Dev Blog No.3 How to Make a VR Game with no Motion Sickness

    When we promoted the games to others, we were asked how we deal with the possible motion sickness in our game given the current VR game situation.

    Obviously, we are not just common VR game.

     Firstly, like we have mentioned before, V of war adopts a special VR operation style, in which the handles of VR are set as the control rocker as the mech. Pushing the handles forward to go forward, pushing backward to go backward, flip the handles to level up etc. therefore, we recommend sitting on a chair while playing our game because that best simulates the situation of a mech. This operation style would mitigate the motion sickness. If you recall your experience while you are driving a car, you shall know what we are talking about. When you in a car, the buildings and scenes pass very quickly, but you won’t feel sick while you are in a car.

 

( video of our operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltrOIZN1UY&t=1s)

    In order to enhance the gaming experience, we have added a comfort setting(sight channel) in the game. The sight channel would only appear when the mech is moving, and the faster the mech moves, the fewer scene can be seen. The design reappears the actual sight effect of the movement, that our eyes could somewhat ignore those information that do not fall within the focus area. However in the common design of our VR headset, the detailed image would be presented in whole, and the headset cannot know where our focus point is. It leads to the vertigo of the player because of failing to get the necessary information, and it’s hard to concentrate as well. Many junior VR player suffer from this.

   Although the situation is much better in senior player group, they are not vulnerable to motion sickness. The design of the sight channel much lower the threshold of playing a VR game. Generally if a player would not get motion sickness when playing a common 3D PC game, there’s a high possibility he/she can just be adapted to our new VR setting in V of War. And we also consider the feeling of the seniors, the sight channels are removable, so don’t worry.

(The black circle is the removable comfort setting, this pic reflects the image effect in a VR headset while the mech is moving rapidly)

   Well, except for the technical innovation, we also made proper adjustment in the map setting, which is smaller than the other typical Battle Royale games. The motion sickness usually comes with the high speed movement. Therefore, in the experience design of the VR mech, we want to reduce the proportion of pure movement and enhance the VR immersion while the VR player is playing, reducing the motion sickness in this way.

   And we have made efforts on the improvement of the frame rate and the game effects, enabling a fast feedback of the operation of the gamer. We tried our best to let our brains believe that we are actually in a mech and driving. Well even though we have cut the size of the map, it is a high volume of workload for a VR game. Would discuss it later in our dev blogs.