‘The idea that VR must get you sick is b******t’

Valve writer Chet Faliszek has said that virtual reality does not inherently cause motion sickness.

Instead, Games Industry reports that Faliszek told an EGX audience that the blame for any sickness experienced by players must lie with developers, as the hardware itself is now good enough to avoid such problems.

"The idea that VR must get you sick is [bullshit]," he said. "As consumers and people in the community, hold developers to it. They shouldn’t be making you sick. It’s no longer the hardware’s fault any more. It’s the developers making choices that are making you sick. Tell them that you don’t want that.

"We have people come in who don’t want to do demos. In a party of ten people there will be someone who says, ‘I’m gonna be sick, I’m gonna be sick, I can’t do this’. That expectation is based on either what they’ve seen before or what they’ve heard."

Faliszek did concede, however, that conventional controllers such as a joypad or keyboard can trigger sickness – a problem solved by new VR-friendly input methods such as HTC Vive’s motion-tracking Lighthouse set-up.

EA warned in November of last year that the industry must unite to rid VR of its motion sickness issue. Some developers have even abandoned VR altogether due to the worries. However, Valve boss Gabe Newell said earlier this year that its HTC Vive technology had a zero per cent” sickness rate.