From Alex Cranz at Gizmodo:
Michael Fassbender’s soft lilt is in my ear spouting nonsense about assassins and their creed. Around me is a whirl of action set against a cartoonish backdrop. I’m in the new Assassin’s Creed virtual experience, and thanks to a blend of low-res graphics and high-res people, it feels like I’ve found my way inside some lost Mortal Kombat game circa 1993.
I don’t have any control. The camera, (and I) race down the corridor of a medieval castle. We skitter to a stop at the edge of a turret. I don’t have a body—I hover over the ground like a spectre—so there’s no way to fully comprehend how close to the edge my virtual self is.
Then the camera is lurching forward as my ghostly form is thrown off the turret. I’m seated, but my stomach is in my throat. At the moment my lunch lasagna is about to reacquaint itself with my mouth, the screen goes black. The experience is over.
I rip off the headset and gulp in a huge lungful of air. The world stops spinning long enough for me to catch the eye of one of the creators. He’s grinning, ecstatic with his debut of the Assassin’s Creed experience, and I’m nauseous and trying to be polite.
This is a carefully designed virtual experience. It was shot on the same locations as the big budget movie, and intended to get the average person excited about virtual reality—a surprisingly daunting task. This is, in many respects, the best that VR has to offer. And as the nausea tries to settle in my stomach one thing is painfully clear.
Our bodies aren’t ready for it.Cranz's article goes into a lot more depth about how VR affects your vestibular system, and about how not nearly enough research has been done on the problem of VR localization (seriously, it's a solid read, so click the link already), but the conclusion seems clear: even if they can solve all of VR's other crippling problems, simple physiology will still turn the whole experience into a nauseating disaster. VR sickness doesn't affect every user to the same extent, but it does affect every user, and nobody's anywhere near figuring out how to fix the problem.
And that's not the only problem. Different kinds of VR content, it turns out, need different levels of visual fidelity and different frame rates, and VR doesn't do any of them well:
The first time I tried VR, I was using an old gaming laptop and an Oculus Rift DK2. I didn’t pay attention to minimum spec requirements for a PC. I didn’t think of how a slower PC might dramatically change the VR experience. In my mind it would be as simple as mirroring the screen on the laptop to the two in the headset—the chunky behemoth with its mobile video card would be enough.
Then I tried playing Alien: Isolation. The computer’s fans hummed angrily as it struggled to output video to the headset. It was having to power not one, but two 1080p displays inside the headset, while immediately rendering a whole new world with every quick turn of my head. The alien’s tail swished across the screen at 60 frames per second. That’s more than adequate when you’re sitting three feet back, but the headset was trying to replicate the real world from only a few inches away. That demands, for a gamer, at least 90 frames per second.
When the refresh rate goes below that, VR sickness can set in, and it’s directly tied to how often you move your head. While a high refresh rate might be coveted by gamers, regular joes will find it wanting, particularly if they plan to watch any live action content on it. That’s because all the content we watch on our phones and TVs is coming in at around 24 to 30 frames per second. It gives content, especially content in motion, a pleasant “cinematic” blur that’s impossible to replicate with current VR headsets. Increase that frame rate and actors look like goofy jackasses in a cheap soap opera.
So, mitigating VR sickness might just render VR useless for non-gaming content, which could be crippling for a nascent industry that's hoping for virtual concert-goers and sporting-event fans to help propel the tech to mainstream acceptance. Even I hadn't thought of that problem until now. It seems like every time I look at VR, there's another problem, and no solutions in sight for any of them.
Seriously, folks, ignore the VR hype. VR is not actually a thing yet, and it's probably not going to be a thing, at least for this generation of VR hardware. If you're on the fence about whether you should buy an Oculus for XMas, I recommend waiting for another year, or for several more years, until they a) work out the practical issues which make VR unusable for most users, and b) figure out what it's actually good for, and build a reasonable library of apps that will make use of your VR gear, right out of the box.