Startups and researchers aim to blur the lines of reality for your subconscious.
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OXFORD, England—I first met Dr. Charles King at his “graduation” from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media Techstars accelerator. The pitch he delivered to a packed audience in London described how ROVR—the company he started in 2012 with co-founder Julian Williams—was addressing a fundamental problem with the much-touted Virtual Reality boom: No matter how fun your content is, if it makes people throw up, it’s probably an experience they can do without.
According to King, two-thirds of us experience some degree of discomfort in VR even if we don’t quite “sell the Buick” as he so colorfully puts it. But Simulator Sickness (SS) is no laughing matter. A handful of experts say that exposure to some forms of VR can be as disorientating as getting drunk, and they call for headsets such as the Oculus and HTC Vive to be banned until more research is done on the long-term effects this has on our eyes and brain.
The safety of VR is a subject very close to my heart. I love VR, and writing about it is not something I can do without actually experiencing it first-hand. Yet I was always one of those annoying kids who had to sit at the front of the bus, and I started getting woozy in the car after about 15 minutes. To this day, I find it difficult to read on the train and usually resort to motion sickness tablets to get me through long-haul flights. Boats? Don’t even go there.
Susceptibility to VR sickness varies quite a lot from person to person, but research indicates that there is a general correlation between a propensity toward motion sickness and susceptibility to SS. While I certainly fit that description, simulator sickness is different from normal motion sickness. SS is not caused by actual motion but by the visual information from a simulated environment. In the absence of motion, an uncomfortable conflict is created between the visual, vestibular (balance), and proprioceptive (bodily position) senses.
So when, following his Techstars demo, King invited me to try out the Wizdish—a VR treadmill that claims to solve this illness problem by providing a more natural interface between the users and their virtual environment—I arranged to meet them in Oxford, where the company is currently based.
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Above: Wizdish isn’t the only company/product looking to combat VR sickness through unusual means—see the Unlimited Corridor.
Stability, thy name may not be software
VR hardware manufacturers such as Oculus tend to downplay the role of hardware in causing simulator sickness, perhaps understandably since they had a lot more sickness-inducing titles at launch than Steam did. Their extensive best practices for developers document details the most common triggers for the condition and ways to work around it. Similarly, Google is implementing a “Motion intensity” rating—to be set by developers—as a way for users to identify content they are most comfortable with.
Yet, although a lot of SS issues do come down to design and personal tolerance thresholds, we should not simply ignore motion sickness caused by the hardware itself, according to Professor Karthik Ramani from Purdue University’s C Design Lab. “Hardware and software should be developed together to reduce the sickness effects of VR. For example, using input devices such as physical controllers should be avoided in favor of more intuitive and natural interactions,” he says.
This is what his team is currently working on, developing a spatial user interface calledDeepHand that figures out the exact placement of your hands and fingers and uses deep learning to replicate those movements in virtual reality. Ramani explains that DeepHand was developed for surgical applications, yet the technology will likely benefit most virtual applications in the future, where it has the potential to significantly reduce motion sickness issues.
“It will help enormously when you can hold your hand up and the virtual hand appears, or you can look down at your feet and your feet are there, because that gives you a sense of presence,” agrees King.
Another novel approach to displaying expansive worlds within a limited space was developed by Dr. Takuji Narumi at the University of Tokyo in conjunction with Unity Researcher Yohei Yanase. Unlimited Corridor uses visuo-haptic interaction to trick the brain into thinking a VR space is bigger than it is. It gives the illusion of unlimited virtual travel in a straight line where it in fact modifies spatial perception by using redirected walking to steer the user a few degrees to the left or to the right so that they’re walking around circular walls. The goal is for people to move in an infinite direction—in any direction they choose—but in such a way that you only need a 10x10m space in which to do this.
Although this is not an overarching solution, users testing the Unlimited Corridor reported feeling VR sickness much less often. This style of merging the virtual and physical environments is already being successfully employed in places such as Hyper Reality theme park The VOID, and it could well be one of the ways used to extend the comfort of longer VR sessions in the future.
If the widely predicted Virtual Reality boom is to happen over the next few years, the industry does need to proactively address the issue of simulator sickness. If, like Charles King says, nearly two-thirds of users are susceptible to it, that’s a lot of people that will be put off of long-term VR use.
Inventions such as ROVR’s Wizdish, DeepHand, and Unlimited Corridor are likely to help, especially as they become more widely available. Yet, my experiences hint that there really isn’t one silver bullet for the SS problem. Designers, hardware manufacturers, and researchers all need to work together to address the many factors that contribute toward it, even as people become more conditioned to them.
So perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant future I might just be able to put on my headset and enjoy longer, immersive experiences without feeling any dizziness or nausea at all. It just may require hardware—be it a treadmill, some type of hand tracker, a fascmile for an endless hallway, or something else entirely—beyond those expensive headsets.
Alice Bonasio is a Technology Journalist, Author, and Consultant. In addition to contributing to Ars, she runs her own Tech Trends blog and regularly freelances for Quartz, Fast Company, The Next Web, Wired, and others. She has a particular interest in Virtual/Mixed reality and is currently writing VRgins, a book about sex and relationships in the virtual age. Find her on Twitter: @alicebonasio.
Source: Ars Technica