I just used some crummy google cardboard thing (barely even looked like VR) and watched some hectic Star Wars video! Was very fast paced and intense. No me gusta

That could be the worst possible way to experience it... And no, I wouldn't call it VR if it was just a video without head tracking feedback.

That's just a screen too close to your eyes.

No wonder you didn't like it.

Yeah, maybe I'll try with an OR headset or something. Why do they even bother with Google Cardboard, it doesn't even work.

If you want to check out some general design considerations with VR and how they feel in practice you can check out the Unity sample framework from Oculus that gives you a feel for different locomotion techniques, UI, etc.

https://developer3.oculus.com/blog/introducing-the-oculus-sample-framework-for-unity-5/

I've had a lot of experience in VR, my sickness chart is something like:
The Oculus Rift DK1 makes me start feeling ill (lump in your throat kind of feeling) after 5 to 20 minutes, but if I take it off as soon as I get that feeling, then there's no lasting sickness. If I keep playing after that feeling appears, then yep, the nausea / dizziness can set in and stick around for up to 12 hours in my worst experiment!!

e because I've gotten used to VR now, or because I'm more careful and not using it for more than an hour...

That's about my experience. I only tried the DK1 maybe 4 or 5 times. And I believe it took more like 30 minutes for me to get that uneasy feeling, but I definitely remember it feeling like something was coming on.

I tried a Samsung Gear demo a guy had for about 4 minutes and didn't notice anything.

That's my entire experience with VR, but I hope to get into developing for it soon.

I think some people are more susceptible to motion sickness than others. I've never gotten motion sickness on a plane and have been on quite a few. I've been out to sea twice and did okay for the weekend out to see, but I was probably taking Dramamine. Then the other trip was only about 4 hours and I was heaving over the side of the boat the entire time although I did everything you are not supposed to do such as drinking the night before, getting little sleep, and eating a big greasy breakfast. Both were scuba trips and as soon as I got in the water I was fine again.

One weird thing about motion sickness is that after about 4 days at sea, I got "land sickness" when I got home. I didn't really get sick, but the world was rocking for probably another 24 hours after I got back on land. It's like your brain eventually adjusts to it and then when you change it back it's totally confused.

Anyway, I sure hope motion sickness is not a problem with VR in the future; I'm very excited about the tech.

Update:

I've now spent about 8 hours across 2 four hour sessions in a Samsung Gear VR run by the Galaxy Note 7:

No motion sickness what-so-ever. They warn you to keep it to 30 minute sessions; I ignored that and did straight 4 hour sessions. But I tried everything I could from things that moved smoothly to things that didn't. From MineCraft to space simulators to roller coasters and VR movies where I was hanging under a helicopter over Manhattan. There were a couple brief moments where I felt a little something and it seemed like it was always when a VR film started. The roller coaster was the only one that really made me dizzy at all. Most of the experiences were fairly stationary, but some were more your standard video game fare such as MineCraft and one where you are inside of a sphere in space and rotating in every direction imaginable as you float. But the ones that rotated crazy always had something in the scene that was stationary or at least from your reference point.

I did all of these sitting down and none standing up.

And maybe it was partially because I was switching between apps about every 30 minutes or even every couple of minutes. But I felt nothing that lasted more than a couple of seconds without taking any breaks except the 24 hours between the two four hour sessions. And like I mentioned, I did feel a bit queezy after about 30 minutes with the DK1 a year or two ago.

So, I've had about a week with the Gear VR. Still zero motion sickness. I've even been playing one game that is a space ship dog fighter where you spin enough to make me occasionally dizzy. But after a second I regain my sense of stability and go on.

I believe the key is to be sitting down in a stable chair or couch. I tried a swivel chair very shortly and felt less comfortable that way although I did not play long enough to get motion sickness that way. But it felt noticeably different.

The only possibility I see other than a stable seat would be quality of motion tracking, but I don't think that is the primary issue.

One thing I noticed when I let someone else play it was that he chose to play it standing up and he was swaying around like he'd downed a quart of Jose Quervo. It was pretty obvious that his brain was getting mixed signals. His eyes were telling him one thing and his muscles were telling him something entirely different. We have a tendency to believe our eyes, yet in this case that was the problem.

At least with current VR technology, I believe standing is the cause of the problem and VR games will induce sickness if they do not avoid this. When firmly seated, there's nothing for the brain to get confused about and any time the eyes try to trick the brain, the muscles send the signal that everything is a-okay because you are firmly planted. Worse comes to worse you fall over on the soft couch. With the arm rest you can only fall one way. I attribute this to the reason that I seem to be able to spend countless hours in VR spinning wildly even to the point of being dizzy and experience no sickness. There could be a link to motion tracking, but I don't think the motion tracking on the Gear VR is that great. It's reasonably good, but it constantly drifts. It's probably good enough as long as you can constantly reset it. Some games allow you to reset the motion tracking inherently while others require you to leave the game to reset the unit. Usually, it is the supposedly uncomfortable standard games like MineCraft that are always inherently resetting the motion tracking. When the thumb controller is what turns you around rather than your head, you are constantly resetting the tracking without realizing it. It for the most part only has problems on the horizontal plane and seems to correct itself on pitch well enough most of the time. I think that the problem on the horizontal plane with yaw is that it's picking a fairly arbitrary point to be "forward". Pitch may be defined more accurately according to gravity, giving you a consistent "down".

VR is not meant for standing. True VR involves paralysis and is a technology probably 1,000 years in to the future, but at least a century or more. This should not be confused for that. This is basically just true 3D gaming. As such, it should be played like it's always been played: on a couch with a controller in your hand. As long as the technology tries to be something it's not, it's going to have problems. The sooner it can embrace what it actually is, the sooner it can catch on.

These companies like HTC that are making VR games where you stand are just asking for a law suit. It's only a matter of time before someone trips and is seriously injured. It's inherently unsafe, although many of us may be willing to take the risk. You're blind folding yourself and lying to your brain to tell it you can see and filling it full of ideas about things being around you that are not there while being totally oblivious to things that are not there. Moving around blindfolded with this kind of false information is asking for all kinds of problems.

In our overly litigious society, I don't see how everything else has to have a warning label on it, and yet this has managed to get past the lawyers. If it were like the rest of society it would start the game by saying, "You agree to use this unit sitting down in a stable seat and never to stand up while wearing this unit. Standing while wearing the unit is inherently unsafe and not at all the intended use of this product. Users wear this unit at their own risk and the company assumes no liability for the incorrect use of this product." You'll probably see these warning after the first law suit hits the courts. I would be tempted to start every game with it asking if the user is seated firmly in a stable couch or chair and exit the game until the answer is yes.

One game had a post that I almost wanted to grab for stability, except in the real world there was nothing there to grab. If I had of relied on that standing up, I would have fallen as I tried to catch my fall on a non-existent object. Even assuming that it tracks you to keep you in a safe area, it's just a matter of time before someone comes into that space unexpectedly and you trip over the baby or the dog and face plant. Besides, very few games can be fun and limit you to staying in a small area. And teleporting from one area to the next is un-natural and seriously fun draining as well.

Yet, if you just play it like any other game - sitting down on a couch with a game controller - you can play it just like any other game with next to zero risk of breaking any bones and from an infinitely more stable and less nauseating platform. This is not true VR; your sense of smell, taste, touch, and balance are not something that it can control, and if it could you would be paralyzed and unable to stand up anyway. What it really is is just a better video game monitor and that's it. I think the sooner we embrace that, the sooner we can start enjoying games for it.

And teleporting from one area to the next is un-natural and seriously fun draining as well

Depends on how you do it.

In the game in the talk I mentioned where they claimed teleporting helps to avoid motion sickness, they gave you an in-game artefact you used to teleport, a small sphere you launched to the location you wanted to go to.

This apparently felt very natural, and became "a fun game mechanic" instead of "a workaround".

At least with current VR technology, I believe standing is the cause of the problem and VR games will induce sickness if they do not avoid this.

Standing up without having perfect motion tracking induces sickness. The GearVR (which has a phone's accelerometer) is very different from something like the Vive (which has amazing positional tracking via dual IR projectors and dozens of time-of-flight sensors).

Standing up and walking around when everything is calibrated correctly and tracking perfectly is just fine.

e.g. the free-roam in a warehouse VR game that I mentioned earlier has be open for a year now, and hasn't had any injuries yet, because walking around feels perfectly natural. I've spent an hour in it on two occasions and not had a hint of motion sickness. Spending 5 minutes sitting in a DK1 is worse than an hour of walking with their tracking system (n.b. the DK1 has no positional tracking whatsoever, so is sickness central)!

There's also a lot of people excited for games like Onward, where crawling on your office floor or ducking behind non-real cover to protect yourself during an immersive virtual firefight is part of the gameplay and is sure to get the adrenaline pumping similar to airsoft or paintball:

Saying that VR is not meant for standing really kinda just ignores the fact that this stuff is happening and is great :P

But yes, having the urge to touch, grab and lean on virtual objects is a thing and can go very badly if you don't remember that there's nothing there in time!!

I think this would be especially dangerous for children, especially as the ability to tell the difference between real and imagined develops much later than we like to think it does...

Point well made and taken. Still, I think 5 years from now - outside of theme parks - we'll all be sitting on the couch with our game controllers playing it and most of the standing systems will be sitting on the shelf gathering dust. I think humans are inherently lazy, or maybe that's just me. :-)

And teleporting from one area to the next is un-natural and seriously fun draining as well

Depends on how you do it.

In the game in the talk I mentioned where they claimed teleporting helps to avoid motion sickness, they gave you an in-game artefact you used to teleport, a small sphere you launched to the location you wanted to go to.

This apparently felt very natural, and became "a fun game mechanic" instead of "a workaround".

I could see that working for a game or two. But a lot of the games on the Gear VR try things like this and it gets really old really fast.

One thing that works really well is board games where you don't have to move really at all. I think the game is called Tacatera. I've only played it a hand full of times but it was pretty fun. I think you would call it a tower defense game and a fairly simple one at that. But you're mostly just standing there looking over a 3D board.

There's also a Legend of Zelda game that you play like a board game sort of. I think it's called Hero something and you have a little orc character you take on an adventure. You just teleport from room to room, but he moves around freely. For the right game, that could work.

So, I think there are some ways to pull it off for some games. But for me, these are not really the types of games I like to play. I mostly just want to play Skyrim in VR. Maybe some Civilization or Call of Duty every once in awhile.