This year, researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio - John Quarles and Samuel Ang - introduced the world to GingerVR. Fittingly named after the root whose reputation as an antidote for nausea precedes itself - GingerVR is a toolkit for VR developers to use in designing their software, aiming to lessen the chances of their users experiencing cybersickness.
Cybersickness is the oft-debilitating phenomenon where VR users experience nausea, dizziness, eye strain, fatigue, and/or headaches whilst in VR. It’s basically motion sickness, VR Edition. Although we can recognize the symptoms, the reasoning behind why it’s a thing, and why it’s a thing for an estimated more than half of VR users, remains shrouded in uncertainty.
Until we unveil more findings that irrefutably explain this - and develop more sophisticated tech that will itself lower the risks of cybersickness - Quarles and Ang have created a handy toolkit for VR software developers that will hopefully tide us over.
We chatted to Quarles and Ang themselves to gain a better idea of what GingerVR is, and what it aims to do.
What Is GingerVR?
GingerVR is a software package that, upon its release, comprised eight anti-cybersickness design assets that can be efficiently integrated into any Unity-built VR project, with a ninth asset having since been added. The assets are based on tried-and-tested techniques from the existing body of cybersickness research.
The techniques vary from motion blurring and FOV blocking, to adding a nose-like object to the user’s virtual FOV to simulate the nose that sits suspended in front of our real-life FOVs, amongst others. The nose technique is particularly interesting, as there is some evidence that its inclusion helps ease VR-induced disorientation as it acts as a natural-feeling rest frame.
Going With The Motions
Many of the included assets are based on research that highlights the role of motion in motion sickness (imagine that!). “You’re not going to feel motion sick sitting in a chair with a blindfold on,” Ang points out. It’s still not fully understood, but it seems that reducing the amount of visual information bombarding the VR-wearer eases the experience of cybersickness.
GingerVR’s Vision Lock - which allows users to click a button that prevents the image on the screen from changing as they move their head - means that less movement is being perceived. The same goes for the Gaussian Blur, Vision Snapper, and Dynamic Field of View assets - all share this concept of dampening the visual overload experienced by users.
The Dot Effect asset similarly tricks one’s perception of motion. A 3D grid of virtual orbs is suspended around you, programmed to move in the same direction as you but twice your velocity at all times. “It’s very hard to explain without experiencing it yourself,” says Ang.“It feels like things are moving closer [to you], but that you yourself aren’t moving. It almost feels like you’re dragging the scene around with you instead of moving through the scene.”
Which Is Best?
With such variation seen in those who experience cybersickness, it’s difficult if not impossible to say which - if any - techniques would prove most effective. Unfortunately at this stage a fair amount of trial and error seems like the only way to proceed.
Luckily, though, GingerVR makes it easier for developers to play around with a range of established techniques until, hopefully, they can settle upon some that work. Multiple assets can also be implemented simultaneously, so looking into which combinations of techniques work well would be an interesting undertaking. Of course, the type of application being made will determine which assets are implementable.
Enhancing VR Accessibility
GingerVR’s aim appears to be twofold. Those who would otherwise be prevented from immersing themselves in the wonder of this fast-developing tech might find solace in these game features. But additionally, thanks to this toolkit, the workload of developers will be eased up too. According to Ang:
The idea behind GingerVR was to look through the literature and gather up all of these different techniques, and then implement them into one software package.
So, instead of everyone separately using up their valuable time and resources researching and building anti-cybersickness techniques from the ground-up each time, GingerVR can step in as a handy starting point that is standardized and already based on a solid body of past research.
If you’re a developer, a researcher or a student and you just want a head-start, you have this software package that contains all these techniques from the literature already.
The best part is that it’s all open source too, so any developer can access all the necessary code for free, and can easily perform any personalized tweaks as needed.
If you’re developing in Unity, [you can] swap these techniques in and out, see what works with your project, see what you can build off of, and see what you can improve on.
The Future Of GingerVR
A huge part of the motivation behind GingerVR was to establish an ever-expanding repertoire of usable resources. “There is a lot of new literature coming out on this every year, so we’re working to incorporate that into GingerVR as we go,” says Ang. So if you’re keen on becoming a prospective contributor - or if you’d like to integrate these features into your own VR software, you can find free access to GingerVR’s code on GitHub.
“We hope that we can get this out there and get more people contributing to it. That’s the magic of open source,” co-lead researcher Quarles says.
Source: Ang & Quarles (2020)
