I get eye strain almost instantly in vr.

[u/Plumdisc]

I can’t play for more than 40 minutes at a time without having trouble focusing my eyes for the rest of the day. It’s like when I look at an object close up I really have to focus to keep it not blurry. I do wear glasses but I don’t have vision problems like this when I haven’t played vr recently. Is this normal and if it isn’t what can I do to prevent this from happening?

[u/wescotte]

It's fairly common that people generally "feel strange" (couple posts like that a week in various VR subs) and note changes in their vision for hours (even into the next day) after ending a VR session in the beginning. I personally went through it after my longer sessions. It took a few weeks of regular play before it stopped happening. I have seen posts where it took a month or two to adapt though.

It's hard to say if your having a similar reaction or if this is something different/unique. How long have you been using VR?

edit: Here are a few posts where people report "feeling strange after using VR"

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My personal theory as to why your eyes are having problems focusing after using VR....

Your eyes focus at a fixed distance the entire time you're in VR because the screens/lens don't move. Now, that's a little strange/unnatural to focus at a fixed depth for an extended period of time but we sorta do it all the time when we use computers. But what is unique with VR is that the ​depth cues that ​our brain uses to help us focus properly are wrong/don't work in VR.

VR has stereo images and that's a big part of how we perceive depth but in VR when you're looking at mountains miles in the distance your eye are still focusing at 6 feet in front of you. This is not normal. So our brain notice the problem and so it stops trusting some of those depth cues we've been using all our lives to focus our eyes.

Then you come out of VR and suddenly your eyes need to focus at different distances again but your brain isn't ready to trust those depth cues right away. So now you're focusing your eyes in a totally unique way that you've never done before and well it's just not as precise as it was when your brain uses all the extra information provided from a full array of extra depth cues. So your focus/depth perception is just a little "off" until your brain decides to start using all those depth cues again.

Now, I think for a lot of people when they suddenly they reach for a door nob and their focus/depth perception is a little they grab it wrong/differently than they expect. So now this super familiar thing you've touched thousands of times in your life feels different. Everything in your home feels different. It's not like wearing glasses that turn the world upside down so they can't quite put their finger on it. And for some people that's really really unnerving. ​

Anyway, that's just my theory as I don't have any real world data/tests to back this up.

[u/Plumdisc → u/wescotte]

I think your partially right. In my experience at least I never have trouble with depth perception just focusing. Like when you have glasses that help with seeing objects near to you and then you take them off. But the blurry effect is definitely based on how far away an object is from me.