk for developers given by the founder recently, and he mentioned that stairs also are troublesome, and ramps work better right now. Something to do with how the brain has been trained to know the sensation of climbing stairs.
Like you, I have a strong stomach but I also couldn't use the Oculus Rift past 15 minutes before wanting to puke. I wonder if the new prototypes solve this problem.
This is speculative, but it seems to me like 99% of the motion sickness that happens in the Rift is because there's only rotation tracking--no motion tracking.
When we look around, we move our head subtly side to side and forward and back. The Rift dev kit doesn't do that--it just tracks what direction you're pointed in. My feeling is that causes a big chunk of the motion sickness.
The production unit will include motion tracking. As long as game titles take advantage of it, and don't do stuff like shake the camera, or move it too much, or do too many cuts, then I think 99% of people will be fine.
