VR or Motion Sickness: how it works!

Since the time we founded our company, we were always putting a lot of emphasis on avoiding VR or motion sickness to make sure that our software was not causing it. In our opinion, that’s the obvious choice for any developer, because what we really don’t need in the VR industry is people telling other people they got sick. Regrettably, we’re the minority, even among AAA game developers that have the financial power to prevent motion sickness by including the most obvious option to decrease it: beaming from one place to another, as Batman Arkham VR and others already did when we had the idea to found this company back in late 2016.

What is Motion Sickness?

Motion Sickness is an effect that is most often experience outside of VR if you’re either on a ship or if you’re reading while being a passenger in a car or bus. The reasons is simple: back when we were cavemen and cavewomen (?), there was only one reason why the movement you felt with your inner ear would deviate from the movement your eyes perceive. That reason was that you ate the wrong mushroom, berry or something spoiled. Since then, our brain is wired to make you feel sick and/or empty your stomach to reduce the danger from whatever you digested.

„VR legs“ to avoid VR or motion sickness are a myth!

Most often when I raise the issue of making sure that anybody can play any game, what I hear back from hardcore gamers is that „you’ve just got to get your VR legs!“. What does that mean. It means that you can get used to the VR motion sickness the same way you can get rid of motion sickness when you go to sea. Writing this article, I just made that connection and can see that that’s actually a reasonable assumption if you haven’t looked into how it actually works.
I remember well a conversation I had with a train conductor who told me that some people can’t get used to the movement of the train and either leave the job again or take medication on a daily basis to counter the resulting sickness.
And that’s the problem: there might be people who do get „VR legs“ if – and only if – the technology is important enough for them to train themselves to not get sick in VR. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that of the general public. And that, in my opinion, is one reason why VR did not (yet?) become the success we thought it would become back in 2016.

Why not just beam?

The easy solution out of this is to implement beaming into the games. It’s not complex on a technological level (we actually do know!) and it doesn’t necessarily break immersion or gameplay. When I first heard about it, I, too, thought that it would break immersion (how real the VR experience feels to you), but strangely, it doesn’t. Why? Because it’s not reality. It’s often a game or a simulation. And it will be still quite a while until headsets without a powerful PC (which brings up costs too much) create VR experiences that feel real – you hardly get that these days with the best hardware available on a 2D screen.
So if whatever you’re experiencing is not reality, it’s something else. And something else can have different rules than reality. And once I used Arkham VR, it only took moments until I didn’t consciously think about beaming, quite similarly to how I don’t think about what button to press on a controller for anything else. That, a controller, also breaks immersion, by the way.
What I refer to as „Beaming“ is that you have some kind of mark on the ground you can move with a controller, and with the click of a button, the screen goes dark (similar to closing your eyes), and when the light turns back on, you’re at another place in the environment. With some implementations, you can even include rotations. Since the screen is turned of during the movement, you don’t get sick. Ever. Nobody. For Real. That’s why any AAA title should include this option, at least in areas where it doesn’t hurt the gameplay. And boy, do you walk around a lot in VR games and environments. But neither of the most recent AAA Quest titles does support beaming: Asgard’s Wrath 2 doesn’t offer it, and Batman: Arkham Shadow doesn’t either.

Working around absent Beaming and the motion sickness involved

Regrettably, it’s still common for AAA games to ignore accessibility at least partially by not including beaming. While it is bothersome, there is a simple solution, even though it makes you feel stupid and breaks immersion. Just close your eyes while your character is moving in VR. I came up with this by accident when I was really unhappy with the PSVR 1 title for not including beaming as a locomotion option. It’s not great with closing your eyes – no game is – but it’s better than not being able to play it at all for a longer stretch of time than your motion sickness allows.