TheEconomistNovember 23rd 2019 711T
he wholehistory of fiction shows that
alternative realities are an attractive
and profitable idea. So back in the 1990s,
when electronics had arrived at a point
where people could build headsets that
blocked off actual reality and replaced it
with a virtual version created inside a com-
puter, it looked as if something world-
changing might have arrived. Games com-
panies were particularly excited, and Nin-
tendo, Sega and Virtuality duly piled in.
The world, however, stubbornly refused
to be changed. It might have put up with
the low-resolution images, the choppy
scene transitions and the poor controls, for
these would surely have got better. It might
also have put up with the price (the head-
sets in question could cost up to $70,000),
for that would surely have come down. It
could not, though, accommodate the dizzi-
ness, nausea, eye strain, vomiting, head-
aches, sweating and disorientation that
many of the technology’s users (more than
60%, according to one study) complained
of—a set of symptoms that, collectively,
have come to be called “cyber-sickness”.
Though not fatal to people, cyber-sickness
certainly helped damage the industry,
which more or less vanished.
Two decades later, however, virtual re-
ality (vr) returned from the dead, with bet-
ter images, smoother transitions and more
precise controls. There were also applica-
tions beyond games. The upgraded tech-
nology has found use in social media, inte-
rior design, job training and even pain
management. Moreover, a new set of com-
panies, Oculus (now part of Facebook), htc
and Sony, have come up with products that
do not require a second mortgage to afford.
Despite these improvements, though,
vrhas not lived up to expectations. It has
done respectably, with sales in 2018 of
$3.6bn, according to SuperData Research, a
market research firm. But that is only 2.4%of the global market for games. Many peo-
ple—and not just the usual hypesters—
thought that this time around vrwould be-
come a blockbuster technology. It has not
happened. Part of the reason is that cyber-
sickness has not gone away. One study sug-
gests between 25% and 40% of users still
experience it.
Dealing with this is difficult, not least
because there is an argument about what
triggers it in the first place. Two theories
dominate. One is that users experience
sensory conflict—a mismatch between
what they see and what their other senses
and their real-world knowledge tell them
they should be experiencing. The other is
that the underlying cause is individuals’
inability to control their bodies and main-
tain proper posture when moving around
in virtual environments. To complicate
matters, both hypotheses could be true.Feeling woozy
Sensory conflict there certainly is. For ex-
ample, when users move their heads they
expect what they see to change immediate-
ly in response. But time-lags and poor
graphics mean their visual input often fails
to meet the brain’s expectations. Dealing
with this means increasing the “frame rate”
at which the virtual world is presented to a
user, improving the resolution of the im-
ages and reducing the latency of response
to a user’s movements. All of these require
clever processing by the computer respon-
sible for creating the illusion.
Improvements in tracking what a userVirtual reality
Lost in cyberspace
VR continues to make people sick—and women more so than men
Science & technology
72 Worm-proofingsheep
73 Medicalisotopes
73 Notachievingclimategoals
74 Solar-powered trainsAlso in this section