Why Am I Puking?
Is looking at a game or movie making you feel a little queasy in your VR headset? It doesn’t happen to everybody. But if it’s happening to you, there are things you can do to make it stop. Read on to find out why it’s happening, and what you can do about it.
About VR…
Seriously, What's Up With the Vomit?!!
Well, the problem is YOU. Specifically, it’s about you and what you don’t know as you dive into the virtual world for the first time. At least, that was the case for me. I know this because as per usual, the first thing I wanted to do when I got my headset was to try everything. I started buying anything I thought was gonna be even remotely fun. And being me, I decided to go big when I took my headset out for a first spin. So…what’s the first thing I tried? I decided to go on the rollercoaster app. HUGE mistake! My first time out was awesome, so I got my son involved by making him try it out. But after the first couple of times, I began to feel a little nauseous. A little nausea turned into a lot of vomit. My son had the good sense to chill on the rollercoaster and do something else. But I love rollercoasters, and I wanted to see if the virtual experience was as much fun as the real thing.
It was not.
So What's Making Me Hurl?
In a nutshell, it’s because your eyes are covered. The more completely covered they are, the deeper your sense of “immersion”, as in being totally immersed in darkness, which is what you want. So the only visual stimuli the eyes get comes from the headset. Nothing from the outside can get in through the eyes. If you’re wearing headphones, the headset also controls what you hear, so no audible stimuli gets in either. But the brain still receives sensory input from the other senses of touch, smell, and taste. And that’s where things can get weird.
IS THIS ALL IN MY HEAD?
Well, kinda. But not because you’re crazy or different or anything. Everyone handles the VR world in their own way. What makes you sick might not affect me in the slightest, and vice versa. But VR nausea is very real. It’s related to sea sickness. With seasickness, the flat, steady world your brain is used to seeing gets bounced around. Your eyes are perceiving an undulating, movable ground plane, while your feet are telling your brain that you are on flat, solid ground. In other words, your eyes are lying to you. The floor is still solid and flat, but your eyes don’t see it that way. The mixed signals your brain is getting from these two normally reliable sources of information can cause it to have a bit of a panic attack, resulting in nausea as it casts about looking to re-establish parity between the eyes and the feet…that thing we call “balance”. You haven’t completely lost your sense of balance, but it has definitely gotten a little turned around in 3D space.
The problem we’re having is the very immersion we bought this thing for in the first place. Covering my eyes with the headset does a job on my ability to know what’s what, and what’s where. My eyes and ears are lying to my other three senses, telling them that something is real when clearly it isn’t. They know it’s not real…they just can’t “feel” it. When you’re in VR, your brain has a hard time telling the difference between reality and virtual reality, which is entirely the point. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. But sometimes, the brain can get mixed signals because your sense of balance, smell, taste and touch doesn’t match what the brain knows to be “real”. The simulated environment the virtual world is showing you is exactly what you’ve asked it to show you, which is not what’s actually there. This is why I bought a headset in the first place. I want to experience reality as a virtual construct. And the only way to do this is to “lock out” all the legitimate sensory stimuli I get from the real world.
Just One More Thing
What can I do to stop it from happening?
It doesn’t have to be this way. With a few elementary precautions, you can avoid ever experiencing the nausea that can creep up on you in VR. Don’t let your first time be your last because you didn’t know any better.There’s a lot you can do to control the nausea. You can start by NOT choosing apps that make you nauseous. That doesn’t mean you won’t ever be able to handle such apps. It’s just not a good place to start when you’re new to VR. You have to grow into it gradually. In the same way you have to build up your sea legs before you take a cruise, you need to do the same with your VR legs. So don’t start off your VR adventure exploring apps that require you to walk, run, drive or fly…i.e., “motion”. Start off with apps that just let you sit still. Then try apps that require you to stand. When you’re ready to try moving around, treat yourself like a baby: Learn to walk before you run. Run before you drive. And learn to drive before you fly or try zero-gravity apps. If you begin by exploring apps that require you to be seated (a swivel chair is perfect for this), you can slowly build up your tolerance for motion.
Here are some other tips that will help you to learn to tolerate motion: