The hardware does matter. There will be VR games that don't induce motion sickness in anyone, because they don't involve movement at all (other than actual movement of your real head, reflected 1:1 in the virtual world). When people think of VR they naively imagine virtual Call of Duty, but that's not going to happen the way people imagine it. FPS is a genre designed for traditional screens; VR will require new genres. I doubt ports of traditional FPS games to VR will even be very popular.

Precisely. Simulation and piloting games will be the prime target for VR, which are coincidentally my favorite genres. I can't wait to try flight sims (e.g. DCS Warthog) and piloting games (e.g. Star Citizen). It will be a whole new experience, with no motion sickness potential whatsoever.

> …with no motion sickness potential whatsoever.

Who's making such a claim about VR? People who think Michael Abrash made this claim simply didn't read his white paper closely enough. Here's what he said:

> …VR may be best with slow movement and a lot of up-close interaction, in which case we’ll have to learn how to create fun games around that.

Longer quote and more discussion in my earlier comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249118

There's always motion sickness potential. When you move your head there is a delay before the image on the screen updates; make this small enough and you won't notice, make it large enough and the world will appear laggy and unresponsive.

It's definitely less likely to cause sickness than some of the other genres, but not guaranteed safe.

> When you move your head there is a delay before the image on the screen updates; make this small enough and you won't notice

Hence why hardware does matter

>The hardware doesn't matter; some people just cannot stand certain forms of stimulation-without-movement that occurs with virtual reality

While it won't help every case, for the vast majority the motion sickness is alleviated when the head tracking is better (accurate positional tracking and low latency).

You can make pretty much anyone feel sick if you add enough lag to the display.

Apparently a lot of people who were getting motion sickness from the first occulus dev kit are now fine with the latest hardware. It turns the screen off after the frame is displayed so the amount of time that you are looking at something that is simply not right is extremely small. All the reviews say it makes a huge difference to people who got bad motion sickness.

i'd have to guess the hardware to some extent, and at least the algorithms applied on top of it, can make a difference in many cases.

that is to say, you can probably not eliminate motion sickness entirely in all cases, but without care it's probably not hard to catalyze either.