[HN Gopher] Motion sickness accessibility in video games
___________________________________________________________________
Motion sickness accessibility in video games
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-01-31 15:20 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (madelinemiller.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (madelinemiller.dev)
| markx2 wrote:
| Add a nose?
|
| https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2015/Q1/vir...
| jrmg wrote:
| From my reading the nose is stationary - I wonder if just
| sitting a cut-out nose shape directly in front of the display
| would help some people?
| elwillbo wrote:
| I work in immersive video, and the tiniest of vibrations can be
| a problem. The idea of adding a nose is fascinating, and could
| be easily accomplished with a layer on top of the video. I have
| an experiment to try...
| foxyv wrote:
| The one thing that will universally get me in a video game is
| head bob mixed with weapon sway. My brain will nope the heck out
| of those games almost instantly. I will happily ride the worst
| roller coasters, boats, busses, and cars I can find and get zero
| motion sickness. One minute playing Call of Duty? Done.
|
| FOV helps with some games, but the bob is always what gets me. I
| would love the option to turn stuff like that off.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I love Halo because it doesn't trigger any motion sickness for
| me at all. No head bob.
|
| I played a top-down 3D RTS once and had to turn it off because
| the camera had just enough acceleration/momentum/drift that it
| was triggering dizziness.
| nottorp wrote:
| > head bob mixed with weapon sway
|
| That's the only thing that ever bothered me in a game displayed
| on a monitor, when combined with underpowered hardware for said
| game and thus low fps.
|
| Fortunately the game had the option to turn off bobbing/swaying
| so I could keep playing it until i upgraded the video card.
|
| I'm also one of the unfortunates that can't stand more than
| like 30 min in a VR headset sadly.
| foxyv wrote:
| Yeah, frame drops hurt my brain a little. What's funny is
| that I'm totally fine in VR after using it for a few months
| for flight sims. Although, after the initial novelty wears
| off I just prefer head tracking and a flat screen now.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm I haven't tried any flight sims. I guess those would be
| much easier on the brain because they don't really simulate
| your head moving but an enclosure you're sitting in moving.
|
| I also hear VR is great for Euro Truck Simulator. Which
| simulates the same thing, vehicle driving.
|
| Maybe I'll even try one day, but the only PC option left on
| the market requires a Facebook (or Meta, I don't care how
| they call it so don't correct me) account doesn't it?
| foxyv wrote:
| When you first use VR for flight sims it is WILD. When
| you roll the plane you actually feel it in your
| vestibular system. Eventually you learn that it's not
| real and you don't get that vertigo feeling anymore but
| until then it's exhausting.
|
| You only need Facebook for Oculus products. The rest
| mostly use SteamVR. I originally used an HP Reverb G2 but
| it was discontinued and now I'm looking into a PiMax
| Crystal. I hear the Valve Index is also pretty good. But
| VR is just so dang expensive.
| nottorp wrote:
| Oh right. Valve Index. I forgot there are some non
| Occulus products still in the market.
|
| But I also remembered why i stopped looking. Everyone
| thinks you want those motion controllers and want to
| clear a space in front of the pc/tv to dance around.
|
| I just want to sit in my chair and command my
| spaceship/giant mech/truck. I don't want the fancy
| controllers and I especially don't want to rearrange my
| house around a VR headset.
|
| And yes, they're -ing expensive. And they probably
| require an even more expensive video card (i have a 4060
| now and i'm not willing to pay more than that for pretty
| poligons).
|
| Add to that my motion sickness that means short sessions.
|
| Maybe in 5 years...
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| The head bob ruined the modern Tomb Raider games for me. I had
| to return them after less than 30 minutes played because I was
| getting ready to vomit.
|
| That you can't turn it off makes it completely unaccessible to
| me. And the camera's bobbing around like a drunkard.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| I can't play any first person shooters because of motion
| sickness, it's quite annoying. Anyone else in this situation that
| managed to figure out something?
| Finster wrote:
| Depends on the game, but usually turning up the FOV to much
| higher than most defaults will help a lot. But screen size,
| etc. will have an impact as well.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Exposure therapy helps for me. If I dont play video games for a
| long period of time I'm always a lot more nauseous coming back.
| But easing into it over time helps.
| jalict wrote:
| Been gaming since forever and in the last 5 years I started
| getting nausated 70% of games I have played (also old once
| that were fine) and generally this is also what is working
| for me -- just a little bit here and there it gets a lot
| better.
|
| I understand the article talks against this, but I am
| grateful that I am able to do this, but I wouldn't recommend
| it for everyone.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Turning off motion blur and other high end graphic effects can
| really help, especially if they are hurting your framerate
|
| I find if I'm getting a consistent framerate then the effects
| don't bother me as much, but motion blur plus a sudden
| framerate drop is guaranteed to make me nauseous
|
| My wife on the other hand cannot handle motion blur effects at
| all, and any time we play a game together I turn it off
| immediately
| legitster wrote:
| I find that a smaller monitor, further away, and on lower
| graphics settings helps.
|
| If you limit your brain's exposure to visual information, it's
| less likely to get confused.
| shrikant wrote:
| FWIW, I've tried everything suggested in the replies to you so
| far, and nothing's worked. I've just given up trying to play
| any first-person POV games, sadly.
| gorpnuts wrote:
| 55 years old and I've never played a first person shooter because
| of I get extreme nausea after about a minute.
| donatj wrote:
| Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first
| publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to
| try it, so a bunch of us gathered in his attic to give it a go.
| We were playing this tech demo where you would swing around on
| ropes to get between flying islands.
|
| Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I
| played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue.
|
| I have a lazy eye. It's fine most of the time but when I get
| tired it just drifts off into the outer corner and makes me look
| scary. My guess at the time was that my brain was just used to
| getting signals from my eyes that didn't make sense.
|
| To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my
| phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| If you have an iPhone, check out vehicle motion cues in the
| accessibility settings. It helped me be able to use my phone as
| a passenger in a car.
| nottorp wrote:
| Whoa! Where's that! Why do they have to advertise the latest
| Product Green or whatever skin and countless emoji and not
| useful features like this one!
| wlesieutre wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA
|
| You can add it to control center, either as its own toggle
| or via accessibility shortcuts menu
| nottorp wrote:
| Found it and set it to "automatic" for now.
|
| It wasn't there last time i went into accessibility to
| enable reduce motion. That one not because it gave me
| motion sickness but because the background parallax
| scrolling is pointless and annoying.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| It's new in iOS 18, sometime last fall
| imzadi wrote:
| I had some motion sickness when I first started VR. I made a
| little thing that I found on reddit that helped. It's just a
| vibration disk hooked to a battery and attached to a headband.
| You position it behind your ear on the mastoid bone. I don't
| know why it works, but it does. I eventually got my VR legs and
| can play for hours without motion sickness, most of the time.
| Some games still eff me up, though; like The Break In, which I
| love, but can only play for an hour before I get sick.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read
| my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know.
|
| I find this fascinating. Reading in cars, riding in boats in
| heavy waves, and anything like that does not give me motion
| sickness. I made it through 45 years of life without even
| knowing what that was. However, ten minutes of Minecraft in VR
| was enough to make me sick to my stomach.
|
| (It was also amazing, BTW)
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I believe (as a layman) that motion sickness in vehicles is
| caused by a mismatch between what the vestibular system
| perceives and what the eyes do. However, headset-based VR
| systems have an additional issue called vergence-
| accommodation conflict, which is where the focus of each
| individual eye isn't at the same distance as the stereoscopic
| vision of both eyes together.
|
| My prediction is that one day (in twenty years, perhaps)
| we'll have miniature holograms for displays and thus get a
| proper match between accommodation and vergence!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-
| accommodation_conflic...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| In VR, some games make me sick, though most of them don't.
|
| One of the worst was a roller-coaster simulator. What really
| did it, I think was the lack of g-forces. If you have ever
| ridden a roller coaster, you are probably familiar with the
| crushing feeling after the drop as you go back up again, I was,
| and braced myself for it. Except... nothing happened, of
| course, but it felt really weird. Even weirder when looking to
| the side, the acceleration is all wrong! I lasted about two
| minutes before getting sick.
|
| I took some time to recover then tried again. Now, I did much
| better. I wouldn't say it was comfortable, but it wasn't to the
| point of wanting to stop immediately. But also, the immersion
| was broken, I went from "I am in a roller coaster" to "I am
| watching a 3D movie", which made for a pretty boring
| experience. To be honest, I enjoyed the first two minutes where
| I had to call stop more than the half hour or so that followed.
|
| I am sure the same thing happen with the rope swings. Like a
| roller coaster, rope swings alternate between weightlessness
| and high g-forces, which VR obviously cannot transcribe. But if
| for some reason, your brain didn't expect these sensations,
| then no problem.
|
| That's the reason I think motion sickness is a real problem for
| VR, even if you can deal with it. Because the way you deal with
| it is essentially by breaking immersion, but immersion is the
| whole point of VR. It also applies to non-VR immersive games to
| a lesser extent.
|
| So, yes, I think it is something we should take very seriously,
| first by fixing the "bugs": low framerates, unnatural camera
| movements, etc..., by adjusting gameplay to avoid unnecessary
| motion sickness, and finally by providing accessibility
| features.
|
| It is a bit of a controversial take, as it may seem "woke" or
| something, as if caring about motion sickness will make the
| experience worse for those who aren't motion sick. But it is
| actually the opposite! Fighting against motion sickness breaks
| immersion, even at a subconscious level. The general idea is
| that motion sickness appears when the sensory experience is
| inconsistent, try to make the sensory experience as consistent
| as possible, both against motion sickness and for better
| immersion.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| With a lazy eye, the brain tends to just outright ignore the
| conflicting signals and you end up only seeing out of one eye.
|
| My guess is that the IPD was the primary problem for everyone
| else. That's real easy to get wrong and it can cause massive
| eye strain as your brain tries to force your eyes to focus on
| an image that is geometrically impossible to focus. In your
| case, you probably ended up just using one eye and your brain
| filled in the missing data. That way you sidestep the focusing
| problem.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I too have lazy eye. I get wicked motion sickness from most
| FPS games. So I would not equate too much to that hypothesis.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| They were talking specifically about the VR mechanics
| though, not gaming in general.
| Triphibian wrote:
| I have found that third-person games that involve a lot of
| looking up and down -- largely anything with crafting/building or
| picking up loot -- really hurts me. On the other hand Death
| Stranding worked great -- largely because you don't have to angle
| the camera up and down to pick stuff up off the ground. I play a
| lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any
| trouble.
| roywiggins wrote:
| There's a moment in Firewatch (first person) where the
| character ducks under a tree or a fence or something and that's
| the moment I turned it off, because the camera lurches
| downward. Incredibly unpleasant.
|
| Also unplayable was Superliminal though that's not a huge
| surprise, considering the mechanic of the game. Outer Wilds was
| also a real tricky one.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That sounds like a repeated animation when you exit the tower
| and duck under the platform (I played it recently); a main
| issue I have with that game is that at that point it takes
| over your control without any real reason other than adding
| in a custom flavour animation / transition of sorts. But
| first person games should avoid that imo, motion sickness
| aside.
|
| Outer Wilds I can definitely imagine, its warped perspective
| / scale / up/down/gravity will mess with your brain.
| Triphibian wrote:
| There's an animation in Sea of Thieves when you're digging
| for treasure that kills me. It is this huge up and down
| swing of the camera.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Yeah for Outer Wilds I don't know if there's anything to be
| done- it's just what the game is. Firewatch on the other
| hand could just... not do that, and it would be the same
| game.
| conductr wrote:
| > I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't
| give me any trouble.
|
| Could also be the "problem", your eye muscles are weak in the
| up/down direction. You can do exercises to build it up
| kmfrk wrote:
| When we transitioned from 4:3 monitors to 16:9/16:10, a lot of
| people were nauseated by the incorrect application of widescreen,
| which IIRC ended up displacing the player relative to the camera.
|
| It created a lot of controversy for BioShock, and a patch was
| eventually made to fix it - just as it helped grow the
| "widescreen gaming" community[1].
|
| Sometimes I wonder what inflection point it took for people to
| make a big deal out of it back then compared to now. People still
| don't know what FOV a game is generally suppoed to be on a 16:9,
| and games don't usually care to educate you.
|
| Monster Hunter Wilds comes with accessibility features for motion
| sickness[2], which is a pleasant, and rare, surprise. But people
| with motion sickness would probably prefer some kind of assurance
| before they spend money on it, I imagine.
|
| [1]: https://www.wsgf.org/dr/bioshock
|
| [2]: https://www.eurogamer.net/monster-hunter-wilds-
| arachnophobia...
| joshuaheard wrote:
| I was fine until I got a super-wide curved screen. Then I
| started to get motion sickness after playing a computer game
| for a while. I think the article makes a valid point about
| developers treating motion sickness like an accessibility
| feature allowing for changes. For me, narrowing the FOV helped.
| mbStavola wrote:
| When I was a teenager, I really wanted to play Halo with my dad.
| I thought he would love it but he refused to even look at it,
| claiming that it would make him nauseous. I just didn't get it,
| we played Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil with no issue, why was
| this any different? I told him it was in his head or that these
| newer games would cause less nausea since they looked and
| performed better. I couldn't convince him and I went back to
| playing hours and hours of Halo, Call of Duty, and whatever other
| crap was on my 360.
|
| 15 years later, I'm in my 30s and I cannot even look at most
| modern 3D games. First-person games are an absolute no-go and
| third-person games are a toss-up. I missed out on a ton of
| games[1] and had to drop quite a few[2]. The ones I completed, I
| did so by forcing myself through the nausea[3]. I've even tried
| to go back to games I used to play[4] and even those kill me. It
| is _really_ bad and at this point I mostly just play 2D games
| like Caves of Qud or top-down /isometric games like Disco
| Elysium.
|
| The accessibility options in a lot of these games do help a bit,
| but it is never 100%. I usually turn things like camera
| shake/head bob off, lower graphics settings, tone down particles,
| mess around with FOV, adding a center dot... the whole kit and
| caboodle. At this point I'm not really sure if there is anything
| else that could be done to help me out, but I still really
| appreciate it when devs think about people with motion sickness
| issues.
|
| [1]: Never even touched Overwatch or PUBG
|
| [2]: I wish I could finish DOOM 2016 and Armored Core 6
|
| [3]: The Witness and all those Resident Evil remakes have caused
| me countless hours of joy and pain, Elden Ring was _mostly_ fine
| but some sessions I had to stop early
|
| [4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again
| opan wrote:
| >[4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again
|
| Only a handful of games I've played make me motion sick, but
| Half-Life 2 is _really_ bad. I don 't think I ever felt sick
| playing CS:GO, though, so it must be something specific to HL2
| and not the whole Source engine.
|
| Most recent game to make me sick was Metroid Prime, played in
| the PrimeHack Dolphin fork. I actually got full-on vertigo for
| possibly the first time in my life. When I went to bed that
| night the whole room was spinning when I got into bed. I don't
| drink alcohol, but stories of being way too drunk are what came
| to mind from that. Such a foreign feeling.
|
| I bravely tried to play Metroid Prime again a day or two later.
| Increased the FoV as high as I could without causing glitches
| (there's a warning about the highest safe value), also tweaked
| horizontal camera speed, as I had felt like it wasn't turning
| fast enough and that maybe that was part of it. I think it was
| okay after that, but I'm still a bit scared of the game and
| haven't played it much.
|
| The worst part of the motion sickness for me is that I seem to
| have to sleep it off, it doesn't go away on its own the same
| day, so as soon as it hits me, my day is genuinely ruined.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Half-Life 2's hovercraft area was AWFUL, even on a 4:3 CRT.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| High FOV settings really help against nausea for me.
|
| On PC, games may be more tweakable than you think and have FOV
| settings hidden away somewhere anyway. E.g. Fallout 4 has it in
| an ini file, some games have console commands for it, etc...
| ziml77 wrote:
| Narrow FoV ruins me. Even after all these years, Far Cry 2 on PC
| was one of the worst video game experiences ever for me because
| it had FoV tuned for couch gaming. IIRC I was able to somewhat
| fix it with a console command to adjust the FoV, but actions like
| sprinting which forced the FoV to something even narrower than
| default would undo that.
|
| And for me motion sickness isn't felt in my stomach, it's in my
| head. The headaches get quite painful, so I very much appreciate
| games that give me an FoV slider with a reasonably large maximum.
| I'd rather not need to take meclizine to comfortably play a game.
| jezzamon wrote:
| Interesting, I thought having a too large FOV would result in
| motion sickness. Which is why when running you might reduce it,
| to compensate for the faster movement. I guess to clarify,
| you're mostly talking about PC gaming where you're sitting
| close to the screen, or is this something you also experience
| with console games?
|
| In VR, one method of reducing motion sickness is covering the
| edges of the screen during movement to reduce motion sickness
| (a temporary tunnel vision effect), essentially reducing the
| FoV. I suppose playing in windowed mode would be similar :P
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Games often widen the FoV when sprinting (or boosting or
| whatever verb applies) because the stuff at the edge of your
| screen really zooms by and makes it look like you're going
| faster.
|
| What probably happened in Far Cry was they had some stupid
| narrow FoV like 65 degrees and bump it up wider when
| sprinting, then when you stop sprinting it goes back to 65
| which overrides the wider angle that parent commenter had
| set.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I'm the same way: low FoV gives me terrible headaches, like
| I'm walking around with binoculars strapped to my face. I can
| go up to 180deg very comfortably in minecraft on the other
| hand. I think the main reason is that the lower the FoV, the
| faster the image moves when you rotate. If you imagine a
| comically small 10deg for illustration, you will go through 9
| full screen wipes if you turn 90deg, but if you have 180deg
| of FoV it is only a single 1/2 wipe.
|
| Higher FoV just inherently feels less disorientating to me as
| well, being able to see all your surroundings makes the
| virtual space feel more cohesive and real, instead of a
| series of disconnected whirling imagery.
| quag wrote:
| Motion sickness in Far Cry is why I stopped playing first
| person or any 3D games. It has taken about 20 years before I
| seriously tried again and figured out that with higher frame
| rates and wide enough FoV I could actually play them again.
| legitster wrote:
| I don't normally get motion sick in games, but I actually have
| the worst time with 2D card games the most. And these games are
| the ones developers will bother least with any comfort settings!
|
| I recently had this experience with Wildfrost - a decent game but
| I find it migraine inducing on big screens - big flat colors,
| lots of wiggly animations, poor scaling, all combined with the
| need to do lots of reading. My eyes felt fried after 20 minutes.
| Triphibian wrote:
| I turned off a ton of the effects in Balatro. That helped. Some
| games don't give you half the options you should. I guess this
| push towards accessibility across the board would help here.
| RankingMember wrote:
| This topic always makes me think of Wolfenstein (2009)'s
| abhorrent head-bob, which is almost guaranteed to induce nausea.
| There's a way to turn it off, but it's clunky (and causes you to
| be unable to run).
| cratermoon wrote:
| The first thing I do is turn off head bob, motion blur, screen
| shake, and anything else that induces animations of what should
| be static background elements.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Talos Principle was especially bad in terms of inducing motion
| sickness! I normally do not get motion sickness, but even with
| the motion sickness reduction settings turned on, I could not
| play it for more than 15-20 mins at a time.
| adamrezich wrote:
| A couple years back I was playing Sea of Thieves with some old
| friends, and one of them noticed he was experiencing motion
| sickness with a video game for the first time. Obviously the part
| where you spend most of the game on a ship had something to do
| with it, but when I suggested he increase the FoV, he said it
| only helped a little. After trying other things, eventually we
| discovered the turning vsync on helped immensely. I'd never heard
| of that being a contributing factor before--I always turn it on
| for first-person games because I find tearing to be distracting,
| rather than sickness-inducing--but nonetheless, that was the
| solution that allowed him to play with us.
| leros wrote:
| I quit playing most first person video games due to motion
| sickness. The first game I remember being unplayable was Half
| Life 2 and that was even after changing things like FOV.
| rob74 wrote:
| Interesting that this is always a big topic when discussing VR,
| but never really mentioned in connection to "traditional" games.
| I guess more people get motion sickness from VR, but
| unfortunately the article doesn't contain numbers on either...
| conductr wrote:
| I don't know if it's motion sickness for me but I just don't
| like having a bright screen right in my eye. Bad memories of
| burnt feeling retinas from CRT monitors back in the day.
| dni0 wrote:
| Does anyone else have a backwards brain when it comes to
| traditional games vs VR?
|
| Spyro the Dragon, Half Life 2, Psychonauts, Portal, etc all make
| me insta-hurl. Meanwhile flying around a space station at a
| million miles per hour in 50FPS VR, smashing into surfaces and
| flipping around like an olympic gymnast.... totally fine.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I think VR sickness is very different to motion sickness in
| traditional games. I've gotten VR sickness a few times. (first
| time on a DK2 in HL episode 2 during the car toss sequence
| because the FoV changes)
|
| Watching a streamer play Hyperbolica gave me motion sickness,
| but playing the same game myself in VR gave me no issues at
| all.
| bradbeattie wrote:
| I run into this with melee attacks in a lot of first person games
| (Cyberpunk, Deep Rock Galactic). Often the camera is pinned to
| the character's head, the head which is animated during a melee
| attack. Both games above actually have screen shake accessibility
| sliders which critically do nothing to prevent this source of
| motion sickness.
|
| I suspect it has to do with "camera movement I didn't control". I
| recall some research done by Valve during the VR development days
| that resulted in the "teleport" movement fix.
| rfreiberger wrote:
| I'm older now but been playing games since I was younger. In the
| years of playing games, I can't place why certain games gave me
| motion sickness while others didn't. One of the worst games I
| played was Silent Hill on the PS, the fog or something in the
| game was so bad, I couldn't get past the intro level. Another
| game was Half-Life 2 and the boat levels, again, it felt like the
| rest of the game but that level was awful.
|
| Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third
| person games and having the monitor further away with a high
| refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays
| so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and
| Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.
| neilv wrote:
| IIRC, Far Cry 6 had a surprising fleet of accessibility settings,
| including for motion sickness.
| recursive wrote:
| I've never felt sick from anything on a traditional screen. In
| VR, any movement that doesn't match my personal movement makes me
| feel sick instantly. None of the mitigations help at all.
|
| This even happened on some of the new Harry Potter rides at
| Universal Park. They have some sections that are kind of like a
| flight simulator with a wrap-around screen. The ride car is on
| some kind of articulated arm. The physical roller-coaster parts
| were totally fine, but this simulator parts made me feel sick. I
| had to close my eyes to keep from throwing up. I cannot handle a
| mismatch between my apparent motion and my felt motion. I will
| never play another first person VR game.
| o11c wrote:
| There's only one game that has ever given me nausea - the video
| game of Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace (1999). [Not to be
| confused with Starfighter (2001), which was also based on Episode
| 1 and I think more popular?]
|
| It's very unusual for being a _third-person_ shooter, with a
| downward perspective (sometimes called "top-down", though you
| can adjust the angle slightly). This is tolerable for the
| lightsaber levels, but very annoying when your best weapon is a
| blaster and you want to shoot a distant enemy that you can't
| actually see, even if it's not nauseating for you.
|
| [Besides that, it's also notorious for quite a few unintuitive
| pull/jump/climb puzzles, and an adaptable difficulty system which
| means that it will get harder as soon as you figure out something
| that works]
| Agentlien wrote:
| Microsoft has amazing resources[0] for gaming accessibility and
| also provide services for auditing accessibility during
| development. While I haven't been directly involved in a project
| using them I did take part of their report for one of the games
| developed at my previous job (Thunderful) and was really
| impressed by how thorough it was.
|
| With all that said, I can't find anything there about motion
| sickness. I must just be missing it, right? Also, the only
| reference I find to VR are in relation to UI scale.
|
| [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility
| elwillbo wrote:
| A friend, whom works in accessibility, has also spoken highly
| of there efforts. Strange they don't have motion sickness
| included.
| ge96 wrote:
| I remember trying Fo4 VR and there was an option like "turn off
| tunnel shadow" something to reduce motion sickness, oh man that
| was an instant regret immediately felt sick when moving
| bentt wrote:
| This is an important topic and I don't think this article is
| really getting into all the important things that have been
| learned about it over the past few years, primarily by VR
| developers.
|
| Too much of the current dialogue is about how _players_ can "get
| over" it. This is silly. There are demonstrable, proven things
| which cause motion sickness via the visual system. Unfortunately
| there are some irreconcilable issues with doing certain
| activities (ie moving/turning without player input) in VR games
| so it's either abandon those activities or blame the users.
| Considering Meta has now poured nearly $85bn into their AR/VR
| effort, there's a lot on the line and the last thing they're
| going to do is admit that the technology is fundamentally limited
| to certain activities.
|
| Here's an early video from Oculus when it was still a bunch of
| enthusiasts chasing something magic.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DgfiDEqfaY&t=1356s
|
| But nowadays you have people that play VR and have "VR Legs", and
| then you have the rest of us who have normal human brains and
| normal human eyes and don't want to take it upon ourselves to
| relearn how the world works so we don't puke when playing an FPS.
|
| The bottom line is that the human visual system is very sensitive
| to acceleration, especially in the peripheral vision.
| Acceleration can be linear, angular, or even in odd dimensions
| like during an FOV shift which god forbid a game would do without
| telling you.
|
| The easiest thing you can do to save yourself is get a smaller
| display or sit further away so that your peripheral vision is
| spared any of the motion and your fovea is gathering the majority
| of it. This is why "tunnel vision" in VR works for some people.
| gamedever wrote:
| I think there's a middle ground
|
| Provide options for people that get motion sickness the same
| way we provide accessibility options. Let those of us that get
| less motion sickness get the "full experience".
|
| So far I'm lucky. I've only got sick in VR twice. Once from
| trying Breath of the Wild via the Labo VR kit. Once trying a
| hacked GTA-5 VR. Both made me feels incredibly sick, far beyond
| what I'd have expected before experiencing it. So, I'm super
| sad that some people experience this more and I hope we can
| find ways to accommodate them.
|
| That said, I played Half-Life: Alyx back when it came out. In
| my mind I assumed teleporting, the default, was the way to play
| because I assumed stick motion (normal joypad controller based
| FPS motion) would be more sickening. But, for me, it turned out
| after a few levels, teleporting felt worse than sliding. I
| think because each teleport was so disorienting.
|
| Strangely, I got zero motion sickness from Jet Island. One of
| my top 5 VR experiences of all time and at a glance would also
| seem to be the most likely game to make people sick. Why it
| doesn't I'm not sure other than the obvious (fast framerate)
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/587220/Jet_Island/
|
| To add, I got a 38inch wide monitor. Playing any first person
| came on that screen full screen makes me sick. I have to play
| all PC games in a window now. I think if I switched back to a
| 27inch monitor I wouldn't have that issue.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-04 23:01 UTC)