This demo explores an alternative idea to rotating your body in VR.

For games using the XBox Controller, the most common way is to use the Right joystick’s X-Axis to accelerate a rotation left/right.

The problem I find with this is because my body (or head) is not moving, but what I see is moving, I feel motion sickness.

The VR Comfort Mode (by CloudHead Games) helps reduce this by tapping to rotate in 30 degree incremements. However, in the real world you don’t turn in those increments and it feels unnatural (although it helped so much that Oculus added a similiar rachet mode to the SDK).

Instead though, I was thinking, if your head movement controls the rotation then you may feel less motion sickness.

I put this demo together to test that theory.

Firstly, the player is setup in Look-Move mode, which is where-ever you look that is the direction of forward motion (as opposed to Tank-Mode, which separates body motion from head motion). So nothing new here, standard approach, you can stand/sit and look all around and move forwards/back/left/right.

Next, I’ve made what I’ll call Look-Turn mode, which is activated by pressing (and holding) any of these: Right Trigger button or Right Joystick (in any direction).

Now, if you look around while in Look-Turn mode, your body will rotate at an accelerated rate. The degree to which you hold down the button will control the acceleration.

look-turn

Just by a quick glance left/right you can turn slowly or rapidly around.

Please download the demo and let me know your thoughts.

vr-look-turn-windows.zip Download (95MB)

vr-look-turn-mac.zip Download (96MB)