Virtual reality makes me sick. It starts with a feeling of dehydration soon after the goggles go on, followed by sweating—and by that point it's too late to avoid the real unpleasantness.
This isn't supposed to happen anymore. Backers believe the motion-sickness problem has been solved, finally clearing the way for widespread adoption of VR technology. An engineer who worked on Sony's Morpheus patiently explained to me how the virtual-reality device prevented nausea while I struggled through my post-demo headache. I had a similar experience with an early version of Oculus, which left me so incapacitated that I needed several hours in bed to get back to normal.
Oculus VR Chief Executive Brendan Iribe runs the $2 billion Facebook-owned darling of the industry, and he has been one of the loudest voices declaring victory on my body's revolt against virtual reality. He's also prone to a bit of virtual-reality queasiness himself: "I'm right on the edge," he told me, "and I'm one of the most sensitive people in the company." After the newest Oculus headset, called Cresent Bay, reaches the consumer market in the near future, Iribe expects some people to be too sensitive. "I'm OK in Crescent Bay," he says, "but I know there are some things to be fixed."
I'm closer to okay in the new headset, too. Iribe gave me a demo earlier this week on the new headset, and after 10 minutes I felt only the slightest bit dehydrated with no need to heave. So count that as real progress for virtual reality.
The unconvincing quality of the virtual experience is what makes people like me take ill. If the eyes register one thing while the inner ear encounters something else, the result for some people is nausea. Much of the sickness comes from the lag that occurs with motion observed inside the VR headset: You move your head, and the virtual world takes a fraction of a second to catch up. Oculus has been adding sensors to its new headset to eliminate that lag and improving the software that converts the sensor input.
There are fewer than two dozen Crescent Bay prototypes right now, all hand-built by Oculus itself. Iribe hopes to distribute the devices to developers in 2015, and will only say that a consumer launch is expected within "many months, not many years." It will likely take years of consumer-level products, he says, before the motion sickness issue is completely solved.
And sickness isn't the only obstacle before Oculus starts selling headsets to consumers. The company is still developing an input device, and over the summer acquired Carbon Design, the team that built the controller for the Xbox 360. Virtual-reality developers have been designing software for use with game controllers and keyboards. Now Oculus plans to create a controller that can be used to track hand movements, so a player lifting her hand in real life will see the same motion in the virtual world. When someone lifts a hand to her face in real life, she needs to see it in the virtual world, too. Iribe says the company is also far from prepared for the kind of large-scale manufacturing required for a consumer launch.
The biggest question, though, is content—and it might also be the biggest source of motion sickness. Iribe acknowledges that earlier Oculus prototypes made it practically impossible for developers to make virtual-reality content that wouldn't come with a headache. The company now needs developers to make content that is compelling enough to draw people to virtual reality. In part that means avoiding doing things that will make them sick.
Oculus's own demo of the Crescent Bay runs through a series of experiences meant to show off the convincing nature of its virtual reality. In one scenario, you're standing on top of a tall building, feeling vertiginous. In another one, you're in a long hallway watching a Tyrannosaurus charge towards you, trying not to flinch. It's very convincing—until you remember that you never get the chance to turn around inside the virtual world. The closest you get is floating slowly through scenes as things slowly move around you. Iribe wants developers to stick to this script. "We really are preaching and pushing for stationary experiences and very, very little to no locomotion," he says.
Keeping people still is the easiest way to prevent them from getting nauseous. But it could also be limiting, given that Oculus is largely seen as a gaming device, at least at first. If a Tyrannosaurus is charging you, wouldn't you want to run and hide? "You're just going to have different experiences made for VR, made for comfortable VR," says Iribe. "It's a different platform you're targeting. Just like you don't have big, rich Call of Duty experiences on your mobile phone—it gets Clash of Clans."
