The era of virtual reality may have begun, but an employee at Facebook-owned Oculus admitted on Sunday that there’s still a lot of unknowns in the VR development space, especially with regards to problems around comfort and motion sickness.
Chris Jurney, head of developer relations at Oculus, was joined by Frank Azor, general manager of Dell-owned Alienware, and Joe Kreiner, head of game engine licensing for Epic Games, at a PAX East panel in Boston that discussed the bigger opportunities and challenges with VR.
“The most surprising thing to me is there’s still more stuff we don’t know,” Jurney said, and he pointed that as a major opportunity, especially for independent developers in the VR space.
With the first high-end VR headsets hitting the market this year, the issue of motion sickness is perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption. Simply enough, if too many experiences on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR make people feel sick, it could hamper chances of VR moving beyond early adopters and into the mainstream. While VR headsets are primarily used for games right now, many businesses are watching the space to see how they can use the technology.
Jurney said one of the major opportunities in VR is finding technical solutions to create motion-intensive experiences that don’t make people feel sick. As an example, he pointed to a game being developed by Ubisoft called “Eagle Flight,” where you fly through a post-apocalyptic Paris from the first-person perspective of an eagle.
Such fast movement through a city environment has a lot of potential to make people sick, especially if you glide too close to buildings and your body realizes you’re not actually there. But Jurney said Ubisoft created a blinder that would block your vision of a nearby building that would appear on your periphery to prevent so-called “simulation sickness” from happening.
Jurney said there are 20 different triggers for motion sickness that people have, and everyone has varying levels of susceptibility for each one. For that reason, he recommends developers test their VR games or experiences with at least 30-40 people as a decent sample size. However, he admitted that not all VR experiences will be for everyone. That’s why Oculus has developed its own comfort rating system, ranging from “comfortable” to “moderate” to “intense.”
Azor, whose company makes high-performance PCs to power VR experiences like the Oculus Rift, said the issue of low framerates in games used to be just an annoyance because of how choppy the experience was. But now with VR, a high, consistent framerate that provides a smooth experience is absolutely necessary to keep users comfortable. When a VR experience isn’t running smoothly, it can create what is called “simulation sickness.”
“On VR, if you drop a frame, you start vomiting all over the floor,” Azor said. That means hardware and software developers need to start thinking about ways to ensure that the frames per second of any experience doesn’t ever drop below a high standard. Sony recently said the PlayStation VR won’t accept any games that ever drop below 60 frames per second.
Kreiner said Epic’s VR game “Bullet Train” mitigates issues of motion sickness from a first-person perspective by limiting movement and only letting you move around through a portal gun that zaps you from location to location. He said he has played some games that allow for free movement and they can sometimes lead to sickening experiences.
“When you have to manually move the camera, that's a one-way ticket to vomit town,” Kreiner said.
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