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Game Development Room-Scale VR Room-Scale Setup Placing the Tracking Volume

Robert Kaltenbach
Robert Kaltenbach
10,285 Points

Motion Sickness With Oculus and SteamVR

I'm using an Oculus Rift CV1 for this project. I know technically this tutorial was designed with Rift in mind, but this is what I have at my disposal for now.

I assumed since I can play games in Steam using the SteamVR overlay I would have little issues, however I was wrong.

Upon importing the SteamVR assets to my project, moving the tracking volume, and proceeding to test- I get a couple of issues:

  1. Motion Sickness. It seems my body is pretty lenient with motion sickness as I've played games with traditional locomotion mechanics (like using the thumbstick to simply move around) with no problems. I think my issue here comes from a reduced framerate, although the profiler was inconclusive in helping me discover any framerate issues.

  2. My camera is set to, essentially, under the floor unless I move the tracking volume up by just under 1 full Y unit. I understand that SteamVR uses the floor + height to calculate where the head should be, so I'm assuming there's a quick fix for this.

I did the entire standard VR tutorial creating the basketball game with mouse/kb controls and experienced neither the motion sickness nor the height issue.

Any help is appreciated.

1 Answer

Robert Kaltenbach
Robert Kaltenbach
10,285 Points

Partially Solved:

The "framerate" issues are actually over sensitivity due to the camera being tracked twice. 10 degrees of rotation is actually 20, 20 degrees is 40, etc. You can effectively turn to look entirely 180 degrees behind you by looking roughly 60 degrees to your left. This also means any movement of your head, even extremely minor is multiplied by two. This causes minor vestibular mismatch, but for those more susceptible to motion sickness this would be a deal breaker.

Both the floor tracking and the over-sensitivity problems were solved by changing the order in which the SDK's are listed in the Virtual Reality SDK's list. I moved OpenVR to the top, and Oculus to the bottom. For the time being, this has fixed the issue and allowed me to continue the course.