Tipsy McStagger wrote on Mar 2, 2020, 22:09:
You can get very sick, very fast in VR. Your disassociation with body movement but eyes fully perceiving movement really can get you motion sick.

This is why for VR to truely take off, you need a cheap omnidirectional treadmill.

Omnidirectional treadmills have been explored quite heavily over the past few years but the consensus at this point is that:
(1) They are too large and expensive to be viable for at home gaming
(2) They are too energy intensive. It's hard enough to just get people to stand to play VR (which is why I think seated modes are critical and thankfully HLA will have one)
(3) They don't even solve the fundamental issue causing simulator sickness: the desynchronization between the movement perceived vestibularly and the movement perceived visually. To solve the problem one needs to actually stimulate the vestibular system. For some people they can slightly mitigate the issue by giving the *expectation* of movement, but they don't actually solve the fundamental problem
(4) Even if all of the above weren't problems, the experience of actually using these things is rather clunky because while they claim to simulate walking/running, the experience of the current implementations is more like "sliding", and so much of the geometry and the way these things strap you in interferes with movement. You end up using it as an abstraction for movement rather than walking/running naturally, so they're rather poor even from an immersion standpoint.

Contrary to popular belief, most people can get their VR legs (adapt to smooth locomotion) with some controlled exposure over a week or two. Once you get to that point, joystick locomotion offers a much better experience than these expensive, bulky, and clunky devices. So most people should just get their VR legs. And if they're one of the unlucky few that can't get their VR legs, unfortunately they're just going to have to accept this fact and stick to teleport (or stick with flat gaming and pray that some genius comes up with a solution to the actual problem)