If you're finding yourself getting a headache and feeling nauseous while playing the PS VR2,
you're not alone, but changing this one setting just may cure this for you. Or if not cure it,
at least help you play much longer before beginning to feel uncomfortable.
With your PS VR2 headset on, we're going to press the Playstation button on one of
our Sense controllers and then press X on our Playstation VR2 Quick Settings. We're
then going down to Screen Brightness, press X on it and then using our thumb
stick we're going to turn this all the way down to zero, press X to confirm,
aaannnnd that's it! You can now play your games and while they won't be as bright and vibrant as
they were before, you will find your level of comfort is going to increase immensely.
Now you're probably wondering why this video has a good 5 minutes or
so remaining in it. I've already told you the setting to change,
so what else is there? You are of course free to leave this video right now if you'd like,
but if you want to actually learn something and find out why turning the brightness down helps
then stick around, because I'm going to talk about how I learned this and why this works right now.
I've been playing VR for close to 2 years now, and felt I had well established my VR legs in
this time. Using smooth motion did make me motion sick when I first started playing
VR but after a few months of slowly easing into it I got my VR legs under me and most
things in VR haven't bothered me since then. When I started playing the PS VR2
though I was surprised games similar to what I play all the time on my Quest 2 and PC VR,
and have no problem with, were giving me a bit of a headache and even making me feel nauseous.
I wondered what was going on? Why was the PS VR2 making me feel sick like this? My first thought
was maybe it was the fact that some of the games I was playing weren't running at a true 120fps.
For those of you that don't know, the displays in the Playstation VR2 are 120Hz OLED panels,
which means they can display images up to 120 frames per second. The problem is the
hardware in the Playstation 5 isn't capable of running some of the PS VR2 games at 120 fps,
so what they do instead is run the game at 60fps and use a technique called reprojection
or warping which uses data from previous frames along with your head motion data
to approximate frames and insert them between the real frames bringing the frame rate up to 120fps.
So in some games, like Horizon Call of the Mountain, basically half of
the frames you're seeing are real frames and half of them are approximated "fake"
frames. About half the time reprojection like this works just fine and you can't
tell the difference but the other half the time you see some weird things happening.
Anyway, getting back to the story, I mostly play PC VR and I'm used playing at a consistent 90 or
120fps, so I thought maybe it was the reprojection that was messing with my
head. I then decided to go to Twitter and ask if anyone else was getting sick using the PS VR2,
and one of my lovely followers told me to watch a PS VR2 review video from SadlyIt'sBradley,
which he'd recently posted, and I got a little education in something called frame persistence.
First off, I've got to give SadlyIt'sBradley a huge shout
out because his information is just pure gold to me.
According to him, in the early 2010's VR developers found the longer a frame is displayed
the more likely people were to experience motion sickness in VR. At 120 frames per second,
in a normal flat screen game, a frame would be displayed for one 120th of a second,
which sounds really fast right? But, for VR, they found even this is WAY too long
for people to feel comfortable. After, what I'm sure was a bunch of trial and error,
they found if they displayed a frame for around one 1000th of a second and then displayed a black
screen for the rest of that frames duration this greatly reduced people's discomfort.
Sony, in order to meet their marketing claims of having the brightest display
of any VR headset on the market with a luminance value of 265 nits,
ships the PS VR2 set to 100% brightness. Using a high speed camera and filming through the lenses
of several different VR headsets for comparison, Brad found in order to make the image brighter
Sony was leaving the pixels turned on longer when the headset was set to 100% brightness;
leaving each frame up for closer to one 500th of a second rather than one 1000th of a second.
While this is an extremely small amount of time our eyes and brains pick up on this
slightly longer frame persistence and it causes a lot of people, myself included,
to experience motion sickness more easily with the PS VR2 than with other VR headsets.
He then experimented with turning the PS VR's brightness down, and found at 0% this
decreased the frame persistence much closer to that magical one 1000th of a second and while
the display is noticeably less bright it made using the PS VR2, for both him and for me, much
more comfortable. I now have no problem playing Call of the Mountain or other games like Pavlov
for hours at a time. Where as before I started getting a headache after only an hour or so.
For those that are brand new to VR and are still trying to get your VR legs,
lowering the brightness probably isn't going to be quite enough. The biggest tip I have
for people that are new to VR is to just take it easy. When you start feeling a little motion sick,
do not try to push through it. All that happens if you do that is you feel more and more sick
and then you don't want to use VR ever again because all it does is make you feel miserable.
If you stop as soon as you start feeling uncomfortable and take a break for awhile,
you can come back once you're feeling better and try again. Slowly, over the course of
days or possibly even weeks, depending on your individual situation, your brain and body will
get used to it and you'll eventually be able to enjoy all the amazing experiences VR has to offer.
This is a bit off topic but if you're curious about the gunstock I'm using in the footage
you're seeing right now, you can check out my review for it by clicking on this video here.