Forum Discussion
Motion Sickness : Look Direction vs Movement Direction
It's the first day I've been using the Oculus Rift with my games. I have mixed feelings at having accomplished it. First off, it is cool to be in game and being able to look around for real. On the downside I easily get motion sickness, and experienced it within five minutes of playing, and I will say more about that.
A confusing unrelated problem, is that the Stereo setting gets set back to False each time I restart the engine. Hmm... i have to keep the UDKEngine.ini file open, to keep an eye on this. I'm not sure what is causing this... but it's quite irritating.
Motion Sickness:
The problem so far to me seems related to Look Direction, the oculus tracks your look direction but does not realign the motion of the player in game in that direction. This means that if you want to change direction sharply, or really to be "facing forward" in your chair at your keyboard, then you need to realign your motion with the mouse. So movement direction is different from Look Direction.
The problem I experienced is that there is a disconnect between the hand movement and head movement. I look to the left because that's the direction I want to go, and I simultaneously try to move with the mouse, and it creates a jerky double movement, sometimes I overshoot.
The movement is smoothest, and gives me less problems when I just wander, and keep my hands off the mouse.
I suspect another problem is the custom crosshairs I made, which are doubled in front of me, and make it difficult to pick up objects and interact with them. I know I need to resolve them to one object and this may help with some of the motion sickness.
SUMMARY:
Excited to use the Oculus, but worried being prone to motion sickness will keep me from making steady progress without frequent breaks (or throwing up).
I will program a hotkey to pause the game so that I can pause quickly and get out of the game when overwhelmed.
I will look for information on changing player direction without the use of the mouse.
Possibility of replacing mouse buttons with keyboard buttons so that I don't influence the game with the mouse creating jerkiness.
Possibly get some sea-sickness pills while developing this.
What do I think a solution could be to look and movement direction? I would say that there should be an influence on movement direction based on the look direction. So that the more sharply you look in a direction the more your "body" would get realigned with the look direction. If I could program this, I would make a delay, look in a direction and the body will follow with an ease-in, and a delay.
A confusing unrelated problem, is that the Stereo setting gets set back to False each time I restart the engine. Hmm... i have to keep the UDKEngine.ini file open, to keep an eye on this. I'm not sure what is causing this... but it's quite irritating.
Motion Sickness:
The problem so far to me seems related to Look Direction, the oculus tracks your look direction but does not realign the motion of the player in game in that direction. This means that if you want to change direction sharply, or really to be "facing forward" in your chair at your keyboard, then you need to realign your motion with the mouse. So movement direction is different from Look Direction.
The problem I experienced is that there is a disconnect between the hand movement and head movement. I look to the left because that's the direction I want to go, and I simultaneously try to move with the mouse, and it creates a jerky double movement, sometimes I overshoot.
The movement is smoothest, and gives me less problems when I just wander, and keep my hands off the mouse.
I suspect another problem is the custom crosshairs I made, which are doubled in front of me, and make it difficult to pick up objects and interact with them. I know I need to resolve them to one object and this may help with some of the motion sickness.
SUMMARY:
Excited to use the Oculus, but worried being prone to motion sickness will keep me from making steady progress without frequent breaks (or throwing up).
I will program a hotkey to pause the game so that I can pause quickly and get out of the game when overwhelmed.
I will look for information on changing player direction without the use of the mouse.
Possibility of replacing mouse buttons with keyboard buttons so that I don't influence the game with the mouse creating jerkiness.
Possibly get some sea-sickness pills while developing this.
What do I think a solution could be to look and movement direction? I would say that there should be an influence on movement direction based on the look direction. So that the more sharply you look in a direction the more your "body" would get realigned with the look direction. If I could program this, I would make a delay, look in a direction and the body will follow with an ease-in, and a delay.
3 Replies
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- Personally I think that the disconnect is going to stay like that until you get out of the chair and have some body direction tracking like using the razer hydra hand controllers.
- well, I don't know that throwing more money is the right way to go. :)
I've been thinking more on this. I really think it's just a delay built into the direction you're facing, and then the body should follow. If I were a better programmer I would have tackled it already.
Now that I think on it too, I see that people who wear the oculus crane their necks around while their moving and are facing completely away from the keyboard. There should be a return to center, after a delay the user gets to decide on... shorter delay if in sprint mode. Possibly even a hotkey like shift for sprinting, but for sort of a "sprint turn in the direction I'm facing".
I think the reason people may not be experiencing this is if they are not actually playing a game... but are in explore mode. If there is a demon or ghost on your butt, then it becomes clear this is a problem... I've plugged the oculus into working games I have been developing, so there is a need for speed. - Moving to UDK forum.
