02. What Is Simulator Sickness?

First up in the topic of movement in VR is a phenomenon called simulator sickness. Simulator sickness is a type of induced motion sickness which is slightly different than typical motion sickness.

Simulator sickness differs from regular motion sickness because it stems from conflicts between what your body is perceiving, and what your eyes are seeing.

There are a whole host of issues that contribute to simulator sickness including but not limited to user control, distortion correction, frame rate, device tracking, movement, and even just being genetically more sensitive to it.

People can’t toughen up, they can’t power through it. The recommended course of action to take when you begin to exhibit symptoms of simulator sickness is to immediately take your HMD off and wait until they subside, which can be as fast as a few minutes, or as long as a few hours.

We don’t want to make people sick or uncomfortable when using our applications, so we need to do everything we can to combat sim sickness for our users!