I bet opinions like yours were prevalent when 3D games first came out. "This 3D thing is nice, but why don't you just concentrate on making a better videogames?".
As also someone old enough to remember that time, lots of SNES and Sega Genesis owners were saying that. And people were getting sick from Doom at far greater rates than they are today from Oculus Rifts.
>>people (inclduing me) will get sick from it is my big concern
Sick doesn't mean cancer or tuberclosis.
I remember from my childhood watching TV was considered bad, because it was thought to be bad fore one's eyes. Ear phones were bad for the ears and reading on the smart phone in a bus makes me motion sick to date.
I mean getting sick, as in having to throw up. A bit like motion sickness, though it is not exactly the same thing.
If enough people can't use it because they get uncomfortable from it, because they puke on the floor, that would be a bad thing. I understand that there is a lot of work being done to prevent that. And still I think it is something to look out for.
I've ran demos on the DK2 where only 1 person out of 200 said they got dizzy. They certainly didn't puke anywhere. This was code running in a web browser. I would say, from the hardware standpoint, the issue is solved. It's up to developers to write software.
"Sick from Doom"?? I don't remember anybody getting sick from Wolfenstein or Doom. Controversy around (for the time) violent graphic realism? Sure. Seasickness? No.
I was one of the developers on the original Doom and got so sick from playing it that it motivated me to debug my code faster. The phases were no problemo, sweating, farting, nausea, then that was it: gotta lie down and hug the cold, firm floor.
I eventually became less sensitive to it. I imagine the same will happen with VR after we get our "VR legs".
Bonus: "VR legs" have been shown to carry over into meatspace. As in, there are VR users reporting "I can read in the car for the first time!" But, it takes a lot of slow, careful build-up to do well.
Conversely, if someone has bad experiences and tries to power-through them anyway repeatedly, it can build up an aversion similar to a "bad tequila night" and ruin VR for that person permanently.
Interesting info that I was not aware of. I guess I was just a casual player, not a developer like yourself doing it all day long (super-kudos btw - you changed the gaming world). All I remember about Wolfenstein and then Doom, is the wonder, the wow. I personally was amazed that this 3d rendering, basic as it was, was even possible, at the time. We were well before any 3d graphics acceleration. This was bog standard frame buffer VGA, or even, for Wolfenstein, CGA? Correct me if I'm wrong. Silicon Graphics workstations were super-exotic!
I suppose VR has a higher hurdle-rate because the nausea thing has been pre-telegraphed by early adopters of suboptimal beta tech. But I have no doubt that immersive technology is the future.
Oh, i did. Not enough to keep me from playing, but when it hit, it hit hard. Hard enough that i still get minor flashbacks even from screenshots. Surprisingly, the first game where i did not have that problem was, of all things, Descent. Must have been something specific about the movement and/or projection.
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted, but it's true. Hardcore gamers complained about 3D all the time in the early days. They felt 3D games often ran poorly, were more buggy and had less features than the 2D games before them.
Sometimes they were just curmudgeons who don't like change, sometimes they were right on all counts.
