Introduction to Cybersickness
Despite advances in headset hardware and thoughtful software design, virtual reality can still be a nauseating, dizzying, and sweaty experience for some people. From horrific rides on virtual roller coasters to alarming leaps with Beat Saber, you don’t must consult with many individuals before someone shares a vomit-inducing experience. As a psychologist at York St John University, within the United Kingdom, I specialise in how wearers react to VR, and so have been in a main position to look at the evolving approaches to the issue of cybersickness.
Understanding Cybersickness
Significant progress in hardware—including improved field of view, higher resolution, and reduced latency—haven’t completely solved the problems. Software designs like adding virtual noses within the display, visual attention tasks aimed toward redirecting the user’s focus, and enhanced visual realism have all shown promise within the lab but have proven frustratingly difficult to copy consistently in the actual world. But a brand new wave of research may take the pressure off engineers and developers and hand it back to the buyer. The research focuses on DIY techniques that allow users to manage higher with VR.
Techniques to Reduce Cybersickness
There are different theories concerning the underlying causes of cybersickness. One idea focuses on postural instability. In real life, our brains interact with our vestibular and proprioceptive systems, which give us a general sense of where our heads or bodies are on the planet and create a physiological response that maintains our balance and stops us from falling over. Maintaining your balance is harder in virtual reality; the world looks prefer it’s moving, but your body doesn’t feel it.
Standing Like a Flamingo
Researchers in South Korea explored whether training people to balance in VR, to provide them greater postural stability, would also reduce cybersickness. Participants trained for 3 minutes, twice a day, for five days. In the control group, participants simply stood and watched an experience specifically chosen for its sickness-inducing movement patterns. In the training group, participants watched while they stood on one leg with their arms outstretched—the flamingo pose—for 30 seconds, followed by 30 seconds of standing on two legs, repeated thrice. At the tip of the week, each groups reported having fewer symptoms of cybersickness while viewing the training patterns.
Leaning Into the Motion
If standing like a flamingo doesn’t sound appealing, then you definitely can try being attentive to the motion within the virtual environment. This technique involves postural alignment, and just like the flamingo pose, it builds on the concept that postural instability is a vital consider cybersickness. Researchers within the Netherlands and Greece teamed as much as explore this. In their study, they opted for virtual driving simulations on a Meta Quest 3 headset. What mattered was how closely the participants aligned their bodies to the implied motion. Those who maintained closer postural alignment with the virtual motion experienced significantly less cybersickness.
Feeling the Vibes
Don’t fancy standing like a flamingo or leaning in all places? Well, how about vibrating the bones in your skull? This solution requires pressing into service a sort of wearable tech that isn’t yet commonly available—a vestibular stimulation device, which sends little vibrations to the inner ear. Researchers are testing these devices to treat seasickness and the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Companies like Otolith Labs are actually in search of approval to sell their products beyond the research community. Research on the University of Newcastle, in Australia, tested whether the devices could ease VR cybersickness by reducing the mismatch between vestibular cues and visual cues.
Over to the Consumer
Of course, none of those approaches is guaranteed to work. They’re based on pilot projects involving small numbers of participants and awaiting replication. What makes them different from the past is that anyone can try a minimum of the primary two at home at once, and there’s not an enormous hurdle to eventually trying out the third. At the tip of the day, cybersickness has many possible causes and associations. Perhaps future headsets will reduce the issue. Perhaps well-designed VR experiences will help, too. But probably the most promising path forward might be a mixture of engineering solutions, design solutions, and user-initiated approaches—corresponding to leaning in, standing like a flamingo, and vibrating those bones.
Conclusion
Only time will tell, but perhaps sooner or later VR’s sickening curse might be broken. The key to overcoming cybersickness may lie in a mixture of technological advancements, revolutionary software designs, and user-centric techniques. By exploring these different approaches and understanding the underlying causes of cybersickness, we will work towards making a more enjoyable and accessible virtual reality experience for everybody. With ongoing research and development, it’s possible that we’ll find an answer to this persistent problem and unlock the complete potential of virtual reality.
