I was quite enthusiastic of VR at first. Then I had to try it.
I have a physical condition that forces me to wear glasses with prisms
Plus, VR headsets are very uncomfortable when wearing glasses, at least at the time, I don't know now.
Finally, after 10 minutes of playing, I got so sick that I had to remove the helmet and keep still for another 15 minutes.
The final nail in the coffin was when I learned that my rig was simply not enough to run the game at high settings. i7 6600k 4ghz+ 1070GTX + 1tb ssd + 16Gb RAM.
It is then that I understood that VR was not for me.
And not because I choose to, but because I was not given a choice.
If VR is a nice bonus for those fortunate enough to adopt it, I'm fine with that.
But if it becomes the only solution, I think that is extremely unfair for a lot of people that simply don't have that kind of money, or the optimal physical condition for it.
Oof. Where to begin... First things first: if someone is new to VR, the VR owner should be responsible and not put the VRgin through something like Elite Dangerous or Onward (read: free locomotion, wild camera movements in 6 degrees of freedom). Or god forbid a roller coaster for kicks and giggles. I really wouldn't recommend Elite as first experience, unless you're stationary in the menu - in VR version you're standing in the hangar next to HUGE SRV and even more HUGE Eagle, and the hangar is VAST. But I digress. For first experience, something stationary is recommended, like a wave shooter or something. There's also individual biometrics at play, namely your head shape and interpupilary distance (IPD). If the headset has wrong IPD set, you will see blurry, double, ghosting, chromatic aberration, and it will greatly add to the nausea.
Headset should be adjusted properly, so that lenses center are as coaxial with your pupils as possible, hence the need for IPD regulation. Some cheapskate vendors try to weasel out of the IPD hardware slider as it drives up the cost (looking at you HP Reverb and Oculus Rift S). One should avoid models without IPD regulation unless his/her IPD is ~64mm.
Now regarding glasses, IDK what HMD did you try. There's sufficient room for glasses in Valve Index. There are also companies that offer VR prescription lens inserts for your hmd, like
https://vidmovr.com/ or
https://vr-lens-lab.com/ . That or you can use contact lenses if you are able.
Back to your first experience - getting nauseous on your first try, depending on the content used, is completely normal. You should stop immediately at first signs of sickness and take a break. Machine used to demo is also important, if it's potato pc and frames are not up to par, VRgin will "suffer". VRvet will only shrug and notice the choppy framerate.
As for your rig, it's not its fault. It's Elite engine being crappy in general. Also, VR is demanding, you need compromises on crappy engines. Again lots of factors could be contributing. Rift had "hidden supersampling" back in the day which kicked in at random moments when the drivers felt that they have overhead. SteamVR does this stupid, stupid auto resolution thingy which needs to be adjusted often per application basis, because it's overly optimistic. It's better shown by example:
I was using VR on an i5-3570k 8GB RAM and first GTX 670 (DK2) then 1070 (vive) and finally 1080Ti till a year ago when I finally upgraded the CPU to an i7-9700k and bought an Index. And that puny i5 (granted overclocked to 4.2GHz) was able to pull many games including Elite for so many years, thanks to Intel's greed and incremental cpu upgrades ;-)
Don't self-eliminate... what you describe is nothing out of the ordinary. If you were demoed Elite, I am not surprised you had nausea, especially with what you wrote about glasses. HTC Vive had ample space for glasses, provided you knew that you can move the panels a little back. I still remember lifting straight up from a Coriolis pad gave me butterflies in my stomach. And not the good kind. It all went away after ~6 weeks. I have now 116 hrs in Onward which is a VR FPS, no problems whatsoever. But, some poor souls never do adapt. Also some poor souls get epillepsy when playing on a monitor. I suspect the percentages are about the same
I still remember my first contact with VR on a crappy DK2. It was a simple table with a house built of cards on it. Not interactive, nothing. But the wow effect was so huge I promptly called my wife and practically dragged her to my friend's house to try it
And she was amazed like a kid in the candystore
There was also this dinosaur experience where you watched big saurs and then an egg started to crack... And then my friend showed us a rollercoaster. None of us had any knowledge about VR at that time so I gladly jumped in. Dude, I was sitting on the couch and still had to GRAB IT to "ground myself" and remind my stupid brain that I'm not tumbling up and down but sitting on a damn couch. We didn't know back then that it was a primitive anti-poison defence mechanism dating back to cavemen times and foolishly assumed that it "simulates roller coaster"
Anyhow, at this stage the brain is susceptible to sensory mismatch, so it can cause these kinds of unpleasant sensations because it's convinced you're poisoned and need to throw up.
Conversely it is the best time to try ekhem... adult entertainment in VR. Because your brain is sooo easily fooled, it really wants to believe what it's seeing and... assumes certain things. What this does is it throws your way some ghost sensory inputs that aren't really there like an illusion of touch. I won't go into details as forum is PG7. Just trust me on this one
And those experiences are usually stationary, if it moves the camera it's a bad experience
(or, for higher difficulty level players lol).
Last but not least, VR won't eliminate traditional gaming. People are lazy slobs, they don't want to stand for X amount of hours and shoot baddies in Onward. And oftentimes I just don't feel like going in VR and play some popcorn-class 2d game like Overwatch. So yeah, 2d is still here to stay, for a long time. That said, I'd literally KILL for Cyberpunk 2077 in VR. CDPR plisss... At least it's not off the table like with Witcher. But, alas, also "not on launch".
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