
To Reduce VR Sickness, Add a Virtual Nose - dawkins
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/reduce-vr-sickness-just-add-virtual-nose/
======
runj__
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."

Yeah, that's me not finding the nose.

~~~
thewarrior
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" .

~~~
Lawtonfogle
Probably part of the brain going 'wait, that doesn't make much sense, let's
look for a word that would fit better in context and looks similar.'

I wonder if it is related to optical illusions.

~~~
StavrosK
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 :/"

~~~
Lawtonfogle
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?

~~~
StavrosK
I guess you're right. I have, yep, it was pretty surprising!

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51Cards
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.

~~~
pen2l
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. :)

~~~
Spellman
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.

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smithzvk
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).

~~~
VikingCoder
...based on the position of where it is in your field of view, the digitally
rendered nose might not need artificial blur.

When you view it with a head-mounted display, your eyes might just see it as
blurry anyway...

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shmageggy
> _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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation)

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wobbleblob
Now I'd like to know: do people who have lost their nose irl experience more
motion sickness?

~~~
sampo
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.

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nysv
Colour me skeptical.

You decreased sickess by 13.5% by covering up about that much of the screen.

~~~
ciex
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.

~~~
jonmrodriguez
Haha maybe it's just me, but I actually dislike having my real-life nose block
part of my view.

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murbard2
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.

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Kiro
Am I the only one who never experience any VR sickness at all? Regardless of
latency. Is it really that big of a problem?

~~~
keerthiko
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 :)

~~~
Dylan16807
Or they just don't get motion sickness? Why does it have to be a sign of
something being "off"?

~~~
laumars
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)

~~~
Dylan16807
>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.

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TrevorJ
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%?

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iaw
I've often wondered if it would help by adding retina tracking and adding the
subtle shift in perspective it creates.

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moron4hire
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.

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shultays

        shown to reduce the effects of simulator sickness by 13.5 percent.
    

How do you calculate such an exact value?

~~~
Steuard
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.)

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awestroke
Does that mean that path tracing engines like Brigade[1] fit well with VR?

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y)

~~~
VikingCoder
This article is about a "NOSE", not "NOISE."

And no, the framerate of Brigade makes it unlikely to work well with VR.

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meej
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).

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cfstras
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.

~~~
dTal
They are not cross-eyed.

~~~
cfstras
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?

~~~
jessriedel
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.

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kazinator
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. :)

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profinger
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.

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jasonlotito
Original post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262743)

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kazinator
Would this still benefit someone of East Asian descent who doesn't see their
nose?

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nisdec
It's called seasickness and known for thousand of years.

You get it or you don't and there is nothing technology could do about it for
a long period of time at least.

Well someone could take some medicine before playing VR, but that would be a
little bit too much, wouldn't it?

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bitforger
Am now conspicuously aware of the nose in the middle of my face.

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leeroyding
This is... genius.

