Specifications

• Work in a quiet environment. Ambient noise can interfere with how your brain

perceives the images on screen and can trigger motion sickness in some people.

Spatialized sounds that disagree with your virtual environment send conflicting

messages that your mind will struggle to contextualize. Try working in a quiet

environment or wearing noise-canceling headphones to remove ambient noise.

• Watch what you eat before strapping on the Rift. This is common sense. Just as

you wouldn't binge on sushi, donuts, beef jerky, and cherry Gatorade right before riding

in the back of a speeding minivan going down the Pacific Coast Highway

, you should

watch what you eat right before using the Rift.

• Take time to recover! The disorientation effects of using the Rift can last for some

time after taking off the headset. For your safety and the safety of others, you should

not operate any machinery or drive a car, etc., if you have just used a VR headset.

There are strategies for mitigating motion sickness from within your application (see

Chapter 10) and well-designed applications may not cause motion sickness for you. However,

as you develop, you may find that one of the "bugs" in your software is that it causes motion

sickness. It may take many testing iterations before you can fix the problem. In addition, some

of the causes of motion sickness are inherent to the Rift itself and while Oculus has announced

improvements (lower latency devices, higher resolution screens) that should help in future

versions of the Rift, you still need to work with the version you have.

You don't need to suffer for your art. If you experience nausea or other motion sickness

symptoms and resting isn't enough, here are some additional remedies you can try:

• Eat ginger. Ginger has long been used as a motion sickness remedy. You can eat it in

any form - candied ginger, ginger-snap cookies, ginger tea, ginger ale - just make sure

that it contains real ginger and not just ginger flavoring. If you don't like how ginger

tastes, powdered ginger is available in pill form and can be found on the vitamin aisle of

most major drug stores.

• Eat saltines or other dry crackers. Nibbling on dry crackers may also help.

• Acupressure. Acupressure uses pressure or other stimulation on specific points of the

body to treat ailments. Practitioners of acupressure believe stimulation of the p6

acupressure point, located about two finger-widths from the crease on the underside of

the wrist may help symptoms of motion sickness. You can try applying pressure to this

point yourself or you can use one of the several brands of acupressure bands available.

• Medication. If you are having persistent issues with motion sickness, there are

prescription and nonprescription medicines that may prevent and treat symptoms. Talk

to your doctor to learn more.

Using and developing for the Rift should be fun and we hope these tips help keep any

motion sickness issues you might have to a minimum.

Or maybe this is just what you refer to as ‘Fridays’. We’re not here to judge.

other simple mistakes. These will be cleaned up during production of the book by copyeditors and proofreaders.

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