I'm pretty resistant to motion sickness (car, train, sea) and I can play more than one hour with the Rift without any problem. But a friend of mine just tested it and couldn't bear it for more than 5 minutes (while he isn't especially prone to motion sickness neither).
What is causing it? A few weeks ago, I read that the OculusVR team was working hard on this issue in order to reduce motion sickness, but how is that possible?
Are there types of games or demos that are particularly harder to endure? Are there any settings we can tweak, or other tips to avoid feeling motion sick?
Best Answer
As Wiki says, motion sickness is
So the main reason is sensory conflict, when your central nervous system receives different information from different sensors (eyes, inner ears, etc). There`s an episode of SciShow that explains it a bit.
Regarding Oculus itself, that can happen because of lag between your movements and the movements of the picture that you see or because you see that you`re moving while your body tells you that you`re perfectly still.
There are reports and discussions of this even on Oculus forums. You can find some unexpected tips there as well, like alcohol helping reduce the sickness effect and such =)
So, what to do?
First, as you said yourself, you can wait for new version of device itself, which is said to be an improvement from motion sickness point of view. It is possible thanks to reduced delay, so the lag is not so noticeable, which helps greatly, it seems.
Second, you can try to fight it with standard motion sickness tips. But if we discard motion sickness medication and drinking like the guys on OR forum, rest of tips are seemingly no so good for virtual reality things because your main sickness reason are your eyes and you can`t just close them or concentrate on some thing in the distance.