Michael Fassbender’s soft lilt is in my ear spouting nonsense about assassins and their creed. Around me is a whirl of action set against a cartoonish backdrop. I’m in the new Assassin’s Creed virtual experience, and thanks to a blend of low-res graphics and high-res people, it feels like I’ve found my way inside some lost Mortal Kombat game circa 1993.
I don’t have any control. The camera, (and I) race down the corridor of a medieval castle. We skitter to a stop at the edge of a turret. I don’t have a body—I hover over the ground like a spectre—so there’s no way to fully comprehend how close to the edge my virtual self is.
Then the camera is lurching forward as my ghostly form is thrown off the turret. I’m seated, but my stomach is in my throat. At the moment my lunch lasagna is about to reacquaint itself with my mouth, the screen goes black. The experience is over.
I rip off the headset and gulp in a huge lungful of air. The world stops spinning long enough for me to catch the eye of one of the creators. He’s grinning, ecstatic with his debut of the Assassin’s Creed experience, and I’m nauseous and trying to be polite.
This is a carefully designed virtual experience. It was shot on the same locations as the big budget movie, and intended to get the average person excited about virtual reality—a surprisingly daunting task. This is, in many respects, the best that VR has to offer. And as the nausea tries to settle in my stomach one thing is painfully clear.
Our bodies aren’t ready for it.
How you experience your place in the physical world is determined by your eyes and your vestibular system, which is primarily composed of a complex series of bone structures in your inner ear. Spinning quickly in a circle or standing up too fast can wreak havoc with this delicate arrangement. Damage to the system creates vertigo. It’s hyper sensitive and does not like to be tricked—yet that’s exactly what VR does.
Your our vestibular system is hyper sensitive and it does not like to be tricked.
It’s why my hosts had me sit down before I put on the headset to experience Assassin’s Creed. The experience mimics an extremely popular demo for VR: the roller coaster. It’s a method of showing off how immersive VR can be, because it directly affects the vestibular system. Plunging down a hill or racing around a sharp corner in VR puts your stomach in your throat almost as accurately as if you were on the real thing.
But while you might be exhilarated, your body is wildly compensating for what your vestibular system is perceiving. Sitting down reminds your body that no, you are not racing around a curve at 60 miles per hour. It also allows you to consciously ground yourself. Because if you don’t ground yourself, if your conscious and unconscious body is not prepared for the experience, then things can get messy quickly.
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With VR, we’re going to have to adjust our taste and reconfigure what our brains immediately consider “good” cinematography. Filmmakers are involved in this as well. Ang Lee shot this year’s Billy Lyn’s Long Half Time Walk in 120 fps, James Cameron is in talks to shoot the next Avatar in anything from 48 to 240 fps, and Peter Jackson famously got a critical trouncing for shooting The Hobbit in 48 frames per second. Unfortunately, audiences and critics don’t actually like watching the movies at these speeds, except as an oddity.
Images are so crisp and clear in higher frames per second, which is great for exploring a video game, but it makes live action content feel like it’s being performed on a stage. Translating that stage to the equivalent of a 105-inch 360-degree screen demands a whole other level of adjustment from audiences.
Yet it won’t just be eyes and tastes that need to adjust to make VR more viable. It’s the mind too.
Virtual reality sits on the cusp now of what is real and what we perceive to be real. It’s the uncanny valley writ large. An all-together disturbing experience too real for our bodies to ignore, but too fake for our minds to believe.
But things are changing. Back when the first full flight simulators for pilots went online, researchers noticed a problem. Pilots who had logged hours in an actual airplane were getting sick when flying in a sim, while pilots who had logged hours in a sim would get sick when they flew a plane. It’s called simulator sickness, is virtually identical to VR motion sickness, and might be the most profound problem for VR to overcome.
If you spend enough time in VR your body could retrain itself. The real world would become the nauseating one.
Our bodies are so incredibly in tune with our surroundings that they know, on a neurological level, when something is off. That’s what is at the core of simulator sickness. The pilots were so attuned to one particular extraordinary experience that when they moved to a similar, but just different enough one, they became ill.
Even if you do overcome simulator sickness, you could be in trouble when you return to the real world. “There seems to be some kind of training going on in your head,” McCauley told Gizmodo. If you spend enough time in VR your body could retrain itself. The real world would become the nauseating one.
The current VR market is being driven by gamers. Palmer Luckey, Jack McCauley, and their fellow Oculus founders developed the headset and transformed the VR industry into what it is today because they were enthusiastic gamers ready to drag the world into the virtual promised land.
The only problem is that this virtual promised land isn’t as ready as gamers would like it to be. It doesn’t matter how rarely you get motion sickness in the real world, the virtual one is an inescapable assault on the human body. Its successes come from tricking the mind and confounding the eyes. But our bodies can perceive the unnatural state of virtual worlds, and when they do they try to protect us, manifesting a feeling of wrongness that makes us feel sick. The problem lies in the VR technology itself. It’s just not good enough to make our bodies believe.
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Source: Gizmodo