Speaking of flying over Paris as an eagle, you may ask yourself if I ever felt motion sickness.
Motion sickness is really a problem with VR games. It sets in, because what you see does not match what you feel. In the game you move at high speed, you avoid obstacles, but you don’t feel the forces that your body has learned to expect in real life.
It’s a big, big problem and developers address it in very different ways. Some games don’t let you walk, they let you teleport instead. It sounds unintuitive, it most likely is, but it surely helps against motion sickness. Others try to give you a reference frame. As an eagle, for instance, I always see part of my beak and some feathers. They never move. In car games you have the car itself as reference frame, in other games you are on a roller coaster or something like that. The important thing seems to be the never moving frame.
This is something that greatly interests me. You have a problem and a lot of people try very different things to solve it.
The other thing that made me buy the Playstation VR is, that this is a new paradigm. It’s a little bit like the advent of smartphones.
In the beginning we had many comanies trying all sorts of things, and then Apple finally found the glorious solution. I had ignored smartphones for more than two years, but then I deemed it necessary to learn the new tricks. I had to do it in order to stay relevant in my own profession. Today it’s all smartphones and tablets, and at work we have finished two apps this year. In the long run I expect VR (and especially augmented reality like Microsoft’s HoloLens) to become a big thing.
But, what about motion sickness now? Does it work?
Yes. I can’t fly much longer than half an hour, but the reason is not motion sickness, it is shear exhaustion. So, yes, it works. At least while I fly.
Oh boy, when I remove the VR gear and am back in the real world, the world refuses to behave as it should. I can look where I want and I don’t move. I can tilt my head and nothing reacts as it had for the last 30 minutes.
Have you ever been drunk? Real drunk? The kind of can’t-walk-a-straight-line drunk? Yes, that’s what it feels like, and it does not go away for hours.
There you have it: fly for 30 minutes, pay for a few hours. And still, it’s worth it 🙂