People have been saying that for decades. After spending 10 years in the 3D graphics and VR industries, I just don't see it happening any time soon. The technology, including Oculus, is certainly getting better but it still sucks. It still makes too many people sick. At this point, I am in the "I'll believe it when I see it" crowd.
For me, the motion sickness problem only happens in games where you're moving around freely on the ground like an FPS. If a teleporter is used to move, I'm fine, and for some reason flight sims don't bother me either. It seems like an inherent problem with the tech due to the disagreement between your inner ear and visual cues. Anyone have insight?
Yeah, motion sickness is a non issue at this point for headsets with good 6 DoF tracking as long as you are only doing 1:1 mapped movement (your VR movements match your real world movements). Teleporting is mostly fine but rapid frequent teleporting can still cause some issues. Other forms of locomotion tend to have more issues but some tricks have been developed and best practices figured out to make it viable for many people for reasonably long sessions. Virtual "blinkers" to reduce optical flow in peripheral vision have proved quite effective and are widely used. Pulling yourself through the virtual environment with your hands also seems to work quite well for many people (see Lone Echo for example).
I always thought driving sims would be ideal for VR, since you are sitting still in the simulation as well as the real world, with only the world outside the car moving, you can look around, etc.
Nope, got aggressively nauseous about two minutes in and had to bail in a hurry, or I would have spilled my lunch all over the very nice simulation rig. The lack of inertial forces to match the simulated movement really wreaked havoc on my inner ear.
NCSA had a VR program in the early ‘90’s, and SGI used to demo the Onyx minicomputer with an Apache helicopter simulator on three screens.
Twenty years later people demo slightly cooler things and are disappointed when I’m not excited. I’ve already seen this future. Wake me up when it gets here!
What would you need to see? We have satisfied paying enterprise customers in healthcare (surgical training) and while there are lots of things that will improve with better hardware we have had no issues with motion sickness with hundreds of non-gamer users in this space.
