I wouldn't get nauseas when I played Overload in VR, but I definitely developed a cold sweat fast. 30 minute sessions were a push and I'd need to recover after. The developers did all the best practices, but there's something inherently mentally stressful about a 6DoF game in VR while you sit still in a chair.
Actually, it's exactly like that! Most games with movement as a physical body, either with or without breast/hip make me car-sick, but this game is mostly taxing mentally because of all of the input. The only game that doesn't affect me, at all and which I can play for many hours is Contractors Showdown.
I’m about to try it in VR. I’ve gotten over most of my VR nausea, but I will say, the original Decent series games gave made me nauseated/gave me vertigo and headaches if I played them too much. Therefore, I am a little worried.
Not everyone has it even initially; it really varies from person to person. I suspect that to some extent it is influenced by past exposure to fast-paced first-person games (e.g. FPS when played using the mouse).
I used to get nausea when playing Doom in the nineties, it never got better. But I never get nausea from fps games with slower movement. I suspect the problem with Doom is how quickly you can change direction while running. You can run quite fast and a 90 degree turn doesn't slow you down at all.
In pretty much any FPS that allows using the mouse to turn (which was already the case even in Wolf3D), you can turn as fast as you can move the mouse. When playing competitively, and with experienced players in general, it is common to set mouse sensitivity rather high, allowing one to perform very fast - but still highly precise! - turns, either to follow the target, or to switch rapidly from one target to another, or to scan the area etc. Really good players can do what's known as a "180 quickscope" like that, which is exactly what it says on the tin - a very rapid 180 degree turn & aim to shoot someone you know is behind you. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEC4AE6KbxY
If you don't have experience doing this yourself, watching such a player over the shoulder can be very nausea-inducing. I think to some extent this is innate, but I suspect for those who don't have a strongly pronounced response to begin with, playing such games (and doing those rapid turns yourself) desensitizes you over time. And I think that also transfers to VR to some extent; I've been playing first-person shooters with WASD+mouse for ~30 years now, and I had no nausea whatsoever the first time I tried VR.
Doom does some weird stuff with FOV and how it renders the environment though; newer FPS games have "real" 3D graphics, Doom used some interesting tricks to make things look 3D. The Quake engine was iirc the first "real" 3D engine.
Quake was the first widely popular "real" 3D engine, but ironically the first game in the series being discussed in this thread, Descent, pre-dated it by around a year with fully 3D graphics in 1995.
> The Quake engine was iirc the first "real" 3D engine.
There were many 3D engines before Quake. You had a bunch of Micropose combat flight sims, a ton of 3d driving games, even Elite on the BBC micro.
Hell, I'd written some 3D graphics on the Atari ST before Quake.
Quake was the first 3D texture mapped, dynamically lit, first person shooter...maybe...depending on your definition. It was certainly one of the first to have that ran at frame rates around 30fps.
As others have said, Descent was also around the same time too.
For me there was practically no sickness at all, first time I used the headset I felt a little weird after an hour, and after that had no issues playing a variety of genres, with no teleportation.
Okay except that one time playing COMPOUND. By accident I moved the analog stick to the left while turning my head to the right, and the image moving the opposite of what I expected made me feel bad. I finished the level there, and then had to go rest for a couple of minutes and stop playing VR for the day.
tl;dr for some people it almost never happens, until it does.
I've owned multiple VR headsets and have many, many hours of VR experience. With seated experiences (vehicles/aircrafts/rollercoasters) I never got nausea, not even initially.
The only experiences that made me nauseas were the ones that simulated movement of characters, where pressing a button would move the character and camera forwards. That was just too much of a disconnect. Movement by teleporting was not a problem.
It was worst the first few times, and I did not last long before I had to take a break, powering through was not possible. With experience it got better, the nausea/dizzyness was less intense and I could play longer sessions, but it never went away completely.
It may sound crazy, but I have never felt nausea with a computer. The only issue I had with VR was my hair trying to cover my eyes, in the middle of a race, and that was it.
However, once I rented a plane to go over the Nazca lines, and it was in a tiny plane, that was capable of changing direction very easily.
That day I felt nausea. By this, I mean you can't ignore it, it is a strong sensation. So much, that the guides will advise to do the flight on an empty stomach. And it was overpowering, one girl in the plane did not watch anything because she was focused on a paper bag close to her mouth.
Not even fast turning karts or anything else has been able to reproduce that feeling.
I've never felt nauseated from VR either. Tried it as a teenager in the 90s with an old-school Lawnmower-Man-style HMD, several generations of Oculus goggles, two different commercial HMDs in immersive gaming venues, etc. I do remember feeling disoriented when first playing the original Descent in the 90s, but no nausea.
In a small (3-4 seat) plane, I got a little nervous from the sudden changes in direction, but I didn't feel nauseated then either. I've been on one of those astronaut trainer 3-axis spinning chair contraptions a few times when I was younger and didn't feel any ill effects. I thought it was a fun experience.
I have gotten a weird variation on motion sickness a few times when I was on small boats. I'd be fine on the boat itself, but a day or two later, back on land, I'd feel like the surface of the Earth was bobbing up and down the way the boat had. It went away in a few hours or less, but it was hard to do anything productive while it lasted. I still didn't feel like I was going to vomit.
No. It can actually get _worse_, as you get more sensitized to VR. The recommendation seems to be to _stop_ using VR if you get motion sick, rather than trying to power through it.
Correct, according to general understanding from VR gamers and green my own experience. If you feel queasy stop immediately because pushing on will make it worse and cement the association in your brain. Leave it a while (a day or more ideally) then try again, repeat.
Maybe it differs on why you get motion sickness? Is it because the screens lag behind your movement with x millisecons or is it becase the eyes detect movement but the balance does not? Or a combination?
I'm guessing it's easier to get used to the motion/display lag than the balance sence issues.
I remember playing VR games with my HP Reverb G2 years ago and I did initially power through the motion sickness for a bit, but it did get better over the weeks until it just wasn't an issue at all.
Data points would be interesting too. Someone saying "I used to get sick after 15min, and now I can play for 60min without a problem. I always stop playing right when I start getting sick".
You know, just to see that it has happened to someone :-)
edit: well this became a bit longer than I initially planned, I think I just had a lot to share when it comes to my recent VR adventures.
Well here I am: I initially got queasy as soon as I moved, then I'd immediately stop and take a break, longer breaks in the beginning. Initially I got a strong sense of de-realization / depersonalization after getting out of the digital world (i.e. looking at your hands and your brain being confused if they're real) But that also went away very quickly. The nausea, and 'am I still in the matrix' feeling got better within days, and went away within weeks. Now I can stomach any crazy topsy-turvy locomotion in any game. But I still feel the sweat and excitement, when swinging off 1000 feet high cliffs in Jet Island, or diving hundreds of meters deep in Subnautica.
It's just amazing how immersive it can be. I think you can only get there by having it at home and really giving yourself the time to get into it.
It's also re-ignited my love for single player games, especially modded triple A titles like Dragon Quest XI, or Resident Evil 2 (Remake) for example.
And btw, I run all of this on (arch) linux, on a Valve Index kit, using both SteamVR and OpenXR through Envision (Monado). It's been a bit of tinkering but that's only made it more satisfying for me. Plus, there are great communities like the Linux VR Adventure group: https://lvra.gitlab.io/
My experience is analogous to yours. Initial motion sickness, *strong* de-realization and de-personalization (especially with hands, but also my torso and legs).
Nausea didn't get better and seemed to be present when my head was turning but the camera was moving either the opposite way or in the same direction but too fast.
I have some really good memories of spending hours inside of Obduction VR (highly recommended if you liked Myst / Riven / The Witness / etc), but the de-realization was so severe that I ended up abandoning that form of entertainment out of concern for my sanity.
Yeah, add me to the list of people who have used the "stop immediately when you're getting noticeably queasy" technique to train my stupid brain to realize that no, it's not actually being poisoned, so it should stop fucking thinking it is and grow the fuck up. ;)
There are still some sorts of games that will make me queasy (games that have a lot of uncontrollable-by-me jumping around (think "leaping ninja fighting games') for instance), but by and large, I've no trouble.
I also found Dramamine to be helpful during the intermediate period where I'd still otherwise get nauseous after a while. I find it continues to be helpful for things like those stupid "leaping ninja fighting games".
Here's my experience.. got a Vive, ZERO motion sickness, was developing some games and toys with it for 6 months or so. Played about 20 minutes of some Resident Evil game on PSVR and got REALLY motion sick around the 10 minute mark and just powered through for another 10 minutes. I had to lay down and it took a good hour to fully recover. Now I can't play VR at all without getting sick, start getting the sweats and nausea as soon as I put my vive headset on. completely ruined VR for me, never finished my game I was working on, VIVE just collecting dust. Fuck the PSVR, I'm still mad about it.
