Oculus might have a fix to end VR motion sickness for good – TechRadar

Virtual reality accessibility has gone from strength to strength in recent years, with Oculus VR leading the pack thanks to its all-in-one, relatively-affordable Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2 headsets. But one barrier remains for some would-be virtual reality gamers motion sickness.

Because whats happening in a gamers field of view in virtual reality doesnt always match up with the way their body moves, queasy feelings can interrupt and spoil the enjoyment of virtual reality apps and experiences.

But Oculus may have a solution to fix the problem once and for all. In a Twitter Spaces conversation with Vice President of Facebook Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth (and transcribed by Upload VR), John Carmack, Consulting Oculus Chief Technology Officer, might have cracked it.

Carmack first discussed some existing solutions they encourage developers to employ at Oculus:

Some of the mitigations that we tell people about about, well, like a cockpit around the edges can help because thats the furthest out to your periphery that largest motion if you cover that up, people do the shrinking vignettes when youre moving.

But Carmack thinks that, if certain calculations can be made for in-game objects, a system-wide implementation could be introduced that could defend against motion sickness effects.

If we do a little bit of changes to the engines and pass some more depth information, which we want to do for positional time warp things, anyways, its possible for us to do a systems-level approach thats actually aware of the depth next to it.

So in a game like POPULATION: ONE, they offer multiple comfort levels that determine how much you pull in at the sides and its helpful for people. But its wasteful in some sense, because if youre outside, youve got the sky at effectively infinity and that causes no impact to your comfort at all when its moving there. But the vignette winds up covering it anyways. What we need to do is look at the depth of things relative to your view, how much its moving incorrectly relative to the inertial stuff and only fade out things proportional to that relationship.

So I think that if youre ducking for cover right behind a wall, thats the stuff that can really make you sick if you translate next to it, the sky doesnt have any impact on it whatsoever. So I think that we could do something system-level that could then be uniform across games, which would be great because right now each game has its own mitigation method and it would be good for users if they just realize that, okay, this is the way VR worlds behave when youre close to something and you slide with the controller, you can expect that to kind of vignette out on the side.

Its an exciting idea for anyone thats been forced to take a break from a full-motion VR experience, and based on the sort of reasoning that seems so obvious when presented to you that its hard to believe its not been figured out already. Whats best is that Carmacks solution would work to minimise the intrusion of vignette effects on the full image only being introduced when and where theyre necessary. And, with a system-level implementation, it would take the headache away from developers having to figure out how best to mitigate sickness in their games, while also giving a consistent motion language for gamers to get used to across all games.

However, this wont be something well be seeing anytime soon, it seems

Thats the type of thing that heck itll probably take us two years to sort of work something out and push it through developers and get buy in and get people to agree to it, said Carmack.

But I think thats a long-term direction thats got some real potential.

Something to think about for the Oculus Quest Pro, or Oculus Quest 3 then, perhaps?

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Oculus might have a fix to end VR motion sickness for good - TechRadar