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Virtual reality makers know that fending off motion sickness is absolutely crucial if the sector hopes to have a successful future.
The key criteria to avoiding a trip to pukesville is making sure VR titles run smoothly and consistently. It’s so important, in fact, that Sony has warned devs that if their titles fail to run at a solid and steady 60fps they will likely be blocked from release on PlayStation VR.
"I know I’m going to get flagged for this but there’s no excuse for not hitting framerate,” senior staff engineer Chris Norden said at GDC, Polygon reports. You cannot drop below 60 fps. Period. Ever. I can’t stress that enough.
"If you submit a game to us and you drop down to 30 or 35 or 51 we’re probably going to reject it."
However, Sony has also said that it has a VR taskforce ready to visit developers to ensure devs aren’t mistakenly submitting games for failed certification. It will also test their titles and help them technically to meet the requirements.
This is not a required pre-certification step, but is open to all those hoping to launch on the platform.
"We’re going to play your game and look for technical correctness," Norden added. "We’re going to provide you a report [that calls out] possible nausea triggers, find places where you’re dropping framerate and where you’ve got stutters in your tracking.
"We’re going to feed that back to you very early in your cycle so that you can adjust your design iteration if you need to, get your technical guys working with our engineers to help you optimize, and just clean up the game and make it as smooth a VR experience as possible."
