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kburke
Participant
August 29, 2014

Everything you wanted to know about simulator sickness

Hi folks,
I've been really curious about the incidence of simulator sickness, so I did some research into the history of simulator sickness and wrote up what I found here: http://www.twentymilliseconds.com/post/all-about-motion-sickness/

One thing I found from the quoted study was that Navy pilots who had adapted to one simulator (e.g. gotten their "VR Legs") would get sick again if they switched to a new simulator system. This would seem to imply that "VR Legs" would be specific to a given application, and users who are prone to simulator sickness might get sick all over again if they tried a new application. Does anyone have any data in this area for Oculus, anecdotal or more scientific?

I am always on the lookout for data points about sickness. If you've tested your application on users, and have any data on incidence of sickness (eyestrain, headache, nausea, etc), please let me know - I promise not to share the specifics, just report data in the aggregate.

Thanks!
Kevin

    4 replies

    mta
    Up and Coming
    August 30, 2014
    A large variety of ostensible seasickness preventatives were sold to customers
    contemplating an ocean crossing. Reason and Brand (1975) listed all the drugs
    recommended for seasickness in the British medical journal Lancet between 1828 and
    1928. Some of these concoctions were amyl nitrite, chloroform, atropine, creosote,
    opium, quinine, cocaine, strychnine, laudanum, cayenne pepper, nitrous oxide, and
    tincture of belladonna. Interestingly, hyoscine hydrobromide, a derivative of belladonna,
    has been shown through controlled experimentation to be one of the most effective
    medications to prevent MS (Benson, 1978; Reason & Brand) and SS (Regan &
    Ramsey, 1996).


    "I prescribe you sir, a course of cocaine"

    "yay!"
    Anonymous
    August 30, 2014
    My initial reaction to this would be to not conflating physical simulators with different applications within the same simulator.

    Especially considering that different applications will cause different levels of sickness depending on the type of media played, sitting in a cinema is unlikely to cause the same sickness as riding on a roller coaster.
    egardner71
    Participant
    August 30, 2014
    I can give you one interesting data point. I have been using simulators for almost 20 years and have never experienced any motion sickness. I do not get sick while flying or riding in cars, including while reading or performing other close in focused tasks. I do however did get sea sick on my first deployment in the navy but once I had my sea legs that has passed too. I tell you that all to tell you this:

    My experience with the DK2 started out terrible. The issue was chromatic aberration. I have a high end pc setup with butter smooth graphics so head tracking and judder were no issue. That being said, two minutes under the hood and I was throwing up with a lingering nausea and head ache for many hours afterwards. Until I solved the Chromatic convergence issue the rift was completely unusable. I can now go many hours under the hood, but I still have an initial reluctance to put it on because of lasting imprint of the first few times I used it without the correction.

    I can explain my experience with the DK2 but it was very real.
    Vrally
    Up and Coming
    August 31, 2014
    A colleague of mine wrote a literature review (60+ pages) about simulator sickness a couple of years back (2009). Regretfully it is written in Swedish, but the reference section may be of benefit:
    http://www.vti.se/sv/publikationer/pdf/simulatorsjuka--orsak-verkan-och-atgarder-en-kunskapsoversikt.pdf
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