Decline VR Sickness Rate is 40-70 percent after only 15 minutes

[Dexter]

I call bullshit on this article. First of all, i tried one of those military simulations back before consumer VR.

It's not an article, it's a Quora rant by some guy written back in May 2016 to the question "How big an issue is the nausea problem for Virtual Reality products?": http://archive.is/asCOz

That's about a month or two after the Oculus CV1 and HTC Vive came out. I'm not exactly surprised to hear "IMHO - these devices should be banned" from a guy that work(s/ed) for companies that sold gear for $40-80k to the Air Force and similar, since there's obvious self-interest at play there as he explained himself:

All that's happened is that they dropped in price from $80,000 to $500...

I wouldn't want to see this either if I was in his position:

Consumer HMDs nowadays most certainly have better hardware today (whether that's Refresh rate(Hz), Resolution, Latency or the Controls and Tracking) than prototype Army HMDs had years ago.

I'm also not surprised he has removed his ranty Blog Post afterwards and you can only find it via "re-prints", since even a bit later he would have looked like even more of a massive idiot for posting that.

 

[Mortmal]

 

[Jigawatt]

Anyway, as someone who's job involves running 100s of people through various applications in VR, I'd put the incidence of "absolutely unavoidable simulation sickness" somewhere in the 5%-10% range, at least in the uni student age bracket. And yes most or almost all of them are women, though there may be some reporting bias in that alongside the innate differences. I don't think it's really that significant for the overall adoption of VR, and it might improve a bit as time goes on, but regardless makes the OP a ridiculous level of fake news.

"Ignore this study from a major outlet and trust my personal experience" is peak 2020 internet. At least you're not running a superpower government with a massive military I guess.

No, peak 2020 internet is telling someone with the phrase "Virtual Reality" in their doctoral thesis that they don't know shit, because I rEaD iT oN aBcNeWs.Go.CoM. For fucks sake don't be such a credulous retard if you're going to try and call people out.

So the quote in the article is:

"With contemporary commercially available VR systems, the incidence of motion sickness after only 15 minutes is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent," said Thomas Stoffregen, a kinesiologist at the University of Minnesota

Trying to find where this has come from led me to this as the most likely candidate: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10447318.2020.1726108 . On my little journey of finding that paper I found that this researcher really likes to forcefully induce motion sickness in people (going so far as to construct a room with marble patterned walls and wobbling the whole thing with a motor) but I'll leave that aside for now. He's also a massive self-citer with about a third of each bibliography being his own papers, another red flag we'll just pretend not to notice for now.

The study in question is massively flawed in two ways: first, the participants were highly motivated to report sickness.

A total of 79 individuals participated (41 women and 38 men), in exchange for course credit

Each participant gave informed consent and was informed they could discontinue at any time without penalty.

Participants were instructed (both verbally and on the consent form) to discontinue the experiment immediately if they experienced any motion sickness symptoms, however mild.

Participants were reminded that they should discontinue immediately if they experienced any symptoms of motion sickness, however mild.

Participants were reminded to discontinue immediately if they experienced any symptoms of motion sickness, however mild.

So a bunch of uni students were given a task that would take about 30 minutes to get course credit - or they could simply bail at any time and still get the credit, and were prompted no less than 4 times of that option. Nowhere in the paper is the effect of this setup compensated for (would have been easy too, just tell them before hand they'll still have to wait the half hour for the credit). The use of SSQ questionnaires etc. is all fine but the final result is tainted by the fact that 29/34 of the 'sick' responses were discontinuers. As to why did he do that - well only one type of result is going to get you interviewed with the prestigious ABC NEWS.

Second, and more critically, this study isn't generalisable at all, because the task involved driving cars the kids couldn't drive! If you want to study VR sickness in a driving task you should give participants a nice virtual Mazda 121 and a speed limit to follow, to minimise confounding variables. Instead have a look at this:

For participants in the driver group, we evaluated game performance in terms of the number of laps completed, the mean number of crashes per lap, and mean driving speed. The number of laps completed differed between men (mean = 1.79, SD = 0.86) and women (mean = 1.14, SD = 0.94), U = 137, p = .045, and between the Well (mean = 2.10, SD = 0.44) and Sick (mean = 0.75, SD = 0.85) groups, U = 42.50, p < .001. The number of crashes per lap did not differ between men (mean = 14.08, SD = 8.70) and women (mean = 13.02, SD = 12.42), U = 173, p = .35, or between the Well (mean = 16.25, SD = 10.90) and Sick (mean = 10.64, SD = 10.03) groups, U = 137, p = .06.

Let's say, a total cohort average lap count of 1.5 in the 15 minute drive time, and average of 13.5 crashes per lap or 20.25 crashes per test. That's a crash every 44 seconds! Keep in mind that half these participants were in control (drivers) and half were getting a mirrored view designed to make them feel like a passenger. Gee the car I was riding in kept crashing every minute, and I got a bit of motion sickness - you don't say.

Here's the second half of the abcnews.go.com article quote: "For some applications nearly 100% of users get sick, he said." That's 100% true, and that's what you're seeing, a poorly designed experiment that overestimates incidence of VR sickness.

And what the fuck is the "superpower government with a massive military" thing supposed to be, some kind of burn? If that's the metaphor you want to work with, your continued credulity and spread of misinformation makes you the Dick Cheney of forum posters.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Ignore this study from a major outlet

Is it a peer-reviewed study published in a respected academic journal?

 

[†††]

 

[DalekFlay]

And what the fuck is the "superpower government with a massive military" thing supposed to be, some kind of burn? If that's the metaphor you want to work with, your continued credulity and spread of misinformation makes you the Dick Cheney of forum posters.

I think that reference to someone who mocks "experts" is pretty obvious and doesn't need to be explained.

As for the rest, fair enough perspective. Share a link when your study comes out and I'll be happy to read it. However as of today, random dude on internet has zero credibility. Surely if you're actually becoming a doctor you know that's how your whole life is gonna work out. "5%-10%" and "40%-60%" are pretty far off from each other, and one dude's a Joe Blow posting on RPG Codex of all fucking places and the other one is on ABC News. The trendy thing on the internet is to say "fuck that guy" but that's not me, sorry. I'm inclined to believe the truth is in the middle but far off from your low-ball. Get published and we'll see though.

 

[Grauken]

Who cares about motion sickness, VR still has only gimmick games that nobody would play if they weren't VR

 

[Dexter]

"Ignore this study from a major outlet and trust my personal experience" is peak 2020 internet. At least you're not running a superpower government with a massive military I guess.

I think that reference to someone who mocks "experts" is pretty obvious and doesn't need to be explained.

Amusingly enough this is "peak 2020 Internet", but not in the way that you think. It's more like "Ignore this actual VR researcher with a Doctorate in a Technical field that works with VR HMDs in a lab every day in favor of a Clickbait reprint of an article first published August 14, 2019 going back to a paper from 2016 about the DK2 titled "The virtual reality head-mounted display Oculus Rift induces motion sickness and is sexist in its effects" by a diversity undergrad research assistant supervised by Dr. "Postural Instability" who came up with a theory about VR sickness back in 1991 in an attempt to disprove the more established ones and since then has apparently not been able to let go, pushing every undergrad of his to include mentions of it as part of their papers as opposed to the more common Sensory Conflict or Poison Theories." (Also he's a Psychologist without any Technical background, a bit of a media hog happy with any articles written about him and a Professor of Kinesiology, which explains why he's so obsessed with his "Postural Instability" theory.)

It's peak "Wow, I read a headline about something on the ABC website, so it's gotta be true and it even confirms my priors, also VR is SEXIST, I KNEW it!" no matter what people with more knowledge about a subject and personal or professional experience in the field might say. It's also a recurring pattern with you.

Trying to find where this has come from led me to this as the most likely candidate: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10447318.2020.1726108

It can't be that since it's too recent, the "article" was first published August 2019 and the quotes they used are from SIGGRAPH2019 (July 28). Given that the phrase "contemporary commercially available VR systems" is used, the phrase "sexist" is used twice and the numbers 40% and 70% when looking at the women I'm pretty sure it's based on this:
https://toseethesea.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2016_MDS.pdf

 

[sser]

Does projectile vomiting break immersion?

 

[Jigawatt]

Surely if you're actually becoming a doctor

My thesis didn't go away just because it was published. Anyway I don't really like to dickwave that, I'm well aware of what an asshole it makes you look like but it was kind of relevant in this case. I'd love to link my Scholar page but I also enjoy the ability to use gamer words on niche role playing game websites so what can you do?

It can't be that since it's too recent, the "article" was first published August 2019 and the quotes they used are from SIGGRAPH2019 (July 28). Given that the phrase "contemporary commercially available VR systems" is used, the phrase "sexist" is used twice and the numbers 40% and 70% when looking at the women I'm pretty sure it's based on this:
https://toseethesea.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2016_MDS.pdf

Good catch on the dates... this other paper is even worse. Even if we assume it was perfectly conducted science the fact that is used the DK2 makes it completely irrelevant to anything going on today. But it was definitely fishing for results, compare the title:

The virtual reality head-mounted display Oculus Rift induces motion sickness and is sexist in its effects

with this from the end of the first of 2 experiments

motion sickness was reported by 22% of participants. ... Despite the fact that the incidence of motion sickness was three times greater in women than in men, the sex difference was not statistically significant. This result could indicate that there are no sex differences in motion sickness among users of head-mounted display systems. An alternative hypothesis is that in Experiment 1 actual sex differences were masked by the low overall incidence of motion sickness. Overall incidence might be higher, and sex differences in incidence might be significant if the Oculus Rift were used with a different game. To evaluate this hypothesis was the primary purpose of Experiment 2.

And then they go on to use some shovelware asset flip to get the results they want. Can't imagine why I might mock such "experts"

 

[DalekFlay]

My thesis didn't go away just because it was published. Anyway I don't really like to dickwave that, I'm well aware of what an asshole it makes you look like but it was kind of relevant in this case. I'd love to link my Scholar page but I also enjoy the ability to use gamer words on niche role playing game websites so what can you do?

I was just making a general point about random forum posters being trusted over actual studies. If you are who you say you are and have the data, that's cool. Maybe if I'm bored I'll google around for more studies to read, but I don't really care enough about VR to do that probably. I was just trying to make a general point about trusting random forum posts on the internet over actual reporting. Which isn't to say every expert is right of course, just that they're not instantly wrong because Forum Joe did some googling either. In your profession, surely you have the same concerns.

Anyway, I'll bow out and admit this particular political dick doesn't really belong in this VR vagina and I shouldn't have barged in and whipped it out.

 

[Mortmal]

Well how serious the study is, who paid for it ? Is the "professionnal" journo trying to do the buzz ? Is it the usual bandwagon, video games are bad ? It's not cause you have a thesis its the truth either, many scientifical studies are faked and follow some corporate interests, the whole medical world is completely corrupted. Also by the way everything they tell you since decades about dietetics are wrong, some israelian researchers, found 4 years ago its related to your intestine microbiome...

So i'd rather trust the codexer who said he tried it with 30 friends and only his mother got sick.

 

[Daemongar]

Look the day they release this in the US is the I begin carrying an emergency supply of dogshit.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Imagine having a hobby that, when you want enjoy it, literally makes you nauseous.

I have this problem with my beer hobby, when I drink a little bit too much.

 

[puur prutswerk]

Anyway, as someone who's job involves running 100s of people through various applications in VR, I'd put the incidence of "absolutely unavoidable simulation sickness" somewhere in the 5%-10% range, at least in the uni student age bracket. And yes most or almost all of them are women, though there may be some reporting bias in that alongside the innate differences. I don't think it's really that significant for the overall adoption of VR, and it might improve a bit as time goes on, but regardless makes the OP a ridiculous level of fake news.

"Ignore this study from a major outlet and trust my personal experience" is peak 2020 internet. At least you're not running a superpower government with a massive military I guess.

No, peak 2020 internet is telling someone with the phrase "Virtual Reality" in their doctoral thesis that they don't know shit, because I rEaD iT oN aBcNeWs.Go.CoM. For fucks sake don't be such a credulous retard if you're going to try and call people out.

So the quote in the article is:

"With contemporary commercially available VR systems, the incidence of motion sickness after only 15 minutes is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent," said Thomas Stoffregen, a kinesiologist at the University of Minnesota

Trying to find where this has come from led me to this as the most likely candidate: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10447318.2020.1726108 . On my little journey of finding that paper I found that this researcher really likes to forcefully induce motion sickness in people (going so far as to construct a room with marble patterned walls and wobbling the whole thing with a motor) but I'll leave that aside for now. He's also a massive self-citer with about a third of each bibliography being his own papers, another red flag we'll just pretend not to notice for now.

The study in question is massively flawed in two ways: first, the participants were highly motivated to report sickness.

A total of 79 individuals participated (41 women and 38 men), in exchange for course credit

Each participant gave informed consent and was informed they could discontinue at any time without penalty.

Participants were instructed (both verbally and on the consent form) to discontinue the experiment immediately if they experienced any motion sickness symptoms, however mild.

Participants were reminded that they should discontinue immediately if they experienced any symptoms of motion sickness, however mild.

Participants were reminded to discontinue immediately if they experienced any symptoms of motion sickness, however mild.

So a bunch of uni students were given a task that would take about 30 minutes to get course credit - or they could simply bail at any time and still get the credit, and were prompted no less than 4 times of that option. Nowhere in the paper is the effect of this setup compensated for (would have been easy too, just tell them before hand they'll still have to wait the half hour for the credit). The use of SSQ questionnaires etc. is all fine but the final result is tainted by the fact that 29/34 of the 'sick' responses were discontinuers. As to why did he do that - well only one type of result is going to get you interviewed with the prestigious ABC NEWS.

Second, and more critically, this study isn't generalisable at all, because the task involved driving cars the kids couldn't drive! If you want to study VR sickness in a driving task you should give participants a nice virtual Mazda 121 and a speed limit to follow, to minimise confounding variables. Instead have a look at this:

For participants in the driver group, we evaluated game performance in terms of the number of laps completed, the mean number of crashes per lap, and mean driving speed. The number of laps completed differed between men (mean = 1.79, SD = 0.86) and women (mean = 1.14, SD = 0.94), U = 137, p = .045, and between the Well (mean = 2.10, SD = 0.44) and Sick (mean = 0.75, SD = 0.85) groups, U = 42.50, p < .001. The number of crashes per lap did not differ between men (mean = 14.08, SD = 8.70) and women (mean = 13.02, SD = 12.42), U = 173, p = .35, or between the Well (mean = 16.25, SD = 10.90) and Sick (mean = 10.64, SD = 10.03) groups, U = 137, p = .06.

Let's say, a total cohort average lap count of 1.5 in the 15 minute drive time, and average of 13.5 crashes per lap or 20.25 crashes per test. That's a crash every 44 seconds! Keep in mind that half these participants were in control (drivers) and half were getting a mirrored view designed to make them feel like a passenger. Gee the car I was riding in kept crashing every minute, and I got a bit of motion sickness - you don't say.

Here's the second half of the abcnews.go.com article quote: "For some applications nearly 100% of users get sick, he said." That's 100% true, and that's what you're seeing, a poorly designed experiment that overestimates incidence of VR sickness.

And what the fuck is the "superpower government with a massive military" thing supposed to be, some kind of burn? If that's the metaphor you want to work with, your continued credulity and spread of misinformation makes you the Dick Cheney of forum posters.

These are unironically 5d moves against our species.

 

[Semiurge]

emember those people who claimed Half-Life 2 was giving them motion sickness? LOL

I did, from the hovercraft driving.

 

[Neuromancer]

The only time I got motion sick was strangely enough from the game The Witness - a low paced puzzle game.

Although after searching in the web, it seems that many people had that problem. For example:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/210970/discussions/0/458606877334938259/

The main reason was the wrong initial setting of the FoV (Field of View).
After I changed that to a much higher value, I could continue without anymore issues.


I think later patches of the game just set the initial value higher to alleviate this problem.

 

[Potato Canon]

Much of the VR sickness scare was based on now-ancient studies using antique equipment never relevant to the 2010's VR renaissance. 90's VR headsets with massive lag and 15 fps. People still cite these studies though they have zero to do with modern low latency high frame rate equipment.

It's also true that new users often (but not always) can often experience a period of adjustment to using VR, the human brain is very flexible and can adapt within a short amount of time. But classical "sim sickness" studies were often conducted on people with zero exposure previously, and thus were not at all representative of what the average regular user experiences. Like making conclusions about bicycle riding based on studying people riding bicycles for the first time ever. "conclusion: bicycles not feasible as vehicles, users fall off too much."

Then there's the issue of incorrectly set IPD and the scourge of cheap garbage equipment with no hardware IPD adjust setting at all(!?) like Oculus Rift S, numerous WMR kits, Oculus Go. That shit will fuck some people up and is grossly irresponsible any company would release such garbage.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

"VR Sickness Rate is 40-70 percent after only 15 minutes"

Sickness Rate from terrible quality of modern games after only 15 minutes still holding steady at 95%.

 

[Gastrick]

Well how serious the study is, who paid for it ? Is the "professionnal" journo trying to do the buzz ? Is it the usual bandwagon, video games are bad ? It's not cause you have a thesis its the truth either, many scientifical studies are faked and follow some corporate interests, the whole medical world is completely corrupted. Also by the way everything they tell you since decades about dietetics are wrong, some israelian researchers, found 4 years ago its related to your intestine microbiome...

Most of the time they don't even have studies to show or one that doesn't prove their point and just go off authority of "X and X organization" thinks or "the scientific consensus" says. For example, they like to pretend pornography is 100% healthy even though it's shown by dozens of studies to correlate with negative mental effects. If I'm looking for what scientific evidence says I expect to get it, not some filthy sub-human's opinion, they can take their article and shove it up their ass.

 

[Lutte]

It's also true that new users often (but not always) can often experience a period of adjustment to using VR, the human brain is very flexible and can adapt within a short amount of time.

If the human brain couldn't adapt to this kind of stuff nobody would be able to pilot jet fighters.
But it is true that VR is a higher investment, higher effort type of platform, despite having a library of mostly not very challenging/competitive type of games which would typically attract more of the casual (who wouldn't want to spend $1k on a headset and $2k+ on a computer) than the hardcore gamer. Just look at footage of alyx. It's more like a target shooting gallery than a fps with actually active enemies.

Then there's the issue of incorrectly set IPD and the scourge of cheap garbage equipment with no hardware IPD adjust setting at all(!?) like Oculus Rift S, numerous WMR kits, Oculus Go. That shit will fuck some people up and is grossly irresponsible any company would release such garbage.

Most VR proponents are willing to push for this garbo because VR can't grow a marketshare worth making higher end games for without people buying cheap headsets. You can't have your cake and eat it. No dev is going to make expensive video games for a platform without users. Your platform won't have users if you solely rely on the higher end of things.

Of course, if you can't make anything decent on the cheaper side.. this will just backfire longterm and kill the platform altogether.

 

[Chippy]

Many years ago there was a show in the UK known as Tomorrow's World. They interviewed a guy that was talking about his work on VR and he said it was dangerous because your eyes don't adjust according to how far away or close things are in the VR environment. So it kinda fucks with your brain.

I mentioned this already somewhere. But not sure I'd trust it. Even if they released "Virtual Sex with Sofia Vergara" I'm not sure it would be worth the brain damage.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

never felt VR sickness at all, it's a nigger thing apparently.
pure white people don't feel it.
if you get vr sickness, check your genes.

So you're saying that white people are pathetic fags that accept escapist fantasies without any struggles, while blacks have an innate instinct that warns when something isn't real/true
Interesting...

 

[Jenkem]

never felt VR sickness at all, it's a nigger thing apparently.
pure white people don't feel it.
if you get vr sickness, check your genes.

So you're saying that white people are pathetic fags that accept escapist fantasies without any struggles, while blacks have an innate instinct that warns when something isn't real/true
Interesting...

no. white people intrinsically know it's not real, and therefore are not affected by it. niggers, who have low iq, have no cognitive ability to separate fact from fiction (cf. wakanda, we wuz kangz, etc.) get confused and sick. this is also because they have trouble recognizing themselves in a mirror. also the fact that you clearly are ignorant of empirical evidence by asserting "blacks have an innate instinct that warns when something isn't real/true" when all evidence indicates the opposite (literally believing cops are "out here da murder uzzzz", believing they "dindu nuffin" and all the times they "try to get their life together")

post hand

 

[Ol' Willy]

literally believing cops are "out here da murder uzzzz"

But shooting negroes is literally the national competitive sport in USA.

Need scoreboard of that, though. For a friend.