VR Locomotion – Natural Vision

Many VR games and simulations invent new methods of locomotion to reduce virtual reality (VR) motion sickness for players. For example, teleporting the player is commonly used to reduce translational movement, which is known to cause motion sickness. However, as a person who experiences VR motion sickness, I feel that the nausea is amplified more by the instability of the camera. Therefore, I believe that any form of VR locomotion can actually be used as long as it is accompanied by a method that stabilises the player’s vision.

In real life, our vision is quite stable, whereas in VR, any slight shift of your head will be perceived as the camera wobbling. This effect is enhanced when moving, such as when walking or running, but can also occur while stationary and looking around. There are solutions that try to limit the player’s range of movement in order to reduce this wobbling effect. However, I believe that it can be reduced even further by building a gimbal into the VR headset. Gimbals are used to stabilise cameras while filming, and I believe that this can also be applied to VR headsets. The effect of gimbals will be like a hardware version of motion interpolation. This should help to reduce motion sickness by decreasing judder and unnatural eye movements. Gimbals are already used in cameras designed to film 360 degrees videos for the same reason, so why not have them inbuilt into headsets?

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