"Motion" Makes Some People Sick?

[celery 8]

The only game I got sick in was Will Rock, the fps was so smooth and the game was so fast that something snapped and I had a killer headache for hours. Mysteriously I've played lots of similar games but no similar effect.

[troop 0]

Well, I have to add an 'new' experience for motion sickness

and headache for myself.

In my entire gaming history, I never had any problems related

and the very first game, that caused me *serious* problems

after just some (5-10) minutes was... Stalker.

I am very positive, that it is the game (bobbing frequency up/down/sides, intensity and speed)

which is, for lack of better wording, out-of-sync(for me).

Just to name a few; none of those cause me problems. All of those

are in parts *very* different wrt to bobbing/FOV

OFP and now ArmA series (+ TrackIR! )

BF series

HL2

Doom series

Quake series

Bet on Soldier series

Brother in Arms series

Duke Nukem 3D

Rainbow Six series (Vegas last one played)

GRAW

FEAR

Farcry

CoD series

Alien vs Predator series

Unreal/Tournament series

System Shock series

You see, that is only a 'fraction', nevertheless widespread

selection of FPS games.

Yet, the *only one* making me feel physically sick, for the

very first time is Stalker.

Btw, I could not read about anyone else affected by

Stalker yet;..so the effect, *which* game/technique

causing the sickness, is very personal.

When it happened to me after all those years of gaming, I was seriously shocked, believe me that.

Luckily for me, the bobbing could be toned down somewhat

via config files (unlike Breed mentioned above) so I was able to

play the game.. pheew.

For ArmA, I believe its not the 'floating view' intensity

(which can be altered via slider) but rather the up/down

frequency, which is out-of-sync for your brothers feel.

Very little, we can do about that;..there is no config value,

correct? BIS?

[Jack-UK 0]

I've never had problems. But one thing i noticed the other day is i was playing Red Hotel online, i was dead and as a seagull, and i was flying about that large office building thing, and i just started turning in a circle while i waited. I noticed that as i focused on the cliff i began to feel dizzy...

It seemed to depend on my point of focus.. once i'd focused on the cliff i found it hard to get my focus back to the 'norm' if you know what i mean. Its hard to explain, it was like a REAL motion blur and i was becoming dizzy, but if i looked away, stopped movement and looked back i could turn again without dizzyness. It was strange... Its also hard to describe so if you havent got a clue what im on about dont worry :P

[walker 0]

Hi All

Loss of local horizontal and vertical is the major cause of VR game induced nausea.

You eyes are reporting the roll, pitch and yaw of the game but your inner ear is reporting your real roll pitch and yaw. The confusion in you brain causes you to feel out of balance and thus experience symptoms like dizziness, nausea, vomiting, headaches, drowsiness, and sweating.

The process is a form of motion sickness, try reading a book for half an hour in a car on windy undulating roads or get in a small fishing boat in choppy seas. Spinning round and round will do the same. It is what happens to astronauts when they feel weightless.

NASA studied it. If you have no motion sickness it means you have bad balance in NASA it means you are a washout for pilot if you are not sick; because you have an inner ear problem. Over time you should be able to control motion sickness; same as a sailor does; your brain reprograms itself.

So NASA needed pilots with a good sense of balance but that then meant they were more likely to be motion/space sick it was a bind. The pilots seemed to be taking longer than sailors did to reprogram them selves.

When seasick stopping in you cabin is the worst thing you can do. It is why they tell you to take stroll round the deck. Old sailors know to look at the horizon to reduce it; of course it is no good at night or in a storm.

NASA thus found that if they established local verticals and horizontals by designing space labs to have a "right way up" motion/space sickness was considerably reduced and the astronauts reprogrammed them selves more quickly.

In a car keep looking at lampposts if you feel car sick.

The same applies with a VR game look at something in the real world you know is vertical or horizontal for a few minutes.

It is a good idea to have your monitor with a window behind it for two reasons:

1) You can look out of you window at something you know is vertical such as a lamp post or the edge of a building. The further you can see and the more numerous the reference points the better.

2) Looking at a close monitor for hours causes eye strain and  loss of focal ability. Having distant objects to focus on reduces this.

Photo sensitive or flicker induced epilepsy is a different matter and you will get this just looking at a TV never mind a computer monitor. It does not require a game to cause it. Flashing TV images, strobe or even fluttering neon lights will cause it. Driving in a car past rows of trees or fence posts with a low winter sun behind it will induce it. It is also frequency specific for most people so a specific sequence or scene in a game can cause it, it is more or less unpredictable. There have been some crowd control experiments that have found ranges that effect most people, though not all. The problem is once epilepsy is triggered it becomes easier to trigger so leading to long term damage.

http://www.flightglobal.com/article....ol.html

Kind Regards walker

[OblivionX 0]

Hi All

Loss of local horizontal and vertical is the major cause of VR game induced nausea.

You eyes are reporting the roll, pitch and yaw of the game but your inner ear is reporting your real roll pitch and yaw. The confusion in you brain causes you to feel out of balance and thus experience symptoms like dizziness, nausea, vomiting, headaches, drowsiness, and sweating.

<SNIP>

Kind Regards walker

Maybe a little OT but a couple of years ago I went fishing with a friend in a small boat on a lake. The "sea" was a little rough,not like storm or anything, but pretty big waves. I felt sick and sweating like crazy. Almost puked in the boat. But after a couple of hours I felt fine again.

I think we was out fishing for about 12 hours. And when I stepped out of the boat at dry land again it felt like the ground under my feets was moving around. Maybe 30 minutes after we got ashore I started feeling sick again. It was like the sickness "went the other way". First it was the rough water that made me sick, but this time it was the steady ground that made me sick. I felt sick all night, it felt like the bed was a boat on rough sea.

Havent gone fishing since. Fish fingers from the store is the closest.

OblivionX

[robert(uk) 0]

Now that you mention it, I did feel slightly dizzy for the first few days that I was playing ArmA, and I did think maybe it was related to the motion in-game. It's not something I've ever suffered from before, and it's gone now so...

[Heron 0]

I get motion sickness from FPS games quite a bit, the newest such is Stalker. I find head-bob does it quite a bit, and hate that it's not a customisable option. I know ArmA is a realistic warsim, but you know, it's still a game at the end of the day.

In OpFlash and ArmA I find the easiest thing to do to cure it is switch to 3rd person when running, but of course some people think it's cheating, which is a bit daft to be honest.

So until everyone is affected by it, I wouldn't expect to see a solution any time soon. Those of us who get it will just have to live with it, unfortunately.

[4 IN 1 0]

well, you really needs to get TIR to get really really sick in ArmA

is there any HD video googles in the market that could fix the problem with TIR??

[PaveQ 0]

Post-process setting set to high makes me feel quite weird. It looks way too blurred, like there was something wrong. Post-process set to low works fine, and the vision is clear.

[jasono 0]

walker is right. Your body's senses get confused, giving you dizzyness and sickness feeling.

Focusing on something in a car that's not moving. Your eyes see the object and its surrounds are still, so your eyes are telling the brain, and the brain thinks "OK the person isnt moving". However the ear has 3 parts which sense your x,y,z balance etc. These are like little tubes with hairs inside them, when your head moves a small amount of liquid inside the 3 tubes moves around brushing past the hairs. This tells the brain your moving. So what's it going to think, are you moving or not? That's when you get the headaches.

PS : sorry to those who now have a headache of reading this. I'm probably wrong somewhere along the line lol

[Heron 0]

I have heard one way of curing the problem is to have a small desk lamp beside you projecting light either up or down (I forget which); the point being it takes something away from the screen so you aren't completely focused on it.

That sounds rubbish now I type it, but I heard that somewhere.

[Rofflecopter 0]

It's the gun sway that normally gets me, I don't find it in ArmA but STALKER makes me feel really sick.

[Maddmatt 1]

Post-process setting set to high makes me feel quite weird. It looks way too blurred, like there was something wrong. Post-process set to low works fine, and the vision is clear.

That is odd. I don't see any blur with it on. Only post-processing I see is depth of field when looking through optics or in cutscenes or the effect when looking into the sun.

If there is something else you see, could you post a screen? You're not the first person to mention that so I'm curious.

[Shadow NX 1]

Well, I have to add an 'new' experience for motion sickness

and headache for myself.

In my entire gaming history, I never had any problems related

and the very first game, that caused me *serious* problems

after just some (5-10) minutes was... Stalker.

Hehe, i was about to post that aswell.

Rarely get any affects from gaming and when it happens then mostly for the reason that i just played too long but at least once Stalker really gave me a puky feeling and whne it happend i just had played an hour and had sleept well before...

But yeah the ArmA view system indeed is bit strange with the slower reactiosn of arms and stuff, first time i played i was thinking my soldier was drunk... but you get used to it fast.

[Rofflecopter 0]

I know it's off topic, I have tried everything with Stalker to stop me puking up, I tried changing the field of view so I didn't see the gun but still the same, bad headaches then sick. Anyone come up with solution apart from not playing

But I don't get any of this with AA, even with track ir, I can throw my head about and nothing, not even a small headache.

EDIT

I never get motion sick, planes (even small light aircraft) and boats the rougher the better never feel sick or been sick, which is odd.

[troop 0]

Here is the relevant Stalker thread about head bobbing

and it *does* affect several people (because the effect is vastly overdone)

http://tinyurl.com/2lo3dl

Of special interest is pg. 5 following...to at least tone it down somewhat

(config file user.ltx value change .0).

For me it worked thus far, to be able to at least play the game.

With the initial value(0.7), I was getting sick within 5-10 mins.

From this and several other games/thread(see ArmA now), one can clearly see

that not every game/technique impacts everyone alike.

Like I wrote before;..it is very personal.

[PaveQ 0]

Post-process setting set to high makes me feel quite weird. It looks way too blurred, like there was something wrong. Post-process set to low works fine, and the vision is clear.

That is odd. I don't see any blur with it on. Only post-processing I see is depth of field when looking through optics or in cutscenes or the effect when looking into the sun.

If there is something else you see, could you post a screen? You're not the first person to mention that so I'm curious.

That's the exact effect I'm referring to. I tried to make screenshot but I couldn't make it obvious. Somehow when I play its more annoying but in screenshots not. Here's what I got:

http://blitzkrieg.homelinux.org/~paveq/kuvat/arma/

I just hate any kind of blurness or unsharpness in my view.

[Maddmatt 1]

Post-process setting set to high makes me feel quite weird. It looks way too blurred, like there was something wrong. Post-process set to low works fine, and the vision is clear.

That is odd. I don't see any blur with it on. Only post-processing I see is depth of field when looking through optics or in cutscenes or the effect when looking into the sun.

If there is something else you see, could you post a screen? You're not the first person to mention that so I'm curious.

That's the exact effect I'm referring to. I tried to make screenshot but I couldn't make it obvious. Somehow when I play its more annoying but in screenshots not. Here's what I got:

http://blitzkrieg.homelinux.org/~paveq/kuvat/arma/

I just hate any kind of blurness or unsharpness in my view.

I can see what you are talking about, but barely. Not surprised I never noticed it. It seems to be a soft glow effect.

If you set anti-aliasing to low (or high, but not normal because that just blurs everything) you probably wont notice it. It should have hardly any performance impact anyway. You miss some nice effects by turning postprocessing off.

[Stugwi 0]

I dont feel sick but i do wake up in the morning with a sore head if i have had a long session the night before.

For me i feel that using the right clik zoom function (which i use contantly) is the root of my headaches.

Zoom in zoom out zoom in zoom out zoom in zoom out......i feel dizzy alrdy

[2GvSAP_Dart 0]

Ahhh, ye ole "Optically Induced Vertigo," as it was called in the early days.

My sister cannot play any sort of fast moving game or sim without getting ill. Can't even watch!

I've been fortunate to not be caught by the bug.

[kavoven 4]

Ahhh, ye ole "Optically Induced Vertigo," as it was called in the early days.

My sister cannot play any sort of fast moving game or sim without getting ill. Can't even watch!

I've been fortunate to not be caught by the bug.

I have that problem, too. Exception is Counter Strike for example and I don't know why. I think I have problems with worlds being in one colour, like in HL1 and 2 for example. Too much gray and to fast movements and I become really, really sick...

[rollnloop 2]

I have had this problem with Arma, first game with this problem.

Solution for me was to set postprocessing to low, no more dizzyness now.

[troop 0]

Sorry for OT; some will need this.

Hopefully, some similar mod will be made for ArmA for

people having problems..

Stalker;..remove head-bob.

http://stalker.filefront.com/file/No_Headbobbing_Mini_Mod;77365

[SlipperyJim 0]

I get motion sickness with some games but I find that it usually happens on larger monitors. I did a bit of gaming on my friend's 21" monitor and wanted to throw up.

I only have a 17" monitor at home and it keeps me from hurling.

[aef.born2die 0]

I dont feel sick but i do wake up in the morning with a sore head if i have had a long session the night before.

For me i feel that using the right clik zoom function (which i use contantly) is the root of my headaches.

Zoom in zoom out zoom in zoom out zoom in zoom out......i feel dizzy alrdy  

My friend tried the 1.6 demo last night, and the animation effects in place when zooming in and out of the ironsights was definately causing him an issue.

He had to stop playing after a few minutes.

A shame really because he reallt likes the game