Originally posted by hitech
Strange thing is, I have never had any real trouble with motion sickness, go do areobatics for an hour, no problem.
I put on a head tracker for 10mins of testing, i'll be sick with mostly a head ace for a few hours.
HiTech
One thing that is very interesting is that most pilots develop a good deal of 'resistance' to basic motion sickness. This does not however always corelate to game induced sickness.
I wrote a paper on the subject years ago, and a few results proved helpful:
Some players tend to chain smoke when playing games. Excessive smoking tends to make you nassious on its own. This led to the ever so popular decision of not letting my test subjects smoke:huh
It became VERY apparent after a while that people can build up their tollerance to game induced motion sickness. Diferent people had diferent base tolerances, but almost everyone could drastically improve their tolerance if they worked at it.
Many of the old stand by fixes like turning on the room lights and moving closer/father from the monitor didnt make much of a diference. Keep in mind the monitors were 15" back then, so you had to be pretty close;)
There was a huge, unexpected result. Game engines had a drastic impact on the results. Some subjects hardly ever got sick playing an Unreal engine game (I think it was unreal), but got felt the effects very quickly playing the Quake engine. It typically ran heavily in that direction, those that tollerated quake, tollerated unreal, but the reverse was not always true. Our conclusion was that there was some small effect in the quake engine that caused the 3d rendering to annoy the brain. We tested with set resolution and kept the FPS up, and the results left little room for any other interpretation. It also became clear that large outdoor environments were tollerated much better than claustrophobic dungeon crawls.
The keys to helping out those with issues with GIMS were:
Get enough sleep, when you are tired, not only are you more prone to GIMS, but you are less likely to notice the warning signs until your deep into feeling ill.
Build up your tolerances to a game by playing for a short time, and STOP BEFORE YOU FEEL ILL. Stopping after you start feeling sick didnt seem to help much. Many short sessions can help most build up tollerances into at least 30+ minutes.
Keep FPS and refresh rates on the monitor up. 70hertz but 60 hurts. Keep in mind this is for CRTs only, 60 on an LCD doesnt matter cause it doesnt flicker.....we didnt have LCDs when I did this. You must sacrifice eye candy for smooth gameplay. Not only does low FPS cause issues on its own, but the induced comtrol lag when a system is beyond its limits makes you think your turning or whatever, but the screen is behind causing brain conflict....thats bad.
DO NOT WATCH OTHERS PLAY. Because part of GIMS is based on your brain arguing with itself and the input from the inner ear, watching someone else intensifies the issue because your brain cant predict (or control) what is going on. Almost everyone was uscceptable to at lease some GIMS watching others play.
Ahh well...my wasted youth.
