Treadmills to endless hallways, tech has some sick solutions for VR nausea

OXFORD, England—I first met Dr. Charles King at his "graduation" from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media Techstars accelerator. The pitch he delivered to a packed audience in London described how ROVR—the company he started in 2012 with co-founder Julian Williams—was addressing a fundamental problem with the much-touted Virtual Reality boom: No matter how fun your content is, if it makes people throw up, it’s probably an experience they can do without.

According to King, two-thirds of us experience some degree of discomfort in VR even if we don’t quite “sell the Buick” as he so colorfully puts it. But Simulator Sickness (SS) is no laughing matter. A handful of experts say that exposure to some forms of VR can be as disorientating as getting drunk, and they call for headsets such as the Oculus and HTC Vive to be banned until more research is done on the long-term effects this has on our eyes and brain.

The safety of VR is a subject very close to my heart. I love VR, and writing about it is not something I can do without actually experiencing it first-hand. Yet I was always one of those annoying kids who had to sit at the front of the bus, and I started getting woozy in the car after about 15 minutes. To this day, I find it difficult to read on the train and usually resort to motion sickness tablets to get me through long-haul flights. Boats? Don’t even go there.

Susceptibility to VR sickness varies quite a lot from person to person, but research indicates that there is a general correlation between a propensity toward motion sickness and susceptibility to SS. While I certainly fit that description, simulator sickness is different from normal motion sickness. SS is not caused by actual motion but by the visual information from a simulated environment. In the absence of motion, an uncomfortable conflict is created between the visual, vestibular (balance), and proprioceptive (bodily position) senses.

So when, following his Techstars demo, King invited me to try out the Wizdish—a VR treadmill that claims to solve this illness problem by providing a more natural interface between the users and their virtual environment—I arranged to meet them in Oxford, where the company is currently based.

From "VR treadmill" to saving your subconscious

ROVR’s home locale is no coincidence; this is not some happy-go-lucky startup, but a rigorously researched venture grounded on quite a lot of hard science. Neither founder exactly fits the stereotype most people would associate with tech entrepreneurs (it is safe to say that King was by far the oldest presenter at the demo day), and both come from solid professional backgrounds. Williams worked as an engineer for the BBC for more than 30 years, while King has decades of experience as a consultant in the corporate sector and a doctorate in Physics, Metallurgy, and Science of Materials.

How did the two meet? “Serendipity is often the path to invention,” King tells me as we drive from the train station to the lab at Oxford Brookes University where they tested their current prototype. Williams had been interested in Virtual Reality technology since 2001, and he filed the patent for the “VR Treadmill” concept in 2008. The concept worked by simulating walking movements through sliding your feet backward and forward on the device surface using roller skates.

This turned out to be far from ideal, however, as the level of friction was simply too low. Wearing the skates ended up changing people’s perception of height, thus interfering with their experience. “We hold a body map in our brain, and this is extraordinarily important,” King explains. “If you become taller for any reason, all of a sudden your center of mass goes up, your center of balance changes, and the body has to do a lot more work to keep you stable.”

So Williams put the word out that he needed to find a low-friction alternative that would allow people to freely move their legs on a surface without wheels, and a mutual acquaintance introduced him to King. By this point, King had a well-earned reputation as a materials expert. And what Williams didn’t realize at the time, King says, was that his design was tapping into an overarching neurological truth.

“You’ve walked a lot today, but if you actually wracked your brain about how you did it, there are no memories,” he says. It turns out it’s a process we all do unconsciously by the time of adulthood:

If we were to process all of the individual actions required to walk on our active conscious, our RAM couldn’t handle it. Once you get past toddler stage and you’ve fallen over and stumbled and done all the things that are necessary in order to learn to walk, it becomes an autonomous action. You’ve only got to look at someone who loses consciousness while standing to see how quickly they hit the deck. It takes a lot of work just to stand up, and walking is not something we’re inherently stable at. The way that Julian had arranged for the user’s legs to move turned out to mimic that familiar instability of walking, and thus tapped into one of our subconscious natural processes. Because we do not carry memories of how we move our legs when we walk, run, or climb stairs, how we move on a ROVR quickly becomes, as in real life, pushed to non-conscious action, leaving the conscious mind free to experience the content.