Cybersickness > Physical and emotional unease in virtual spaces
The Feels Guide is a field guide to internet emotion — new feelings, moody machines, emotional design, and wherever, whenever, however emotion and technology mix and mingle.
Cybersickness, a physical reaction to sensory disconnection in simulated environments, is accompanied by an emotional reaction too.
🔑 DEFINITION
The physical and emotional symptoms prompted by exposure to a virtual or simulated environment.
See also: digital rest stops, simulation sickness
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, at least as long as people have traveled by boat. Car sickness, too, has been around as long as people have been driving.
In the 1950s, the first example of motion sickness in simulated environments was documented by Bell Aircraft Corporation. In helicopter simulations, people experienced symptoms similar to motion sickness in other contexts. The same held true for space simulators. The Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, developed to measure the extent of the illness, is made up of nausea, oculomotor, and disorientation scales to reflect the main physical symptoms. Research on simulation sickness found that there were emotional effects where pilots developed anxiety in anticipation of the physical effects.
In the 1980s, motion sickness among video gamers was reported. Certain games like Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 became notorious for inducing motion sickness but the feeling is common to any game with movement whether Minecraft on a PC or World of Warcraft streaming on Twitch.
Cybersickness in virtual reality has been the subject of intense study. The images projected from a typical virtual reality headset have a major impact on the experience of motion sickness. Mismatched motion, limited view of view, refresh rate, motion parallax, and viewing angle all can induce motion sickness.
While cybersickness is most often associated with virtual reality systems and immersive games, it can also emerge from parallax scrolling on websites where a background image remains static but the foreground content moves. It can even occur when quickly scrolling, especially if some of the content is in motion as you scroll in a Netflix queue or social media newsfeed. On a page with several moving ads you may experience cybersickness too.
Originally thought to be caused by a visual disconnect, the sensory disruption is more extensive. It’s vestibular, or what your inner ear senses about your head movement and balance. It engages proprioception, or the sensory receptors in your body, too.
💗 EXPERIENCE
The physical symptoms of cybersickness — nausea, migraines, dizziness — are immediate and obvious. But symptoms like fatigue and disorientation can last for hours after exposure. Evidence suggests that women and people who are stressed, sleep-deprived, or have poor balance are more at risk but it can happen to anyone even if not prone to motion sickness in other contexts.
The emotional effects are insidious. Stress post-use can develop into dread of experiencing the effect again or longer-term anxiety, especially if using virtual reality is a requirement for work or there’s peer pressure to participate. Many people blame themselves for their motion sickness despite it being very common, so guilt can be associated with cybersickness too.
💪 PROTIP
It’s possible to gradually acclimate your senses to VR with repeated exposure, although how much people should train themselves to ignore conflicting sensory stimuli is an open question. Some traditional motion sickness fixes, like acupressure wristbands or ginger, aren’t as effective for cybersickness, but adjusting the field of view, interpupillary distance, and frame rate can help. Some designers are even added rest frames to help people stabilize, similar to digital rest stops on social media.
🤔 LEARN MORE
If you’re already wearing a VR headset may as well go all in and get some motion sickness relief
- If there’s a Healthline explainer, you know it’s real
- This New York Times piece rounds up the research about cybersickness’ prevalence and its long-term effects
- Here’s a video about managing the effects of cybersickness
- French startup Boarding Ring released motion sickness glasses that can also be used as an add-on to headsets
- Or you can scan this how-to for making adjustments to your game
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That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗
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The guide behind the guide
I’m Pamela Pavliscak, a tech emotionographer who studies emotion on the internet. I’m writing a book, All the Feels (Algonquin, 2024), about how technology is changing our emotional life — mostly for the better. I run an emotion tech consultancy called Subjective Labs and teach emotional design at the Pratt Institute in NYC. And I’m starting to share what I learn here and on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter.
