'Zero percent' of Vive headset users get motion sick, Valve boss says

With several consumer products planned to release within the next year, VR is officially taking off (again). But if you're one of those unfortunate few who turns green at the sight of a head-mounted display, it may not sound very promising.

Motion sickness has been a huge problem for virtual reality ever since it looked like something out of The Lawnmower Man, but Valve boss Gabe Newell says his company and hardware partner HTC have finally cracked it with the help of… wait for it… lasers.

As you might expect, a physical-space tracking system for virtual reality is pretty complicated. But in a nutshell, Lighthouse uses two laser-emitting base units which are placed at different points in a room, allowing the sensor-speckled Vive headset to track changes in the user's position. This Tested video has a pretty good primer on the tech, if you want to know more.

Couple this with the standard array of gyrometers and other motion tracking methods, and you have a system that can follow you around a 15-by-15 foot area in great detail, a system that Newell says will finally keep motion-sickness prone folks like himself from tossing their cookies.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.