I feel like such an idiot. I read it like noise, as in added digital noise.
The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise.
"particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there."
I too read it as noise. This happens to me very often these days , don't know if it's part of some cognitive decline :P
EDIT:
Another such HN headline misreading was when I read "The contribution of Cheese to western civilization" as "The contribution of Chinese to western civilization" .
Nope, I did "virtual noise, huh? Interesting. Wait, wasn't there an article the other day that added a nose to get rid of motion sickness as well? Hmm, does it actually say noise? Nope :/"
I'm not sure that is different. The perception part is still filling in what fits based on context. It takes your consciousness to tell the perception 'read again while suppressing spellcheck'.
Have you ever read the paragraph where every word is misspelled but people tend to be able to read with very little reduction in speed?
The mind takes many shortcuts when it reads. It's easy to read "digital nose" as "digital noise" since that's the more common phrase. This is little like how you can read words with their mddile lettres mispacled.
I had the exact same experience, only with one added bonus thought: "OK, so I don't see any noise. Middle of the image... Maybe they consider this weird shape to be noise for some reason? Hmmm, what is it anyway?" :)
I read the title to the the post here on HN. Then I read your comment, every bit of it, *except to the last line, when it finally hit me I was probably misreading the text and it said nose, not noise. This is all on top of me having had the same problem a week or two when this was reported here then. It's crazy how much of reading is whole word pattern recognition using context, and how weird it can get when it fails.
When I was scanning the headlines quickly on the front page I thought it was "noise" at first too - then I noticed the definite particle "a", felt that phrase seemed unusual ("a virtual noise"?) and saw "nose" when I focused.
I wonder if it's partly due to the proportional font... nose and noise look pretty distinct in a monospaced font because of the length difference.
Most of us are seeing the phrase "digital nose" for the first time.
Easy mix-up, everyone read it as "digital noise" and thought to themselves, "grainy screen? noise as in randomness of the input timing? that doesn't sound helpful."
Hopefully I'm not too late to weigh in on this one but I've experienced this personally for years.
I am a person that experiences motion sickness from most 3D environments if on a sufficiently large screen. The effect became noticeable once frame rates passed a certain level in the early 2000's and after that I was unable to play most FPS games.
Despite this I loved the Need for Speed franchise. Hot Pursuit on the PS3 ate up a lot of my free time. :) I could only use the game in one visual mode though... "Hood view", where the hood of the car remains visible at the bottom of the screen. That provided my brain with a fixed reference point and as a result I could spend hours in there.
When a following release of NFS for PS came out (I think it was Most Wanted 2012) they removed the hood view option. Five minutes into the game and I get a strong motion sickness headache. After searching a few other titles I found similar issues with all of them and gave up gaming.
I wrote EA and Criterion Games a couple times about this but never heard back. Unfortunately it was a deal breaker for me trying anything further in the franchise. I hope that game developers (especially with immersive VR now) take the time to find and test with someone like myself as tricks like this help a lot.
I stopped playing games about 10 years ago, but thought I would come out of the break to play Portal... I did, and was very saddened to find that I just couldn't play it because it gave me really bad motion sickness and headaches. The nauseating feelings kick in after just 60 seconds of gameplay (and no, not just when going in and out of portals -- even when I'm simply walking around without making portals the headaches come in).
I hope more research is done on this, and some solutions are found, because I really want to finish playing Portal. :)
I've been playing FPS shooters for most of my life. But I've had to stop.
For some reason HL2 would give me headaches. Really, really bad headaches. I thought it might be the Engine, or me being tired. But I don't get headaches playing TF2 or Dystopia, both of which use the same engine. Surprisingly, Portal and Portal 2 didn't give me as bad headaches.
Later games are hit-and-miss. Bioshock I didn't suffer. Bioshock Infinite gave me headaches within 15 minutes.
And watching any Let's Play of a shooter gives me headaches within a minute.
I've chalked the majority of it up to getting older. My gaming binges used to also give me headaches, but only after several hours. So I've had to switch to strategy games instead. But still, something about certain ways things are rendered or the FoV or framerate is affecting me and I wish I knew what it is.
Portal, like many new-ish 3D games, have a very narrow FOV (in the 60-75 degree range) compared to classic 3D games (90-100). If you have a widescreen monitor (which amazingly wasn't standard when HL2 and Portal were released) try cl_fov 110 in the console.
It could be a FOV (field of view) problem, try upping it to 80-90 degrees. Many games designed for console assume you are 10 ft from a tv, not 2ft from a monitor, so the default to as low as 60 degrees. I know if I don't up it to at least 75 I can't play for long without feeling disoriented, and I know some get headaches.
"The effect became noticeable once frame rates passed a certain level in the early 2000's and after that I was unable to play most FPS games."
This is a little surprising to hear given that it it's usually low frame rates that are associated with motion sickness in VR. Indeed achieving sufficiently high frame rates to minimize motion sickness is currently one of the primary technical challenges of developing VR experiences.
How did you conclude that it was rising frame rates that led you to develop this reaction?
This is a known effect and most games have the ability to put a dot in the middle of the screen for reference. It doesn't work for everyone and for every type of motion sickness. Mine doesn't seem to work with any of these tricks and is at best mitigated slightly via software if its an option and usually its not for most items (disable vsync, increase FOV, turn on reference dot, turn off walking motion bop, turn off blurry transitions, etc). I think we're about the discover that motion sickness is a Hard Problem and lots of proposed solutions will only attack part of the problem domain. We're just not built for visual perception of motion without inner ear activity.
VR will most likely be hampered in a way to not allow motions that cause sickness, until this is all solved (if it ever is). This is going to hurt gaming, but it'll be good for other applications. I think motion sickness is really going to give AR companies a leg up. Projecting game elements into real space could be our only real solution here. I mean, we're about 20 years into the 3D gaming revolution and we still haven't solved this for 2D monitors, let alone headsets that make it a lot worse. Frankly, I'm not sure if the 3D headset revolution is actually going to happen. 2D screens are so convenient and you can remain social and aware of your world while using them. Even with motion sickness fixed, there are still so many liabilities.
Saying VR will be the standard tomorrow for viewing media, games, etc is a bit like saying 20 years ago every theater will be a giant IMAX. Sometimes the added experience isn't worth the hassle and I say that as someone with over 100 games on Steam.
Actually I experimented with something like this. I tried blocking parts of the view but it didn't work. Honestly not sure why though. The hood did move a little with inertial responses and perhaps my brain perceived that as an intermediary.
I'm on the same boat as you. I feel your pain. The only exception is that in my case only FPS make me motion sickness. Race sims, 3rd person, and such, I can handle them very well...but FPS I can only play for like 15m.
I really want to try VR, but if this motion sickness is not fixed it's gonna be a deal(heart) breaker for me :(
They should put a blur on the nose. Having it in focus just seems wrong and perhaps distracting from their goal of giving the brain what it expects. Heck, I just tried right now and I'm now old enough that I can't even get my nose into focus at all anymore (pretty sure I could when I was a child, lenses are getting harder to flex I guess).
> Whittinghill says this is likely a result of “change blindness,” a perceptual phenomenon that allows our perceptual system to ignore objects that we see over and over again.
Uhhh, that's not what change blindness is at all. It sounds more like vanilla sensory adaptation. Our visual system has adapted to the presence of our nose in our visual field (since it's always there), which is why we don't notice our noses in day to day life and don't notice a virtual nose placed at the same location.
A Chinese friend once told me she can't see her own nose. And the thought of us whites constantly having our nose in our field of view was funny to her.
Your real nose always covers some part of your visual field, still it doesn't bother you, because your brain removes certain stimuli that persist over a long period of time.
Don't be tricked by that "area".
I admit I haven't tried it but, from my experience with the Oculus, you will barely able to see that nose (unless you actually try to look at it, like you would in real life). That area is mainly in the peripheral vision.
I agree with you. The impact of these findings is greatly overstated by the headline, and you make an excellent suggestion regarding a competing explanation about why it might help.
Next study: repeat the study using a "nose" in the outside, or of varying sizes, and see if it helps.
This research is interesting, but it's not front-page interesting.
For a second, I thought this was going to be about adding smells to the experience... which would probably be a very bad idea, as nauseating experiences condition strong smell aversions.
I wonder if a nose pincher would decrease motion sickness with VR.
I play games where using a VR headset is a competitive advantage. Racing sims and flight simulation, combat and aviation. I get quite bad motion sickness from VR (DK1, DK2, both are bad), so I know that within a few years I have no chance of making it in any online multiplayer games.
Funnily enough, the first sensations of motion sickness in a flight simulator have a resemblance to what I feel when I go flying in a small aircraft. However, in real life, I get used to it, VR just keeps on getting worse and worse.
What makes it worse is that once you stop playing, the VR-induced motion sickness doesn't stop. It goes on for hours, bad balance and mild nausea. It gets worse if the lenses in the Rift are a bit off (they must be adjusted for every person), that leaves me incapable of reading or writing for the rest of the day.
So yes - it's really that big of a problem. If a 30 minute gaming session leaves a significant portion of the customers incapacitated for hours afterwards, there's no way you can call it a product and put it on the shelves.
BTW, I have high hopes for a competing product in development, the CastAR head mounted projector. It doesn't block your view of the real world so it might not cause as bad motion sickness. That also makes it viable for more serious flight simulation where the Oculus is useless because you can't see the flight controls (ie. your hands on the gaming controllers).
Yes, I have. They work pretty darn well. I even used the FaceTrackNoIR application which uses a bog standard webcam with face tracking, which worked fine when I didn't have a beard, but beard or glasses screws it up. You need a high frame rate camera to make it work, the Sony PlayStation Eye (60 fps, you can disable vsync, can be found cheap second hand) is a popular choice.
On my TODO list is building a DIY head tracker to be used with FreeTrack or other open source tracking solutions (forgot the names). I have an extra PS Eye waiting for that but I'd need to obtain some CCTV lenses (without IR filters) for that.
I don't think you have any chance of survival without a TrackIR or an Oculus in online combat flight simulators against guys who have one. Situational awareness is everything in dogfighting.
Okay, just wanted to be sure because you're absolutely right that they're practically a requirement.
Definitely build yourself an IR tracker. Should cost you less than $10 in components and it works far better than face tracking. FWIW, the FaceTrackNoIR+point tracking plugin > FreeTrack (the latter hasn't been updated in years and the former plugin is based on FreeTrack's codebase).
To not experience any VR sickness with the state of today's technology, you must either be using exclusively the tame applications of the technology -- such as garden walk, home tour, etc, and not trying out any FPS games like TF2 or something -- or you have something biologically off about your linkage between your natural balance sensors and how your brain tries to correlate them with what your eyes see.
Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)
Because motion sickness is a well understood phenomena; the cause of which the previous commenter was discussing.
The usage of the term "off" was probably a poor choice of words, but I didn't detect any negativity in his tone despite "off". eg:
"Either way, that's good for you, embrace the future more easily than the rest of us :)"
(the last part of this post is also targeted towards jsprogrammer who suggested there was an air of superiority with the former post. Sometimes, it's entirely possibly you can read too much into another persons comment)
>Because motion sickness is a well understood phenomena
Sure, one that ballpark-range around half of people get. Neither side is more standard. Is this different, does it affect 98% of people or something? I'm not suggesting negativity, I'm suggesting that perhaps Kiro is not at all an anomaly.
If one doesn't conform to the perceived norm, some believe the nonconformers must be lacking in some respect and take it as a sign of inferiority to their percieved dominate and self-described "natural" culture.
Only a small number of people have gotten to try out HTC Vive so far, but I am yet to see someone complain about VR sickness when using it. Gabe Newell also said that "zero percent of people get motion sick" while using that system.
I got a DK2 when it first came out. When I tried a rollercoaster, I felt a little off but ok. Over the next few weeks I noticed slight nausea with the Zelda demo, Tuscany, and the Tiki boat. But that was nothing until I tried Quake 2. After fifteen minutes of playing, I couldn't stand up, and was extremely ill for several hours. Since then anything where I am not seated triggers the same feeling again.
I think the brain/balance issue is very common if not the norm; much more than is accepted in the community. It will be a disaster if it's not solved before a commercial release.
I once convinced my girlfriend to wear the DK1, in one of the demos that came with it (Tuscan villa), without her moving, just looking around a static location.
In less than 10 seconds she ripped it off in a sick panic, and spent the rest of the afternoon looking green on the couch.
Apparently that indicates you are more than likely male. VR sickness affects women at a higher rate than men. It's interesting what we learn about how perception works from trying to trick it. http://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexis...
Have you tried 3D glasses in big movie theaters like IMAX? Or watch a movie like Avatar or Jurassic Park (re-released 3D edition of the 1993 movie) on a good 3D TV. You should see the 3D effect there.
But some people only see 2D, e.g. with only one eye or eye-problems.
3D IMAX does the trick, i can really see the 3D effect and i find it very impressive. 3D movies like Avatar do not work so well though, it gives me the impression of having several 2D layers instead of actual 3D effect (it lacks depth, again). But Oculus is even worse than that, I don't see any 3D effect at all.
I have never experience it myself either, but I saw a lot of students that experienced it in the VR lab. Especially people who had not 100% eye-sight on both eyes had a lot of troubles.
So it is a serious problem, and VR won't fly in consumer space until this is fixed. Important is also the head-tracking, and a low input latency as well as a high display refresh rate. So VR might be a fade like 3D TV, and augmented reality displays like the former Google Glass could be the winner. But who knows.
As John Carmack said in a talk, they found that there is a variety of sensitivities out there. Some people deal with it just fine, some are sensitive and some are super-sensitive.
I have a DK2 lying around unused. Besides some trouble getting it to work at all, I haven't been using it much because after the previous session I felt sick for an hour.
But probably it's only because it's working as intended. Last session I tried a bunch of roller coaster sims, so maybe feeling sick just means it is working properly :)
Sickness comes from two places: how the "game" is made, and how much are you resilient against sickness.
For instance, when I tried DK1 for the first time, I was able to test many demos for like 45 minutes, and I didn't felt a lot of sickness. Meanwhile, a friend of mine held only 5 minutes.
This friend of mine (who owns a studio and he wanted to develop for virtual reality), started to train himself and his colleagues, using the Oculus every day till they felt sick. After 1 month, they were able to play Unreal Tournament with the DK1 for 15-20 minutes, and use normal demos for an hour or two.
I highly advise you to try this out too: you can just improve!
I've only ever used an Oculus DK2. If it isn't perfectly calibrated for my eyes before I use it it's basically unusable. I'll most likely vomit within 30s to a minute.
Once it's calibrated I can't play for more than 15-20 minutes without getting a slight headache.
I'm pretty resistant, I got slight nausea after playing Unreal Tournament on the DK1 for 20 minutes or so but I've yet to experience it with the DK2 even with low frame rates.
It reduced motion sickness by about 13% - and appears to cover about that amount of the screen. Are we sure the effects aren't simply because you are effectively covering up part of the screen? What happens if you cover up 50%? 100%?
Imagine the possibilities! You can now pick your own virtual nose! With virtual avatars in social apps, you can pick your friends' noses, too! Or their hair, or their ears, or their pets. You can make your friends look exactly like you want.
My students regularly show me how easy it is to calculate extremely precise results. Now, whether they should trust that precision is a rather different question, and one that even the good ones struggle with for a while. (In other news, I wish that more people paid attention to uncertainty propagation. Or heck, even just some oversimplified heuristics for significant figures.)
As indicated by other quantifications in the post, I assume it is based on the average amount of time people were able to use the device before they had to stop due to sickness.
That just comes as a % related on how much (average) time people played the same game with and without the nose. 13.5 percent refers to those ~90 seconds added playtime. This means, on average the Tuscany demo has been played for 697 sec (~11 and half mins) without nose, and 792 sec (~13 mins) with.
It would be interesting to know the dynamics of the experiment (the testers were aiming to hold on as long as possible? Or they were simply told "play as much as you want"?), since the Tuscany demo is quite short, and most of people wouldn't play it for more than 10 minutes, besides sickness
Interesting, this article not only made me more aware of my own nose in my field of view, it increased my awareness of the fact that my left eye is my dominant eye (a bit unusual given that I am right-handed). It takes effort for me to notice my nose from the right and after reading this I have a distinct sense of my nose being off-center to the right side of my face. Weird! I wonder if this trick would work by placing the virtual nose only in view of the dominant eye (I suppose that's more complicated to implement, though).
I reckon the noses in the examole images are on the wrong side. The images are cross-eyed, e.g. the left image is for the right eye. The nose on the left image should therefore be on the left, and vice-versa for the other eye.
You can test that by crossing your eyes so the images match and try focusing (the first try takes a while). If you see a stereoscopic image, the source is cross-eyed. If it were not, The depths in the image would look "weird", because they're inside-out.
With a VR headset, the left image is shown to your left eye, and the right to your right. Intuitively, it should be clear that they aren't cross-eyed, since your nose is in the middle of your face.
And as someone else said - you're crossing your eyes, when you should perhaps be doing the opposite - looking far into the distance until the images overlap.
Close your right eye, your nose will appear on the right of your left eye. Close your left eye, your nose will appear on the left of your right eye. They have this correct. When you put the goggles on it will seem the same as you currently see, the nose fades because it is on the far side of your vision field of view and on opposite sides.
I always wondered after seeing this a bit ago if the addition of a torso might also help. Part of the disorientation might be that it seems like your body is not there. A nose with a torso and eventually LeapMotion like hand controls/arms, may help reduce VR sickness.
It might appear like that, but it is about distance!
Moving the two images over each other will make your brain think the nose that is farest away from the common center is closest.
BUT: the nose should ideally be mirrored, so that the shapes match, at least if you want to combine the images directly using cross-eyeing. They are correct if you show each picture to one eye though (what VR glasses are doing), every eye sees what it would see. However, little differences are filtered out anyway from your brain, merely a disturbance.
I just tested it and it seems I can manage fusion and see the effect both if I switch them and if I don't. Now I'm confused. is there something special about these images in particular or has my perception been all wrong?
When I tested it out, I got the proper sense of depth perception when I looked at it correctly (i.e., looking through the plane of the monitor, with left image for left eye) and got no sense of depth perception when looking cross-eyed (i.e., left image for right eye). It's temping to think you're seeing depth as soon as the two images "snap together" when you're cross-eyed, but when I actually consciously checked I noticed that the images in fact looked flat (except for the nose).
As far as why it looked flat rather than inside out, I can only guess that that depth info conflicted with the other depth information you get from vision (parallax, known relative object sizes, perspective lines) and my brain ignored it.
EDIT: Actually, after trying the second view (the one with hands, not the roller coaster) cross-eyed, I saw the inside-out depth. It's most noticeable looking out the window.
Argh, the stereogram animations on this page are of the "stare into infinity" type rather than "cross your eyes type". The first one is impossible for me due to insufficient interpupillary distance, combined with my inability to diverge my eyes. :)
This is something you experience a lot with GoPro sort of footage as well. A trick in that world is to show part of the helmet or bike (or whatever the camera is attached to) to give you a steadying point because, otherwise, the camera appears too shaky and crazy.
What if they played it longer because they were interested in looking at the nose, to see how light affects it as you turn around? I for one would definitely do that.
Funny what all gets filtered out. When I'm wearing my extremely old plastic glasses (real ones, not VR), I do not perceive the myriad of scratches on it either, though it certainly contributes to less resolution of what I see, but I'm not aware. Most people are shocked when they get new glasses/lenses/eyes about the increase in detail they weren't aware of.
There's a less computational explanation for that. Your glasses sit very close to your face, meaning that any scratches are dramatically out of focus; the degradation gets spread over your entire visual field.
Which is not to say that you wouldn't have gotten used to and started ignoring a scratch you could see, because you're right; you would have. But that's not what's actually going on.
How do you know that's not what's actually going on? You may be different, but when I wear glasses, they're sufficiently far from my eyes that imperfections are quite visible as localized phenomena. They're not in focus, but they're nowhere close to spread out over the entire visual field. Specks of dust show up as blobs of dust. Scratches show up as fuzzy lines.
I'm going to guess that the person you're replying to is sufficiently familiar with his glasses to know what he actually sees.
"[...] But it is a promising start, particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there" - it's right there in the article.
The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise.
"particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there."
Yeah, that's me not finding the nose.