Battling Against the Motion Sickness in Video Games and Resident Evil 7 VR version

Feb 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Resident Evil is one of the bigger franchise in video games and just a month ago 24th of January Resident Evil 7 hit the stores. While lot of fans felt disappointed with the game and did not enjoy the type of turn Capcom took with it, it did certainly provide us something special in its Virtual Reality version that is currently Playstation 4 exclusive. Unfortunately, I did not have the luxury to test the game myself, so I had to mainly rely on videos and articles explaining some of the solutions in the design that has made Resident Evil 7 to combat motion sickness and why it is a good example of a VR done right.

First, we should probably take a look at what actually causes motion sickness and probably one of the best answers comes directly from John Carmack, virtual reality engineer and game programmer.

“Nausea is due to inconsistencies between the rendered visual field and the vestibular system (view/body mismatch” — John Carmack

The vestibular system refers to the anatomy of the ear and more specifically to the inner ear part where liquid moves and provides the brain information about the movement of the body. So, in Virtual Reality games one of the problems is the visual and body information mismatch. Because video games extremely often include lot of movement and high action phases, these types of situations where the visual information does not match the body information is quite common.

However, motion sickness in general does not always apply to everyone and it is slightly inconclusive why this is. Few articles stated that gender and age are one of the biggest factors defining who can experience motion sickness and who might not. Becca Caddy wrote an article “Vomit Reality: Why VR makes some of us feel sick and how to make it stop” where she stated that women in general are more likely to experience motion sickness then males.

Then what kind of tricks do video games in general use to combat motion sickness? Shawn Patton and Jesse Schell did a presentation in VR Developer Conference 2016 talking about experiences with “I expect you to die”. First of all, one of the bigger things to remember is to keep the frame rate as high as possible to provide smoothness of motion. Secondly, the sudden accelerations and decelerations very problematic, like in Minecraft VR for example, where sprinting can cause motion sickness fairly easily due to the sudden burst of speed. Keeping Horizon level evened also is one of the high recommendations as high changes in the horizon level creates even bigger mismatches. Oculus also recommends starting with more slow-paced interactions in order to ease players to the game, because gaining more experience in using the VR also can help with the motion sickness. VR companies and game companies also often recommend that players should take regular breaks, but for lot of players who can easily spend hours playing games, these types of advices easily fall of on deaf ears.

Then how is Resident Evil 7 any different from other Virtual Reality games? First of all, Resident Evil 7 is probably the first VR game that allows users to extensively adjust VR related settings in the games menu. In order to combat motion sickness, Resident Evil 7 allows the users for example to adjust walking speed, camera inversion, camera rotation angles and allowing smooth crouching. The players are even able to adjust the animation transitions of movements and how fast they are played.

While these settings do not guarantee a cure to the motion sickness, they are surely a great a step to the right direction to combat motion sickness in video games. Combatting the motion sickness however does come with a price and immersion does take some hit due to this. Because Resident Evil is a horror game and horror games do often include jump scares and sudden bursts of motion, they have to be battled against somehow to avoid large mismatches. One thing is that some of the character animations have been left of such as being jumped at or getting knocked down and these are exactly the types of things that can cause nausea. Additionally, Resident Evil 7 has received some negative remarks about its visual quality when compared to the regular version, which is most likely because they could not assure steady framerates with VR and had to do some optimization for it.

The interesting thing in Resident Evil 7 is that only Playstation 4 controller is used and using other devices is not possible. The way interaction happens in Resident Evil 7 however does make me wonder if the control schemes help or worsen the possibility of motion sickness. Due to splitting the ability to move and view between the controller and the VR headset, it makes me think if this type of combination makes players more prone to motion sickness. Especially when more scary situations happen and screen shakes due to head movement and user reacting through controls.

Resident Evil 7 is certainly an interesting case of how motion sickness can be combatted against, but still it remains necessary to find solutions on how to even better combat this that also does not reduce the immersive aspects of video games.

Sources

https://www.wareable.com/vr/vr-headset-motion-sickness-solution-777

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3mMc_0_UtU

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023671/Lessons-Learned-from-I-Expect

https://youtu.be/_ZPFvZ5DpsQ