Thwarting VR Discomfort: Tips for a Smooth Experience

8 tips to prevent HTC Vive motion sickness

Benjamin Arango

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

What HTC does to reduce motion sickness

HTC Vive is aiming at giving its customers the virtual reality experience so real and sick-free that they can fully have fun with the technology and make their money and time spent well. In spite of improvements to game technology in recent years, HTC is focusing heavily these days on making sure users feel correctly oriented. HTC is also at work on boosting the frame rate to match with the body movements and to clear up that nausea-inducing mismatch. The game developers are coming up with a variety of solutions to solve the problem, or at least minimize it. A new technology introduced by the Mayo Clinic is a good hope for HTC Vive to bring its headsets to a whole new level. The hospital has developed algorithms that, when paired with galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS), can trick the brain into syncing what you’re seeing in VR with physical stimulation within a tenth of a second.

8 Tips to reduce motion sickness

Listed below are some ways to reduce motion sickness while using your virtual reality headset.

• Avoid playing racing games or any other game that rapidly throws you around.
• Eating right before using VR tends to increase motion sickness as well. Ignore that.
• You can actually ‘build up’ a tolerance over time and be less susceptible to motion sickness once you get used to it.
• Search for field of view options. Lower fields of view help with motion sickness
• Ginger tablets aid with nausea and motion sickness
• After you have had a motion sickness, sleeping is best because it lets your inner ears completely reset themselves.
• Just before putting on the HTC Vive headset, consume a couple of beers, sounds like a weird option but some people have reported it doing wonders for them.
• Getting a bad frame rate can also make you easily sick, if you get yourself a beefy computer nausea can be reduced.

**Warning:**These quick remedies work from person to person. Thus the best thing to do as soon as you feel the slightest tinge of nausea, stop what you’re doing and remove the headset. Don’t re-enter VR until you aren’t feeling sick anymore. Thinking you can “tough it out” will leave you feeling dizzy and nauseated for hours and trust me it’s not worth it.

Benjamin Arango

Benjamin Arango is a writer and a lover of all things video.

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