It's kind of interesting... I remember when tales of "motion sickness from 3D games" was first reported with early 3D (and raycaster) titles, primarily WolfenStein 3D, Doom, and Descent... And then such stories more or less vanished. Apparently there actually was more to them than I thought.

Well, for the most part, console games from the Xbox onward, the console FOV has been 75 degrees. Part of it, yes, has been to reduce the load on the machine, but also part of it was to compensate for the fact that a lot of consoles are being hooked up to widescreen televisions, and that FOV is the VERTICAL level; at 4:3 (as per normal PC monitors) 90 degrees vertical equals 120 horizontal, while on 16:9, 90 degrees vertical would be a whole 160... Where some distortion would definitely start to feel noticeable. (120-135 is about the safe maximum) Cutting the vertical to 75 degrees for 16:9 results in a 133 1/3 degree horizontal view. This results in close to the same visual area: the old PC arrangement yielded a view of 10,800 degrees2, to 10,000 degrees2 for the console arrangement. (~3.29 vs, ~3.05 steradians)

OP never asked for this.

:hubbahubba:

Not to mention, it's rather unfortunate that it means they'd have to give up taking whatever other augmentations would go into that slot.

Hmm... eyelasers+mind control or not throwing up when playing Skyrim? What a cruel, cruel world.

Oh god, you guys were right about MW3. Just watched the YouTube "Wtf is MW3" video and it actually made me feel nauseous. :sick:

This sounds like a night of heavy drinking for me.

>Normal PC Monitor = 4:3.

What?! Really? Literally everyone I know has a widescreen monitor. Playing FPS on a 4:3 monitor looks too weird to me. (uses a 16:9 television as a monitor)

Chalk it up to poor phrasing on my part; I assume full responsibility for that. I should clarify that as "traditional PC monitors." Up until a few years back, they made up the significant majority of monitors used with gaming; it wasn't until more recently that they started getting displaced by widescreens. (and most PC widescreens still are more square than TVs, as they tend to be 16:10 rather than 16:9)

I specifically mentioned the 4:3 ones as they were what was standard for PCs around the time of the original Xbox, when it started introducing the concept of 75-degree view angles... Or at least started making them highly noticeable.

Specifically, when I stopped watching people play UT over their shoulders.




@Schnakers
heavily drinking drain-o, yes.


..and just to reiterate:

Don't play when you're tired. <-- I end up in utter barfs-ville, no fun. :nope:

Woah, I didn't know this was so common, guess I'm lucky to be immune to motion sickness and headaches (no really, in 18 years and nearly 11 months I have not had a single headache that I can remember and I've never been motion sick, not even when reading in a car).

Neither did I until I hit forty.. what ya gonna do? :shrug:


at least you got time

Reading in a car for more than 30 mins sdghwetydf my mind until the point I have to stop. :wacko:

I've actually get this way when I play Wolfenstein 3D for some reason.

As others have said, it's probably related to the FOV - Field of View.

Some games let you change the FOV through console commands though. Eg. the PC version of Gears of War let you change the FOV by typing "fov 100" in the console.
Not all games let you do this though. Some people have said Skyrim let you too, so you should be fine for Skyrim.

It's a bummer that Modern Warfare 2 + 3 don't let you change the FOV, even though all the other games (Black Ops, Modern Warfare 1, Call of Duty 2) let you.

With older games, I think a significant factor might've been the less-than-perfect perspective that they calculated. Partly, it was due to the lower precision available. The net result is that surfaces wouldn't quite take proper perspective, and screw with your perception, yielding motion sickness for some.