Valve: “The idea that VR makes you sick is bullshit”

But my, and countless others, experiences with VR have proven that it most certainly can cause motion sickness, to which Falisek explains: “It’s no longer the hardware’s fault any more”.

“The idea that VR must get you sick is [bullshit]”, he said. “They shouldn’t be making you sick”. “They shouldn’t be making you sick”. While I agree that developers can make the difference between good and bad experiences, I don’t think anyone can claim that their hardware is 100% free of motion sickness. He says this is why Valve‘s VR uses the Lighthouse system with trackable controllers. I even managed to get a few face on with VR at E3 without feeling ill, which was already a success in my book. During a keynote at Oculus Connect 2 last week, Abrash explained that VR sickness is primarily caused by the disconnect between what the eyes see and what the vestibular sense feels, and aside from avoiding visual motion that exacerbate this problem, there is now no solution in sight. “We have a bunch of people who will come in for demos who don’t want to do demos”. All the major headsets can support refresh rates of at least 90fps with low-persistence pixels that don’t smear as you move your head. The disconnect from what you’re seeing and experiencing visually versus what’s happening to your body is a well-documented issue, although companies have included technology and features to help prevent that.

Virtual Reality is coming into our hearts and homes soon. Instead, it is the developers who choose to make implementations that would cause dizziness, headaches, and/or nausea. In-game design choices and how characters are controlled contribute to the nausea.