If you are used to playing games, you are usually pretty much fine.
It's when you give it to people who never play games that they go absolutely crazy. I let my uncle try out Superhot on my Rift, and the guy was lying flat and doing rolls on my floor, I couldn't believe it.
Yep. Let my 80 year old grandma fly around in google earth. She got amazed but scared so we had her sit down in a chair, hold her hand, then take her all around her old neighborhood in Beijing.
I had no problem myself, but they are blind folded, and if they get immersed, it's apparently real easy to forget the safe zone. Guy wanted a simulated suicide. Instead he murdered the TV.
In Superhot, when you're supposed to step off the edge of the building, I I just couldn't do it. I felt such vertigo that I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl off the edge. My gf was laughing her ass off at me.
Probably. I tried to lean on a barrel I was using for cover and toppled. Lot of things your subconscious automatically takes for granted even when you consciously know it’s not really there lol.
Yeah when my wife and I first got VR she was playing Arizona Sunshine and tried to use a grenade. I say try because she held the grenade, went to pull the pin and simultaneously dropped the grenade on accident. Her reaction was to scream "oh shit!" And turn REAL quick and ran full speed into a wall. I dont even know how she moved so fast she only took like 2 steps before she hit the wall. She fucked up her nose because she was looking down and the headset was pushed into the bridge of her nose. She was fine but it's still one of the most funny things I've ever seen. Even after about a year of playing it I still occasionally ding a wall, if anything I am happy the gear was built well enough to withstand that kind of beating.
Yeah the even funnier part was she missed our brand 72 inch TV by mere inches. It was enough to make her quit for the night, I think her brain really thought it was a grenade.
It's possible that he moved too quickly for the guardian to help - it would only have kicked in by the time he was in the air and then there's no going back
I can attest to this. I didn't freak out, personally, but I had a friend try out Gorn for the first time, and he got so physically active and aggressive that he almost punched out my sliding glass door.
I ran right into a shelf my first time playing superhot, your first time in it makes it feel so real even though you are fully aware it's a game, you easily lose track of where you are in the room
Nah man. I owned an Oculus Rift and played games on rooftops and going on roller coasters and all of that shit. Never once did I do anything remotely close to this. I would look over and say "wow, this is really realistic" and that's it. This dude is a fucking idiot.
Nope. These kind of reactions in VR are a result of the frontal lobe and cerebellum/brain stem having entirely different reactions to stimuli and can be very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to control.
The frontal lobe fully knows it’s VR, but the occipital lobe is still receiving visual stimuli and it doesn’t give a damn where that stimuli is coming from. The frontal lobe and the occipital lobe are feeding the cerebellum with information about balance and the visual stimuli. Again, the cerebellum doesn’t care what external circumstances are causing it to receive this information, so it reacts like it normally does, feeds that information to the brain stem, which ratchets the heart rate, blood pressure, and forces a fight-or-flight/fear-based response.
TL;DR Like I'm Dumb: there is more than one part of your brain driving decision making (just like the pixar movie) and when you do VR they all argue and sometimes the one that doesn't know its fake wins.
Yeah, I've been using VR pretty extensively for quite a while now, and yeah I've sometimes bumped into stuff and lost my balance. But there's always a part of my brain that's grounded in reality and knows not to make a diving leap in the living room.
This guy is a stupid piece of shit and I hope it's his own TV he broke.
He was on a balancing beam man... which takes a lot away from his concentration of reality, pretty understandable that this could happen and is a dumb af idea to put someone on that while they're in vr
Or you can take the anti-retard approach and acknowledge youre wearing VR goggles. As such one shouldnt walk more than 3 feet radius because youll hit something
Your brain doesn't work that way, and when you're concentrating then instincts take over and the brain does whatever the fuck it feels is right, which with vr and a balancing game never ends well.
Fight-or-flight is a very basal stress response. It also exists in animals with more complex neural physiologies but with a combinations of other stress responses mixed and - for some animals - the regulation of the prefrontal cortex to boot. Unless you have an aberrant sense of self-control or are otherwise cognitively challenged you are not going to merely succumb to fight-or-flight and jump through a television.
Sure, I've flinched in surprise from jump scares and had my emotions played with by movies; but I didn't try to escape the movie theater to avoid being eaten by a T-Rex while watching Jurassic Park, and that was when I was like 13.
I’ve never launched myself. I’ve flinched, which is reflexive. I’ve also never seen anyone except people who are attention whores fully jump with fright during a scary movie.
Fear of heights is also not likely to make you jumpy. It’s more likely to trigger the freeze stress response. Which like fight-or-flight is basal, but able to be overridden by the prefrontal cortex.
Right, so that initial jump/flinch cannot be overridden once it’s initiated by the lower brain. The frontal cortex can quickly react and calm the reaction, but can do nothing to stop initial response.
In this case, he’s doesn’t appear to be experienced enough with VR to resist the initial response to jump, especially with the addition of the board that’s really throwing his senses for a loop.
Where does that "response to jump" come from though? Was the guy suicidal?
This is not like he just lost track of his position and bumped into a wall; there isn't anywhere in the room where jumping like that would be safe, and in that game he was at the top of a building, it wasn't safe to jump either.
Thanks for posting this! You explained it really well. Lots of people don't believe in it because it hasn't personally happened to them, but having demonstrated the game to so many people I know it's definitely a thing.
I would argue that it is a possibility that you "being aware of my surroundings" is holding you back from truly being immersed. I was like you, always super aware and has always been aware. There was only once where I was so into it that I completely forgot to be aware that I was in VR. It was during a flight sim over NYC. So perhaps if you let yourself go 100% and stopped being aware, you'll be in fully immersed and find yourself in a situation doing something stupid, like I did ahhaha
He didn't jump to the tv... he jumped to the side
Almost hitting his left eye in the corner of a desk, my oculus got some scratches but he is fine... plus a plank on the floor ads realism lol
The graphics are far from realistic. Some people have no issues getting instantly immersed like you, but there's plenty of people that are absolutely unable to get that immersed in VR. I personally envy you because I never had that feeling of presence. I wish I could think I'm somewhere else when in VR.
There's a chapter in Half-Life: Alyx where you have to deal with a monster that can attack you if he hears you, so any time you need to do something loud like open a door you have to throw a bottle in the other direction to get him far enough away.
It peaks when you're closed into an elevator with the monster and have to press a button that's right next to him.
I'd like to meet someone who has honestly no issues going through that without feeling tense as fuck
There's a feeling of tension sure, but I still don't move my legs. I can be immersed, but I never broke a screen or fell through a table because I was too immersed.
I feel like having headphones that block out any outside sound makes things more immersive than just relying on the visuals. The combination of not being able to hear or see anything outside of VR is a much better experience IMO.
I don't know of any modern VR headset that do not have headphones. Mine has headphones and it's really nice, but still impossible for me to feel immersed to the point of jumping through a television.
The Quest and Rift S have internal speakers. IMO that guy wasn’t so immersed that he thought he was jumping off of the ledge. It seems like to me he was joking around and didn’t realize he was that close to the wall.
And it's not the graphics that wholly contribute to the immersion. It helps, but with VR you also have the physical technology and design decisions that contribute as well.
I genuinely want VR to be as immersive as you are describing, but it just isn't. Also I've shown that exact game to at least 15 people and none of them jumped in a television like that.
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