Before the Oculus Rift VR headset ships to its first preorder customers in 12 days, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey invited select press to a major preview event, which I wrote about here. I touched on some nausea issues, mostly in terms of particular examples of comfort and discomfort alike, but I skipped the larger question of the platform's immersive feeling in general.

That's because I spent roughly four hours after the preview event feeling sick. I felt stuck in a dizziness spell the likes of which I'd never experienced in over a year of major, lengthy VR preview events. In the past, I'd used more ineffective VR tracking systems, particularly Google Cardboard, and I'd used earlier Oculus kits with more "screendoor" problems and other visual issues.

What was so bad about this one?

The answer is hard to pinpoint because it didn't have anything to do with the crisp screens or otherwise solid hardware. The problem popped up randomly throughout roughly five hours of Oculus event headset demos (which, as an aside, left a "raccoon eyes" imprint on my face). It took a developer fixing the issue on one demo for me to figure out one possible reason: the headset may have occasionally lost webcam tracking.

Certainly, some tracking disconnect occurred, because that demo's before-and-after comparison helped me realize that in the "before" situation, my tracking was sometimes similar to that of a Samsung GearVR—meaning that relative tracking worked, so long as my head was still, while absolute tracking of my head's spot in space did not work. This limitation was mixed with what felt like a "rounded" tracking effect on occasion, where the tracking moved my head at what felt like a more curved path than my head had actually traveled.

The more dangerous issue was that this tracking mistake mix would not happen consistently. Normally, when a VR game's tracking fails hugely, I can tell immediately and am therefore quick to stop playing, close my eyes, or take my headset off. (I'm relatively sensitive to VR discomfort issues but find myself able to tolerate bad scenes for a review's sake, at any rate.) Conversely, at the Oculus event, I played extended semi-uncomfortable sessions for long enough to really scramble my noodle. If I wound up super-woozy as a result, imagine how VR newbies will feel.

Oculus may very well fix this issue in the next two weeks. In the meantime, launch game developer Playful Corp, the creator of pack-in launch title Lucky's Tale, confirmed that it had seen this issue in testing and "were unable to repro" the issue. The team actually had to restart my Lucky's Tale demo twice before the tracking issue disappeared. Additionally, Oculus Rift is not currently equipped with any feedback system to tell players that they may be having a tracking issue and to either stop playing, adjust their webcams, or run through any sort of calibration app. This struck me as odd, because the Oculus Rift is quick to put up a notice on a PC screen when a player has taken his or her headset off.

As of press time, my questions to Oculus about this tracking issue remained unanswered. Hopefully, that's because the company is pounding away at the bug in question so that no paying customers have to go through what I did this week. Until then, though, we hope that Oculus has a better answer come March 28 then supplying buyers with their own bowls of stomach-comforting ginger chews, just like the company did at the San Francisco preview event.