Golding told me some people experience the eye straining symptoms of motion sickness because when we use a VR headset our eyes have to physically angle in a bit to compensate with it being strapped to our faces. There's the sensory conflict if you're hurtling through space and yet sat down-you may have experienced this at the cinema-and there's also the fact VR headsets are so close to you. It needs to do it in 5 to 10 milliseconds and if there's any kind of lag, it can cause sensory conflict, even if it seems real enough to you consciously."Īlthough lag is probably the most common reason why people experience motion sickness while using VR, there are other considerations at play too. But, it can't do it as fast as it needs to in most cases. For example, you move your head to the left and the screen shifts right. "As you move your head with a VR headset on," he said, "the advanced sensors in the headset will know you're moving it and refresh the screen accordingly to make it move the right way-this ensures what you're seeing is as real as possible. He explained that there are a number of reasons why VR can bring about the symptoms of motion sickness. I asked Golding what's specifically going on with virtual reality then, because although it's similar to being on a boat or plane, it's also different in many ways. But it essentially boils down to a conflict between either vestibular (your balancing system in your inner ear), visual (what you can see) or kinaesthetic (movement) inputs. There's a lot of interesting science going on here that you should read up on if you're interested. Of course, it's much more complicated than that. I asked Golding why we experience motion sickness and he told me it can all be boiled down to a sensory conflict or mismatch, which essentially means one sense is telling us one thing-your eyes say you're walking around a virtual world-and another sense tells you another-your body tells you you're sat down. That's eye strain, difficulty focusing and headaches. Golding explained that when we're talking about visual mismatches, as we experience in virtual reality, the oculomotor symptoms are sometimes the worst. ![]() He also told me motion sickness was actually used as a form of punishment and even therapy in the past which will make anyone who experiences it acutely wince in pain right now. ![]() He explained that there are all kinds of symptoms of travel sickness, from nausea and vomiting (the two most common) through to sweating, increased salivation, warmth, dizziness, drowsiness, headache, loss of appetite, decreased sensitivity to odours and many more, less frequent ones. Golding, from the faculty of science and technology at the University of Westminster, London. There are actually a range of theories as to why people experience motion sickness. This is a big deal because VR headsets may be used mainly for gaming and light entertainment for now, but if VR ends up playing a huge role in everything from on-the-job training to education to healthcare as it's expected to, it needs to be as comfortable, easy-to-use and non-discriminatory as possible. We wanted to explore why we experience motion sickness when we wear VR headsets, who feels the symptoms the most and what tech companies are doing to address the problems. ![]() When you've forked out a fortune for the tech and most likely bought it for entertainment or educational purposes, it's not as easy to ignore your symptoms or just hope they pass. Now Sony's PlayStation VR is promising to take the tech mainstream but more and more people are reporting that they experience symptoms of motion sickness while they're wearing VR headsets. ![]() Did you know that during a flight that experiences turbulence, more than 25 percent of the passengers will experience symptoms of motion sickness? And a fairly big proportion of them will likely throw up? Many of us are used to the symptoms of motion sickness as we travel - nausea, sweating and headaches - but we'll pop an anti-nausea pill, take some ginger or just wait it out, because it's an inevitability.
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