Why virtual reality makes a lot of us sick, and what we can do about it.

  • marshadow@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I enjoy VR gaming and I get motion sickness.

    The trick is to slowly acclimate, which takes patience and body awareness. Play for a short amount of time, pause the game when you start to feel slightly warm (or ideally just before that point), and go do something else for 20 minutes or so. With time, the play periods will get longer and the rest breaks will get shorter. Eventually you may stop needing the rest breaks.

    A couple caveats: my sample size is 1, a hiatus of more than two weeks means retraining again, and you have to be firm with yourself about stopping on time.

      • marshadow@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Fair enough, and I didn’t mean to imply that everyone should. It’s totally understandable to decide the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

      • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That is understandable in the moment, it’s alot if the only pay off is one game. But I would argue it is very worth it overall. It’s a small price to pay to permanently be able to handle it and have no qualms about future VR games/uses.

        Plus most games and experiences don’t even cause VR sickness to the most susceptible people, so if you pick and choose your games and stick to ones that don’t cause issues, you can play VR without any conditioning right away too.

    • CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      As this is my personal strategy as well, I would like to add that your sample size is now 2, with a 100% success rate :3

      Although for me personally I don’t have to retrain that quickly. My resistance to motion sickness certainly gets weaker over time, but I seem to have reached some kind of baseline, compared to my previous state, where about five minutes could give me an awful headache, while now I can take it for a bit longer, even after not being in VR for a month or two.

      Speaking of, we need more VR games. I’d love to play more of them, but nothing new is really big and exciting or anything, which is how these long breaks even happen.

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My sample size is much larger and indeed that has been the case. I’ve been hosting VR demos for 10 years now, since DK2. DK1 was bad news for people even slightly prone to motion sickness. 3dof is only viable for motion sick prone people if they can keep their head exactly where the game expects it to be, which you can’t.

      With each new generation of headset, there has been so much less prep for getting random people into it and making sure they wouldn’t even get mildly nauseous. More software options without translational movement and much less obvious safety nets in games that do. You can always find at least one game/experience that is right up someone’s alley that won’t cause motion sickness even if it turns out they would otherwise have been really sensitive to it.

      But I always let them know that when they do want to start branching out from the “safe” choices, that they should treat it like sea sickness, limit exposure at first and build up sea legs. Ideally never get to the point where you would throw up, try to stay as far away from it as possible while still having fun. You will eventually notice one day that you haven’t thought about it in a long time.

    • ediculous@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      I take an off-brand Dramamine then hop in. Best if I know 20 minutes in advance that I’ll be playing since it takes a little time to digest, but I’m not doing chores.