VR Motion sickness
Many years ago, I tried Virtual Reality (VR) for the first time. It was the Oculus Rift developers kit, one of the very first Head Mounted Displays (HMD) that was the result of a KickStarter campaign in 2012. It looked like a pair of ski goggles superglued to an iPad. I remember that I went for a ride on a rollercoaster that was extreme, even with some jumps. I played around for about 15 minutes and then suffered from severe motion sickness for about three hours. The concept was extremely cool, but clearly the technology had a long way to go. Last week I pulled the trigger and got my first VR HMD (HP Reverb G2). My gut feeling is that the technology is now mature enough to provide a lot of value. In the coming months, I will evaluate how VR can be used in civil engineering and acoustics.
I think a lot of the motion sickness came from latency issues with the old first generation HMD. When you move your head around, there was a slight delay before the image updated accordingly, and this triggers a feeling of nausea. This is because our bodies know that if you eat something poisonous, a common reaction from the poison is a mismatch between motion and vision. The human body is a fantastic system so the obvious thing to do when something like that happens is to throw up, and get the poison out of your system ASAP. VR isn’t poisonous, but our body can interpret it that way. It might be possible that the motion sickness can be reduced with practice. I have used VR too little to comment on that. Ask me in six months and I will have an answer.
However, the current generation of HMDs are leaps ahead of that early developers kit I tried, and they are now using high resolution displays with high refresh rates of up to 90 or 120 Hz. This seems to reduce the motion sickness issues a lot, because I don’t perceive an obvious lag between my head movements and my visual impressions. One thing that will never go away though, is that when you are driving a race car for example, your body will expect G-forces while driving but you won’t feel them because you are stationary in the real world. And this one can be somewhat uncomfortable. But as I said, it might become better with practice.
My aim with the headset is to find a program that can read IFC files and allow me to walk around in the buildings that I am working with. I use 3D models in almost all my projects nowadays, but one thing that I cannot do with 3D projections on a 2D computer screen is the understanding of scale. No matter how much I study the drawings and models, I cannot get a feeling of the room sizes. That’s where I am convinced that VR will be the perfect tool. As an acoustician, you cannot put numbers on everything. We are working in the intersection between art and science. I often rely on my gut feeling when making critical decisions in a building project, and from an engineer’s perspective, that does not rhyme well. But that’s the way it is. Acoustics is about feelings and the calculation models can only take you so far. By virtually entering the rooms I am working with, I will gain a much better understanding of the decisions at hand. VR will help me develop a more sensitive gut feeling, if I can stay away from motion sickness, that is.
Another obvious benefit that I can see, is that I can enter a building site and go on a tour before I travel to the construction site to make measurements. I will learn to find my way around the building and get a feeling for the room sizes and identify the optimal test locations. This will also increase workplace safety, because the probability that I “get lost” and loose valuable time on-site decreases.
If anyone out there knows about good software to help me out with the scenarios I describe above and to read IFC files, it would be much appreciated if you can share some of your experiences with me. Hope to see you in the virtual world soon!