ipd adjustment and vomiting

i bought a Meta Quest 3 because i wanted to be productive in VR with an immersive desktop and multiple monitors. instead i spent the first session fighting the urge to vomit.

the problem was IPD, or interpupillary distance, which is the distance between the centers of your pupils in millimeters. every VR headset needs this number to align its lenses with your eyes, and if you get it wrong everything feels slightly off. your brain gets conflicting signals from your eyes and your inner ear, and the result is nausea. not the subtle kind either, but the kind where you can't look at a screen, can't focus on anything, and rendering any sort of work is out of the question because your body is screaming at you to stop.

i set it wrong because i forgot what my old Quest 2 used. i owned one years ago and apparently it was set to 63mm, but i didn't remember that when setting up the Quest 3 so i just guessed, which was a bad idea.

measuring properly

after the nausea subsided i measured my IPD properly this time using the ruler method:

1. stand in front of a mirror
2. close your left eye
3. align the 0mm mark of a ruler with the center of your right pupil
4. without moving the ruler, open your left eye and close your right eye
5. read the measurement at the center of your left pupil

i got somewhere between 62 and 63mm, but it was hard to tell exactly because my glasses prescription is overdue and everything's blurry at ruler distance. i went with 63 for now since that's what my Quest 2 apparently used.

this video by Jorange covers the process well if you want a visual guide.

since fixing it

i haven't experienced any dizziness or nausea since. the headset feels natural and i can actually use it for extended sessions without wanting to die. the difference between wrong IPD and right IPD is genuinely night and day.

i might try 62 at some point to see if it's better. the test is simple enough because if i vomit, it was wrong.

at least it works now

the whole point of buying the headset was to have a multi-monitor setup without the actual monitors, and now that the IPD is right it actually delivers on that. here's what my virtual desktop looks like right now.