Developer cites motion sickness in delaying Oculus Rift support


Since the unveiling of the Oculus Rift two years ago, there have been plenty of people willing to embrace the second coming of virtual reality with open arms and open minds. For at least one development team, though, those open minds have been infected with motion sickness as they try to code virtual reality support into their game.


'We are all extremely excited about VR because we believe it brings unparalleled immersion and that is something we would love to be a part of,' developer Aaron Foster writes on a Steam Community update for outer space horror game Routine. 'However, at the moment, we have had to slow down our VR integration as we all get extremely motion sick with the current kits. We will take another look at implementing VR closer to release but for now we can't fully commit to a VR version of Routine.'


It's not clear whether Foster and his team are using the original Oculus development kits, which were shipped widely last year, or the newer 'DK2' units that have only just begun to be sent to a handful of early pre-orderers in recent weeks. Our early experiences with Rift prototypes left us with a significant queasy feeling during and just after use, but advancements in head-tracking, image persistence, and resolution have mitigated those problems immensely in more recent versions of the headset.


Oculus is well aware of nausea complaints from many users of the Rift; CEO Brendan Iribe admitted that he himself got sick every time he used the first dev kit. The company offers tips for developers looking to limit the sickening effects of VR in their games, but it has said in interviews that further advancements in hardware (such as eye-tracking) are going to be key to fixing the problem. Even then, there may be some portion of the audience that will always have some form of 'simulator sickness,' and there is some evidence that women are more prone to the effects than men.


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