Seven ways to avoid dizziness in virtual reality

Throw away your keyboard and mouse for 10 minutes and you'll realize that moving around in VR is completely different than any other game you've ever played. Let's take a look at some of the tricks developers are using to get you into VR, which not only makes you feel like you're in another world, but can also help you feel less dizzy and nauseous as you start exploring.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of movement in VR, at least not the way we used to play video games on monitors or TVs. But some hardware solutions can realistically simulate walking in reality, such as the omnidirectional treadmill designed by Virtuix Omni or the VR park designed by The VOID. VR developers want to make it possible for ordinary users with a headset and controllers in a certain space to experience the vastness of VR space comfortably. Developers are actively researching solutions, and the following are some of the mainstream movement solutions in VR that can provide users with a comfortable experience.

1. Room Space Action

Walking is by far the best experience. Valve's Steam VR platform is also carrying this tenet with the upcoming HTC Vive. The Vive's wide-area positional tracking means you can walk right up to the main characters in a movie, look up from under a table, hide behind piles of treasure, and truly experience VR like never before. If you can still stay awake, you will be absolutely shocked by the immersion. Oculus and Sony also offer range tracking devices, but for now they are more focused on balancing standing and sitting gaming experiences. After playing Rift and PlayStation VR many times, I found that this way of playing games is indeed effective in reducing the occurrence of motion sickness. Hopefully, other developments will be made in the future with more standing gaming experiences.

2. Cockpit

A good cockpit can make a world of difference. Whether you're looking around in Project Cars or blowing up enemy Wraiths in EVE: Valkyrie, a clear view is the key to comfort. Not only does a cockpit add weight when moving (of course, this is limited by the physics engine), it also ensures that the player sits in a natural position, making one-on-one confrontations easier and not straying from the intended direction when moving. This is beneficial to developers currently working on racing/aircraft/spaceship simulators, as well as players who just need a chair and peripherals to show off.

3. Large cockpit

Cockpits are great, and we love them, but when you have a space big enough for a boat, is there a better way to use that space?

StressLevelZero's upcoming game Hover Junkers is a post-apocalyptic shooter exclusively for VR that lets you hunt down your in-game friends online using the game's floating warships decorated with scrap. Although this type of "room cockpit" isn't available in current VR games, it would not only solve the problem of movement, but also integrate into the game mechanics. The game will first be available for HTC Vive in April and will be available for Oculus Rift in Q3 or Q4 of this year. We hope other developers will emulate its excellence.

4. Teleport

No matter how much spatial tracking is provided, the three mainstream head displays (HTC Vive, Ouclus Rift, PSVR) have a common problem: when you encounter an obstacle in the real world, you need to go around it in VR. And using "teleportation" can solve many dizziness and nausea caused by VR, such as the dreaded "yaw poison" (Yivian Note: refers to the forced change of the reader's direction) - or when you use the right button of the controller to change the field of view (POV).

Virtual reality games such as AltspaceVR, Cloudhead's Blink, Epic Games' FPS games Bullet Time and Convrge all use teleportation to achieve good gaming effects, including visible cursors or ghostly perspectives controlled by players. The new game Budget Cuts even directly uses teleportation as a game mechanic for their unique portal system.

5. flight

In fact, flying is so common in the gaming world that it's impressive how smoothly and without causing any dizziness Ubisoft has designed Eagle Flight to lift you into the air.

"I've done a lot of research on what causes nausea and how to solve it," said Ubisoft game director Olivier Palmieri at Gamescom. "The most important thing is to ensure comfort even if you have a lot of movements. We want to use this prototype to prove that even if we have a lot of movements, we can still ensure comfort for the user."

Psytec's Windlands shows off some bouncing action, using a grappling hook that lets you swing from cliff to cliff while maintaining a steady, predictable speed. Like a cockpit, the grappling hook helps you stay centered in 3D space as you fall from the sky.

6. VR Comfort Mode

   Standing VR experiences can create an incredible sense of immersion, especially when using VR feet to walk. But every now and then, we need to sit down and take a break, which is where VR Comfort Mode comes in.

We all know that using controller buttons can break immersion, but normally, we sit facing forward with our heads still, and VR Comfort Mode allows us to slip back into our old gaming habits without interrupting our experience.

The VR comfort mode featuring micro-teleportation does not have the high-speed 360 -degree rotation that you would get if you used a controller remote control, but instead has a scene switching (Snap-to-Turn). In terms of vision, sometimes a black screen is used to switch any sudden situation or suddenly change the field of view (POV), allowing users to switch quickly without having to tie up cables or rotating the chair.

Gaze-based action, like going wherever you look, is also a popular choice among developers who include VR comfort modes in their first-person games, but it doesn't feel as natural as scene switching.

7. Head in the air (third person)

Third-person games like Lucky’s Tale, Chronos, and Adventure Time: Magic Man’s Head Games won’t have the same movement issues as first-person games, and will be more familiar to new VR users.

In traditional 3D platformers like Banjo-Kazooie, your point of view can be tracked smoothly behind the character. This is also the case in Lucky's Tale, Edge of Nowhere and many new 3D platformers, and it is a logical extension of the genre. However, in Chronos, your point of view (POV) is teleported to a series of fixed positions with a 360-degree visual vantage point. When playing the game demo, the rapid switching of scenes was initially disorienting, and slowly, when a new scene appeared in front of you, it became one of the highlights of the game that made people "wow".

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe expressed his views on third-person games at the 2015 E3 gaming show. Iribe said: "I think people underestimate third-person games a little bit. In fact, there are a lot of good third-person content, and it works best with a controller." Regardless of the experience, players of all ages will enjoy this type of easy-to-learn cognitive game.

VR systems that cause motion sickness are badly designed. But taking a step back, motion sickness is not fundamentally a VR-specific problem, but a human technical challenge. Even if we design a perfect headset that makes it difficult to distinguish between the virtual and real worlds, it will still cause motion sickness. So even without a headset, humans will get motion sickness. Driving, riding a roller coaster, boating, or a turbulent airplane ride can all cause motion sickness, and some specific people are more susceptible to motion sickness.

As virtual reality develops rapidly, achieving a motion sickness-free experience largely depends on design rather than technology to solve the problem.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.