Indeed, and just a quick Google suggests that a lot of people have had nausea issues with the Rift e.g.

http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-2355037/minimize-oculus-rift...

Totally correct. As someone who has been using the Oculus DK2 since it's release, I can personally state that nausea can have many underlying sources, but the most frequent is the conflicting information your vestibular system is receiving: equilibrium vs. vision.

The Rift itself, in conjunction with good software, is excellent at tracking both rotation and translation motion and keeping the display in sync. More often than not, the nausea one experiences has to do with locomotion within the game. Spinning your character around with your mouse, for example, produces a spinning sensation with no corresponding input from your equilibrium, resulting in a sick feeling in some people.

The good news is: Many people are able to "get their VR legs" by starting with simple experiences and slowing introducing more complex ones.

It's not the headset that causes the nausea, it's the software.

Well yes, an oculus without software is just a very heavy blindfold, and those are unlikely to cause nausea.

The experience is software + hardware, so I don't see what distinction you're trying to make.

The parts are swappable. Going to a different headset isn't going to make you less prone to nausea if the software is no good. And if the software is good, you'd not get nausea even on a lesser headset. The headset is not the determining factor of nausea. Even the DK2 did its job and did it well enough.

It's like blaming the plate for overeating.

I don't think consumers will care who is really to blame, they'll only come away with a bad experience, word will spread, and demand will drop.

To use a food analogy: You sell pizza, it is the best pizza in town, but the delivery driver sucks and food is constantly arriving cold or smashed. Your patrons aren't going to care that you always blame the delivery driver for the problems, or that the pizza COULD be good if not ruined, they're going to either shop somewhere else or quit buying delivered pizza. Same thing here, regardless who ruined the thing, the experience is still the same.

Except in this shitty analogy, I hire the driver, so if the pizza is bad because of the driver, it is my fault. Oculus doesn't hire most of the VR game developers in the world.

I absolutely would not blame the restaurant if my GrubHub delivery guy ruined the order.

And regardless, what the mythical "average consumer" does or doesn't do is immaterial. You should know better.

Except in that shitty analogy, the way I understood it, Ocolus is the delivery guy. The Rift is not the product, its just the delivery mechanism: the games are the product.

> It's like blaming the plate for overeating.

I don't know if "blame" is the right word, but eating off a large plate does make you more prone to overeating.

Nausea, headaches, (and a bad experience) can be caused by things like low resolution and low (max) framerates, for example. Software cannot do anything about those issues.