US start-up builds tech that lets gamers dial down VR nausea
Cambridge, Massachusetts start-up VRemedy Labs is developing a software tool that controls feelings of nausea by enabling virtual reality gamers to dial up or down the levels of motion experienced during activities such as flying around using handheld rocket thrusters. The company is using its own game-in-progress, I Hate Heroes, to refine the technology, with engineers currently controlling the intensity at which the game is played, with a view to users being able to do it themselves. VRemedy Labs is also hoping to work with headset manufacturers or launch a software tool for developers to add to their own games.

Companies and researchers have been exploring a slew of potential solutions, from beefing up the resolution of the displays in headsets to limiting your field of view when there’s a lot of motion-related activity going on in the virtual world. And a very young startup called VRemedy Labs is working on an interesting fix of its own: a sort of software-based dial that you can turn up or down to raise or decrease the excitement level—and, it hopes, the resulting nausea—within VR games.

The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is building its own video game to test this out. The game-in-progress, which revolves around rescuing a group of superheroes, includes several kinds of locomotion that tend to make people feel sick in VR, such as flying around with adjustable rocket thrusters in your hands or pulling yourself from one place to another with grappling hooks.

For now, the startup founders are manually controlling the potentially uncomfortable effects that users experience as they try out the prototype. VRemedy Labs cofounder Richard Oates says one of the things they’re doing is starting players at the highest level of intensity and, if they feel sick, slowly dialing it down (over a period of about 10 minutes) to see if that helps. Then they ramp back up in hopes of finding a sweet spot for the player, adjusting things like your field of view and the number of obstacles that rush past when you’re moving. Eventually, they hope, players will be able to make the adjustments themselves.

To come up with different comfort levels, VRemedy labs first built a spectrum of nausea that takes into account existing research as well as best practices at the companies selling headsets, such as Rift maker Oculus and Vive makers Valve and HTC. Nish Bhandari, another cofounder, says they try to make the changes between different levels very subtle.

VRemedy Labs expects the game, which it’s calling I Hate Heroes, to be completed next year. Eventually, Oates says, the startup hopes to work with headset makers or release a software tool that game developers can use so their games can be adjustable as well.

“We want to break the mold of having [VR] experiences that are nauseating and awesome or comfortable and boring,” Oates says. “And instead make games everybody can play and play at their own pace.”