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The secret to Beat Saber is that the player's physical and virtual world are locked together at all times. You're standing on a small platform and can't go anywhere. Thus, it doesn't cause nausea. Or disorientation. Or falls. Even when the player is in very active motion.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw



I desperately want more games like Unseen Diplomacy, where you walk through an infinite hallway. In real life, you're just walking in circles, but it doesn't feel that way in VR!

I'm immune to VR motion sickness, but games without fake movement just feel so much more immersive!


The game "Tea for God" (https://www.google.com/search?q=tea+for+god&oq=tea+for+god) also has this strange behavior where the world curves around in a non-Euclidean / M.C. Escher-style fashion so that you feel like you're in a labyrinth, but you're actually in a ~8ft square in your living room.

"Tea for God" and "Unseen Diplomacy" are the only games I'm aware of that operate in this fashion, with "realistic" walking movement that doubles back on itself.


There's at least one more, Shattered Lights: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1057720/Shattered_Lights/

But I've played all three of these to death!



Eye of the Temple has some of the coolest VR-specific movement tricks I’ve ever seen.

If you’re getting close to your IRL boundary, it sets up a rolling log as part of a puzzle. To stay on a real forward-moving rolling log, you have to walk backwards to maintain balance. So in context of the game, you’re convincingly moving “forwards” while in reality you’re walking backwards.

Pretty sure I took off the headset and geeked out at everyone in the house first time I realized what was happening.


Eye of the Temple is different. It uses moving platforms, effectively a form of artificial movement, instead of non-euclidian space.


Another type of game with this characteristic is Table tennis simulators. Although the reduced field of view is a limitation, it just feels like wearing a strange helmet. Inner ear still matches the visual picture.


I've seen plenty of people try to lean on the table and fall over


When I got my headset forever ago my brothers girlfriend broke a controller by putting it down on the virtual table lol


I play with an actual dinner table in front of me around the same place as the virtual table. Hazardous for some games but helpful on this case!


That what makes it not bad, not what makes it good.


I would expand on that.

I'd say because the gameplay is so elegantly simple, most people can do kinda sorta well right from the get go. It feels extremely natural with almost no set up apart from height, just incredibly intuitive and frictionless.


That's not sufficient to explain Beat Saber's secert as pretty much every VR rythym game follows the same pattern but was not as successful


True.

Synth Riders is quite nice as well, and so is Pistol Whip. Both are "on rails" rather than standing on a platform. I'm not sure if that's what makes Beat Saber slightly more appealing though.


I wonder if a game where you ride inside of a mecha with free roaming capabilities would feel more natural.


That's the basis for a very common VR game(s) you see in VR arcades and such (or conventions). https://store.steampowered.com/app/334540/Vox_Machinae/ or https://store.steampowered.com/app/1192900/IRON_REBELLION/

Having played them, they were slightly disorienting at first but nowhere near as actual movement-based VR games.


No. The visual movement of the mech will not align with the inertia you feel irl and you'll get dizzy.


Not really.

Any game where your game-world movements don't match your real-world movements is what causes motion sickness.

It's as simple as that. If you're sitting in a mech, once the mech moves, you're likely to get sick, because you're moving in the game world, but not the real world.

There are ways to kind of fool your brain to make it work, but it's not 100%. For example, in Gorn, one of the movement options is to move an arm forward, then pull it back while holding the trigger, kind of like you're pulling the world. But if you alternate arms as you do it, your arms kind of simulate the swinging motion of walking, and that can be enough to drastically reduce or even eliminate the sickness.


And the worst part is that it goes both ways.

Brain expects movement (from visual stimuli) and doesn't feel any movement? Nausea. (VR sickness)

Brain expects stability (from visual stimuli) and feels movement? Nausea. (Sea sickness).

This is why when you're sea sick they tell you to watch the horizon, because if you watch the horizon, you can tell that the horizon is going up and down and your brain can correlate that to the motion.


There are also efforts to create patches that provide neural stimuli to fool your brain into thinking you've moved. Reportedly Valve has looked into those in the past.


Why wouldn’t the same thing apply when driving a car in RL, however?


It does. When your acceleration changes you feel it and if you don't you might get sick. If your acceleration is static there are no additional forces on you


Car sickness is very real though, only maybe not as much for the driver.

I never used to have it, but in modern cars where accelerations are much higher and you're much more disconnected from the outside in terms of how much you can see and hear, it's almost a certainty. This is especially true on the backseat where it can also get fairly claustrophobic.


For many people it does. However for most it does Not because you aren’t standing still. You’re actually moving.


Because in real life you do feel the effects of bends in the road, acceleration, breaking, and the terrain under your wheels.


You feel the acceleration and braking and turning when you’re in a real car.


In real life, you can feel the acceleration of the car.


Do you regularly play Beat Saber?




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