The future of video gaming belongs to virtual reality — as seen in Oculus Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus. In spite of these technological advances, people who play virtual reality games often get nauseous — a common side effect of VR gaming.
Researchers at Purdue University may have a solution to keep virtual reality gamers from getting sick. It's a relatively simple fix: put a virtual nose inside the game.
Basically, what makes gamers feel ill when they play virtual reality is the sensation of their eyes telling them one thing while their bodies experience something else. Even with the most modern virtual reality systems, there's always a slight delay in movement and what the eye sees. This is also common with theme park motion simulator rides (anyone who's ridden Universal Studios' "Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey" can relate).
Researchers have found that virtual reality games with one immobile component – such as a flight simulator game with cockpit controls – don't cause as much nausea in gamers. Why? It seems that having one stable thing in the field of view helps the body and eyes better adjust to scenes and motions that are slightly out of sync.
So in order to design a less nausea-inducing virtual reality game, researchers came up with the perfect solution: a virtual nose.
"It was a stroke of genius," said David Whittinghill, an assistant professor at Purdue. "You are constantly seeing your own nose. You tune it out, but it's still there, perhaps giving you a frame of reference to help ground you."
The researchers were right. In their tests with two separate video games, players who saw the virtual nose played longer without feeling ill than those who played without the virtual nose. Even more interesting is that the users who played games with the virtual nose didn't even notice that it was there until it was later pointed out to them.
Researchers are still trying to understand why the virtual nose makes virtual reality gaming a little more tolerable, but they have some ideas.
"Our suspicion is that you have this stable object that your body is accustomed to tuning out, but it's still there and your sensory system knows it," said Whittinghill.
The team hopes to further their research to predict the amount of sickness a virtual reality game induces after a certain amount of playing time, in addition to learning how to inhibit that feeling for as long as possible.
[Photo Credit: Sergey Galyonkin | Flickr]
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