Hi All,

My team is about to start active development on a VR Action Platformer. We're partially worried about causing too much VR sickness (enough for people to take off the headset). If you could please read the idea below and let me know what you think.

Game Idea:
VR Action Platformer where the player plays as a hero in training. The player gains new superpowers by completing missions and exploring the general area. Each power has a movement (and possibly attack) focused ability. By combining multiple abilities players will be able to create their traversal systems (allowing the player to adapt the VR experience to what they can enjoy). We plan for the missions to be timed courses where you have to get to location in a certain amount or catch up to a specific object. We also want to add in attacking, however, we fear it might be a bit much with the fast movement in VR. Finally, we plan to add a ton of skins and visual focused loot.

We created a survey to see if people would be interested in the idea before we started active development. We'd really appreciate it if you could fill out the survey if you like or hate the general idea. We also didn't just want to put out the survey without giving back so included at the end of the survey is a link to a 4k wallpaper from a level mockup we did.
 
Only 3 minutes to complete, and we'll love you forever!
http://info.dvnc.tech/vr-idea-survey

Thanks for reading and please let me know what you think!

I’ve tried a few VR systems and motion sickness doesn’t bother me much, but I mostly played stuff like Elite: Dangerous. 

I don’t know how comfortable I’d be playing a platformer, and I’m pretty sure most people are worse than me for motion sickness. 

Most VR is obsessed with first person because its assumed this is the best way to use it but third person can help reduce motion sickness. If the camera is pulled behind a moving avatar that the player can fix on some of the effects of motion sickness are mitigated. Vertical motion can also be reduced as the camera follows the player on its own trajectory etc. 

My (educated) guess is that a fast-paced 1st person platformer will be immediately nausea-inducing in ~80% of your potential audience. But I'm not aware of a lot of public research on the topic, so your best bet may be to mock up a quick example of the type of motion in Unity, and test it on your family and (soon to be former) friends

Third person platformers seem to be a lot better, albeit with some careful constraints on rapid camera movement. All of the 1st person platformers I have tried in VR are designed to e really, really, glacially slow.

My personal experience is that third person cameras with mininal sway and bob seem to work well. First person cameras that jump about cause nausea when i'm tired at around the 20 minute mark, while if i'm caffinated and/or alert, i'm usually good until i get dehydrated.

For example, Mirrors Edge - even though its not a VR game will trigger me after about 15 minutes if tired - while i can play various VR games that dont have the camera shake/effects in first person for a few hours at a time.

Sounds like motion sickness will be a problem. The best you can do is make a prototype and try it out.

Google earth for VR has a mode when you move the edges of the view fade to a non moving grid and that helps combat it pretty well. You could make that a setting for the user. Good luck.

I have played a few mario ripoffs on steam, plarformers do not give me motion sickness, because the brain takes control of the view differently just as you would play a simple non-VR platformer, it's just a little more immersive. It takes a few minutes to get used to, but other than that i don't know. It might be the other way around for some

1st person, no chance, unless maybe you are piloting a mech or something and have a fixed cockpit which can help a lot with motion sickness. 3rd person with a fixed (head movement only) camera can work really well.