It's very cool that they are doing this. But, for anyone who tries it, there's something very important to keep in mind: Low latency is critical to VR! Unfortunately, Android sensors and graphics pipelines have very poor latency. If you try this and get terrible motion sickness, don't dismiss VR as a vomit inducer.
In fact, many people have reported that spending time in VR, and taking a break whenever motion sickness creeps up, actually reduces motion sickness outside of VR. As in, people are saying "After playing in my Rift for a few weeks, I can suddenly read in the car for the first time!"
> In fact, many people have reported that spending time in VR, and taking a break whenever motion sickness creeps up, actually reduces motion sickness outside of VR. As in, people are saying "After playing in my Rift for a few weeks, I can suddenly read in the car for the first time!"
Is this because the VR experience is causing your brain to recalibrate your vestibular system [1]?
More than likely. Our brains are very adaptable, it would appear this is more similar to how people have been "recalibrated" to chronic pain and extreme phobias.
The chronic pain example is that a prolonged duration (about 2 weeks) of being free of pain medications can cause the body to adapt and recognize it's over-interpreting pain.
The extreme phobia was if you had someone with a severe phobia of snakes, you would put them into a room with a few dozen snakes in cages and lock them in until they recalibrate as their body can only stay in panic for so long. However... it isn't the most ethical way as it actually is possible to suffer heart failure from fear.
> The chronic pain example is that a prolonged duration (about 2 weeks) of being free of pain medications can cause the body to adapt and recognize it's over-interpreting pain.
Yeah, but the pain never really goes away, though. But the time effect is definitely true.
I've heard of the phobia method, as your body eventually exhausts its adrenaline stores and you're able to address the issue more rationally instead of under physiological duress.
I had not heard about the chronic pain example though; thank you!
> I've heard of the phobia method, as your body eventually exhausts its adrenaline stores and you're able to address the issue more rationally instead of under physiological duress.
If you're talking about Adrenal Fatigue, then that's pseudoscience not backed by the medical community[1] (though you will find plenty of "solutions" for it on the internet, for your money of course ;) ).
I think you can train it in general. Astronauts, for example, usually get over zero-g sickness after a while, and flying in small planes makes you less sensitive to turbulence.
After I had a bad concussion, one of the biggest things that helped -- with a multitude of post concussion syndrome symptoms, not just vision/movement -- was vestibular therapy. It consisted of things like having the word "dog" on a sheet of paper on a wall and keeping my eyes focused on it while turning my head left and right to a metronome. Once I got better at that, we'd either increase the speed or add "distractions" like having "dog" written on black and white checkered boxes.
But more related to what you're saying, there are actually therapy systems that use multiple displays to simulate things like walking through a grocery store. Some people after a concussion can't even go through a grocery store because all the stimulus of different boxes plus movement overwhelms them. An even simpler thing I did was simply to watch youtube videos of people walking through areas with a shaky camera or a dashboard camera from a car driving at night (dealing with other cars' lights). So if those 2d versions are effective, perhaps VR can also help.
> Android sensors and graphics pipelines have very poor latency.
I'm not familiar with the sensors latency but the graphics pipeline certainly doesn't have "very poor latency". If you aren't dropping frames the app is just running in double buffering. Android then adds a single extra frame of latency as it doesn't "race the beam" so to speak, so the grand total latency added by the system in the graphics pipeline is 16ms. Aka, pretty damn good.
I haven't seen any data whatsoever one way or another about sensors, so got a source on that? I've seen much about touch latency, but that's the hardware not Android (and on a Nexus 5 the touch latency clocks in at about 20ms - closer to fan-fucking-tastic than "very poor")
Seeing as nobody has a VR system with lower than 16ms latency, we honestly truly don't have any idea what lower than 16ms even feels like, much less are in any position to assert that 16ms is "way too long".
Game developer here: 16ms is the magic number in frame rates as it means you're hitting 60fps, which is about the same as the human brain's visual refresh rate.
Did you try it? The latency was actually pretty decent, though I don't have a the full headset to try it sufficiently. I am sure it is nothing near something like the Rift, but it's a neat proof of concept to start getting the VR idea out there.
There's extreme variation among humans anyway. Some people hurl at the slightest touch. Some people can withstand severe turbulence with their head down and not feel a thing. Moving towards that end of the spectrum won't hurt you any more than those people already experience.
In fact, many people have reported that spending time in VR, and taking a break whenever motion sickness creeps up, actually reduces motion sickness outside of VR. As in, people are saying "After playing in my Rift for a few weeks, I can suddenly read in the car for the first time!"