How game designers find ways around VR motion sickness
Getting around in VR without moving your body
Motion sickness has long been the bane of virtual reality. It’s associated most strongly with first-person shooters and walking games, which create a stark mismatch between your real and virtual body. Move too fast in the game, and your stomach won’t respond favorably in the real world. Yet play a game where the movements of your virtual character match your own, and you might run into a wall or your coffee table. VR game developers know these boundaries all too well, and they’re now beginning to move beyond these limitations in unique and fascinating ways.
The results were out in full force at last week’s annual Oculus Connect developer conference. Oculus is on the brink of releasing its Touch motion controllers, which means designers building for its Rift headset are dealing with more and more realistic body motion in VR. Take, for example, Lone Echo, a new Rift exclusive which uses the physics-bending freedom of zero-gravity to overcome the hurdles of in-game motion.
‘LONE ECHO’ RELIES ON THE PHYSICS-BENDING FREEDOM OF ZERO-GRAVITY
Lone Echo developer Ready at Dawn relies on an ingenious method to replicate the feeling of floating in space — specifically, in a mining operation within a ring of Saturn. Instead of asking players to move around a confined physical space, Ready at Dawn chose to create a system of constant motion. After all, you’re never perfectly still in space unless you tether yourself down. In Lone Echo, players drift endlessly, moving between all manner of levers and bars and other objects. While adrift, you can steer with small bursts of air from your hands, activated by buttons on the Touch controller.
The sensation is disorienting at first, teetering on the edge of discomfort even with all VR’s recent advances in minimizing motion sickness. Yet once you’ve got your bearings, Lone Echo’s movement system feels natural. You stop worrying about the disconnect between your body and your brain, because the element of zero-gravity fills the gap. After a few minutes, the thought of motion sickness begins to fade away.
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Source: The Verge