“I’ve been working with helmet mounted displays in military flight simulation for several decades – I am an expert in the field.IMHO
– these devices should be banned – but that may not be necessary
because after the first wave of early adopters I think it’ll go the way
of 3D televisions. But that’s just my opinion. Let me explain why.

Everyone
thinks these things are new and revolutionary…but they really aren’t.
All that’s happened is that they dropped in price from $80,000 to
$500…and many corners have been cut along the way.

There
are several claims that the nausea problem has either been fixed, or
will soon be fixed, or that application design can be used to
work-around the problem.

The claims that it’s
been fixed are based on the theory that the nausea is caused by
latency/lag in the system, or by low resolution displays or by
inaccurate head motion tracking…all of which can (and are) being fixed
by obvious improvements to the system. Sadly, the $80,000 googles we
made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays,
and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of
civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick – so this seems
unlikely.

The problem is that the people who
make those claims are either ignorant (or are deliberately ignoring) the
evidence collected over 20 years of flight simulation experience with
VR goggles (only we called them “Helmet Mounted Displays” – HMD’s – and
what we did was called “simulation” and not “virtual reality”).”