Forum Discussion

vonakho6's avatar
vonakho6
Honored Guest
8 days ago

Best VR setup for what I think is astigmatism?

I get headaches from every platform I've tried so far within an hour from just an hour of gaming.

 

I seem to recall astigmatism being mentioned back when I had laser surgery for myopia, and that that wouldn't be removed. It doesn't bother me in day to day life so It slipped my mind until husband started talking about getting a VR set I could use too. Rn only he can use the Oculus 3 we've got and I've just kinda resigned myself to give up on it.

 

Ive done a bit of searching and so far it seems getting lenses for me for the Oculus is the best advice, but my Google Fu is weak so I turn to the experts to make sure im not spending our meager cash reserves on dud advice.

 

What say you, oh Hivemind of the web?

 

2 Replies

  • steve_40's avatar
    steve_40
    Visionary
    7 days ago

    I am short-sighted in one eye, long sighted in the other, and have astigmatism. I am able to use my Quest 3 comfortably without wearing glasses or prescription headset lens inserts, even though I need to wear glasses to drive. I use my Quest 3 with the eye-glasses adapter set at maximum position, that helps a lot for eye relief. The image is actually surprisingly clear after finding the sweet spot. My longest play session was about 18 hours with minimum breaks, but I applied manuka honey eye drops 3 or 4 times to prevent dry eyes. They help a lot. I don't think the custom lens inserts available can correct for astigmatism.

  • Slayemin's avatar
    Slayemin
    Meta Employee
    6 days ago

    I work in calibration, so the best advice I can give is to make sure your headsets IPD (inter pupillary distance) is matched as closely as possible to your physical IPD. Then make sure that the headset is snuggly fit on your head so that your nominal eye position doesnt change when you are moving your head around in VR. If you still get headaches, another thing you can try is finding prescriptive lenses for your eye displays.

    Another potential cause of headaches is sim sickness caused by different comfort levels of VR applications. I can handle moderate VR comfort games, but something like SkyrimVR makes me sick in under 5 minutes. symptoms may vary, I get nausea, some people get headaches, etc. If you have the fortitude to experiment, you can A/B test different content to see what causes your headaches. Is it certain types of content, all content, or no content with the right IPD?

    Realistically, we cant really test and account for myopia and astygmatisms in vision since the degrees of ocular distortion vary from person to person and its super hard to reliably test with hardware setups.