Day: November 29, 2022

VR Sickness: A New, Old Problem

November 29, 2022 by 56 Comments

Have you ever experienced dizziness, vertigo, or nausea while in a virtual reality experience? That’s VR sickness, and it’s a form of motion sickness. It is not a completely solved problem, and it affects people differently, but it all comes from the same root cause, and there are better and worse ways of dealing with it.

If you’ve experienced a sudden onset of VR sickness, it was most likely triggered by flying, sliding, or some other kind of movement in VR that caused a strong and sudden feeling of vertigo or dizziness. Or perhaps it was not sudden, and was more like a vague unease that crept up, leaving you nauseated and unwell.

Just like car sickness or sea sickness, people are differently sensitive. But the reason it happens is not a mystery; it all comes down to how the human body interprets and reacts to a particular kind of sensory mismatch.

Why Does It Happen?

The human body’s vestibular system is responsible for our sense of balance. It is in turn responsible for many boring, but important, tasks such as not falling over. To fulfill this responsibility, the brain interprets a mix of sensory information and uses it to build a sense of the body, its movements, and how it fits in to the world around it.

These sensory inputs come from the inner ear, the body, and the eyes. Usually these inputs are in agreement, or they disagree so politely that the brain can confidently make a ruling and carry on without bothering anyone. But what if there is a nontrivial conflict between those inputs, and the brain cannot make sense of whether it is moving or not? For example, if the eyes say the body is moving, but the joints and muscles and inner ear disagree? The result of that kind of conflict is to feel sick.

Common symptoms are dizziness, nausea, sweating, headache, and vomiting. These messy symptoms are purposeful, for the human body’s response to this particular kind of sensory mismatch is to assume it has ingested something poisonous, and go into a failure mode of “throw up, go lie down”. This is what is happening — to a greater or lesser degree — by those experiencing VR sickness.

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DIY Self-Assembling 4D Printing

November 29, 2022 by 5 Comments

A 4D printed object is like a 3D printed object, but it changes shape or self-assembles when its environment changes. [Teaching Tech] has been reading about this technology and decided to try to replicate it using his conventional 3D printer.

His attempts to make a joint that changes when submerged in the water looked at several options: material that can absorb water, material that expands with temperature, and — the selected option — a dissolvable locking mechanism. Essentially, a hinge is held open by a water-soluble lock. When water dissolves the lock, the hinge can spring to its natural position.

Like most experiments, this one had a few false starts. But you always learn something each time. The final design had a TPU hinge and spring with PLA structural beams. The TPU required flat printing, so various pieces have to be rotatable so they can be placed in their final orientation after printing.

Usually, multi-material setups are for printing different colors of the same kind of plastic, it’s possible to use different plastics, but it can be tricky. As a compromise, [Teaching Tech] did one print using PLA and TPU, but printed the PVA locks in a separate pass and installed them on the print at the end. The first finished 4D print wasn’t entirely successful. The hot water slowly dissolved the PVA, but it also deformed the PLA. A redesign of the lock made a big difference.

We aren’t sure this is practical yet, but we are sure someone has a need for this technique and it could be made very practical with a little work. The last time we saw 4D printing, there were magnets involved. We think this is an exciting time where people aren’t just trying to get conventional printing to work well, but are pushing the envelope with new techniques like conical slicing, for example.

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A Handy Guide To The Humble BBS

November 29, 2022 by 32 Comments

Some of us who’ve been online since the early days fondly remember the web of yore — with its flashing banners, wildly distracting backgrounds, and automatic side-scrolling text. But there was a time before the worldwide web and the Internet as we recognize it today, and the way of communicating in this before-time was through Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS. There are still some who can cite this deep magic today, and this page is perhaps the definitive guide to this style of retrocomputing.

This how-to is managed by [Blake.Patterson] who is using a wide variety of antique machines and some modern hardware in order to access the BBSes still in service. He notes in this guide that it’s possible to use telnet and a modern computer to access them, but using something like an Amiga or Atari will give you the full experience. There are some tools that convert the telephone modem signals from that original hardware to something that modern networking equipment can understand, and while the experience might be slightly faster as a result, it does seem to preserve the nostalgia factor quite well.

For those looking for more specific guides, we’ve featured [Blake]’s work a few times in the past, once with an antique Epson PX-8 laptop and again with a modern ESP8266. It doesn’t take much computing power to get connected to these old services, so grab whatever you can and start BBSing!