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VR motion sickness is “no longer the hardware’s fault,” says Valve dev
One of the greatest challenges facing the half-dozen or so virtual reality (VR) headsets currently in development is the tendency for VR to sometimes cause extreme motion sickness in users. There are numerous factors behind what causes VR sickness, but Valve Corp.’s Chet Faliszek thinks that users should be holding developers accountable for discomfort, rather than VR devices or the medium itself.
“The idea that VR must get you sick is BS,” Faliszek recently said at EGX (via GamesIndustry.biz). “We have a bunch of people who will come in for demos who don’t want to do demos. In a party of ten people who come in, there will always be someone who says, ‘Oh, I can’t do this. I’ll get sick, I’ll get sick, I can’t do this.’ That’s because of expectations either because of what they’ve seen before or what they’ve heard.”
“As consumers and people in the community, hold developers to it,” he continued. “They shouldn’t be making you sick. It’s no longer the hardware’s fault any more. It’s the developers making choices that are making you sick. Tell them that you don’t want that.”
Oculus VR Chief Scientist Michael Abrash also recently spoke about the effects of VR on the mind and body, explaining that most discomfort is caused by the body’s vestibular system, which senses acceleration and changes in direction. During a keynote at Oculus Connect 2 last week, Abrash explained that VR sickness is primarily caused by the disconnect between what the eyes see and what the vestibular sense feels, and aside from avoiding visual motion that exacerbate this problem, there is currently no solution in sight.
“The only conceivable way right now to get fine control [on the vestibular sense] is to implant electrodes inside the skull, and I don’t think we can get 100 percent adoption on that even from hardcore gamers,” Abrash joked. “I’m not happy leaving the vestibular sense to future VR research, but right now there’s no traction on the problem.”
Valve’s own VR device, HTC Vive, is scheduled for limited release later this year, and earlier this year Valve founder Gabe Newell claimed in an interview with The New York Times that Vive had eliminated VR sickness, saying that”zero percent of people get motion sick” when using the device.
You can watch Faliszek’s full EGX talk below:
Photo by pestoverde
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