{"id":279,"date":"2016-11-27T12:45:38","date_gmt":"2016-11-27T12:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/austella.com\/?p=279"},"modified":"2018-12-27T12:47:38","modified_gmt":"2018-12-27T12:47:38","slug":"theres-no-escaping-itweve-got-to-talk-about-sim-sickness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/austella.com\/?p=279","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s no escaping it\u2026we\u2019ve got to talk about Sim Sickness!"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re looking to create a\u00a0VR experience<\/a>, you\u2019ve no doubt come across the term \u201cSim sickness\u201d in your research. Simulator sickness to give it it\u2019s full name has been the Achilles heel of VR for many years and presents significant challenges for virtual content creators. VR Developers like ourselves have spent years understanding the condition and employing a range of techniques to counter it and in this blog we explore some of those techniques.<\/p>\n

So what causes motion sickness, why does our body feel the need to vomit?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It all harks back to our hunter-gatherer ancestry, \u2018yeah I\u2019ve heard that excuse before\u2019 I hear you say. Back to a time when a large part of your diet was foraged berries, a small part of the brain called the\u00a0area postrema<\/em>\u00a0was your best friend when defending against poisoning. Back then, if there was a mismatch between the visual data your body received and the data received from the vestibular system (the sensory system that provides information relating to balance, orientation and movement), the body assumed you were hallucinating and therefore had ingested a poisonous substance. Your body\u2019s defence system kicked in and\u00a0ejected<\/em>\u00a0that poison as quick as possible!<\/p>\n

Sim sickness is a subset of motion sickness and again the symptom is a feeling of dizziness caused by a disconnect between your visual stimuli and the movement your body feels\u2026the body relying on evolutionary-perfected biological processes again believes you to be poisoned and takes steps to eject it!<\/p>\n

In other words, sim sickness is the result of our body\u2019s slow pace of evolution versus our brains extraordinary capacity to understand and augment the world around us.<\/p>\n

Enough of the biology lesson, what can we do about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well sadly, we can\u2019t completely eradicate sim sickness, there will always be a small percentage of the population that is predisposed to the condition. On our travels around various VR exhibitions, we\u2019ve personally witnessed around 5,000 people try our experiences and we are tracking around 1% of people that cannot continue the experience beyond the first 30 seconds. We always ask the question \u201cAre you a person who suffers from severe travel sickness when taking a car journey\u201d and in almost all cases the answer is yes.<\/p>\n

This shouldn\u2019t put you off creating a VR experience but it should prompt you to find a development partner who is well versed in minimising the effects.<\/p>\n

The VR industry is understandably seeing huge growth, as with all growth industries there are the innovators and early adopters and a few years later, the early majority. Sadly, there are no shortcuts when developing in VR. Successful VR studios today are those that have been experimenting, making themselves sick, iterating and learning over a number of years. There\u2019s no substitute for experience.<\/p>\n

The challenges around sim sickness can be boiled down to roughly three areas \u2013 hardware, software and the users.<\/p>\n

Hardware<\/strong><\/p>\n

With significant investment from industry heavyweights such as Sony, Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC and FaceBook, it\u2019s perhaps not surprising to see the rapid evolution of hardware over the past few years. Improvements to optics, tracking sensors, resolution, response time and field of view, all contribute to lessening the negative effects of sim sickness. Clearly technology will continue apace over the coming years and possibly the most impactful development will be the increased ability to conduct complete body tracking, enabling all real life movement to be mapped in the virtual world.<\/p>\n

The User<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the one aspect that as developers we cannot control. As previously mentioned, some people are naturally more susceptible to motion sickness. In addition, if the user is feeling under the weather, has had a lack of sleep or has alcohol in their system (including the after effects of a heavy night!) \u2013 this can all increase the likelihood of sim sickness.<\/p>\n

Software<\/strong><\/p>\n

Great strides have been made by the early pioneers in VR development \u2013 some valuable lessons have been learnt and a solutions found that decrease the effects of sim sickness:<\/p>\n