HDR on displays is actually largely uncomfortable for me. They should reserve the brightest HDR whites for things like the sun itself and caustics, not white walls in indoor photos.

As for tone mapping, I think the examples they show tend way too much towards flat low-local-contrast for my tastes.

> She recommended a few cafes, and I went to look at their menus. To my surprise, I couldn’t access their menus. They were only on Instagram, and it’d force a sign in before showing me the content.

Wow. There are over 30 restaurants within a mile of where I live, and not one of them uses Instagram to host anything as far as I know. They always have a real web page, even if it’s cobbled together on Wix or some other horrible thing, and the menu is invariably a PDF (because they had to send something to the printer, and they don’t know how to put something nicer on the web). Sometimes you have to allow third–party JS to get their webpage to render so that you can get the PDF though.

Well, I guess the national chains don’t post a PDF these days. They give you a real menu and even offer online ordering and delivery. Most people probably don’t need to look at a McDonald’s menu to know what they sell though.

Exposure therapy. Just play for a very short amount of time, even 2-3 minutes, then stop for a while. Do this over and over. Always keep the duration below the threshold of your motion sickness. Eventually your brain gets used to playing without being sick and you'll be able to play for longer and longer periods. Always stop the moment you feel motion sick in any way - don't try to push through as doing that makes it worse. This is what I had to do to get used to games in VR, and it worked great. I can now play for hours without issue.

To add the counter: A website shold always have a manual control and not try to guess my timezone or preferences based around that. Since I typically use a device in well lit conditions and detest dark mode as it is, not having a manual switch for when things go wrong kicks off a bad experience.

This is an important topic and I don't think this article is really getting into all the important things that have been learned about it over the past few years, primarily by VR developers.

Too much of the current dialogue is about how players can "get over" it. This is silly. There are demonstrable, proven things which cause motion sickness via the visual system. Unfortunately there are some irreconcilable issues with doing certain activities (ie moving/turning without player input) in VR games so it's either abandon those activities or blame the users. Considering Meta has now poured nearly $85bn into their AR/VR effort, there's a lot on the line and the last thing they're going to do is admit that the technology is fundamentally limited to certain activities.

Here's an early video from Oculus when it was still a bunch of enthusiasts chasing something magic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DgfiDEqfaY&t=1356s

But nowadays you have people that play VR and have "VR Legs", and then you have the rest of us who have normal human brains and normal human eyes and don't want to take it upon ourselves to relearn how the world works so we don't puke when playing an FPS.

The bottom line is that the human visual system is very sensitive to acceleration, especially in the peripheral vision. Acceleration can be linear, angular, or even in odd dimensions like during an FOV shift which god forbid a game would do without telling you.

The easiest thing you can do to save yourself is get a smaller display or sit further away so that your peripheral vision is spared any of the motion and your fovea is gathering the majority of it. This is why "tunnel vision" in VR works for some people.