Feel sick when you play VR? It's pretty common and this Waterloo researcher wants to know why

When Zubi Khan has friends over to play virtual reality video games, it's not unusual for someone to feel a little sick to their stomach.

"I've had friends come over where they would put a headset on and then, like, almost immediately they'd feel like that sense of vertigoand then they have to take it off," Khan said in a phone interview from a park near his Toronto home.

"For me, I use a motorized wheelchair to get around, so I think part of that has made me kind of, like, immune to getting motion sickness because I'm used to being stationary while I'm moving," said the avid VR gamer andcontent writer for comic and gaming CGMagazine.

"The only time where I'll feel vertigo or feel kind of dizzy is if I haven't used [VR] in a long period of time."

Feeling sick after entering a VRenvironment is not uncommon. Similar to motion sickness, it's dubbed cybersickness.

People who get cybersickness may experience a headache, vertigo (when you feel what's around you is moving or spinning),disorientation, eye strain or nausea.

One study published in June 2021in thejournal Nature that looked at predictors of cybersickness reported between 22 and 80 per cent of people who useVR may experience it.The percentages variedwidely, depending on the intensity of the game and the headset theperson waswearing.

What's not as clear is who will get cybersickness and who won't.

But that's somethingMichael Barnett-Cowan, a researcher at Ontario's University of Waterloo (UW),wants to figure outbecause the technology isn't just about gaming. Virtual reality can be used for other applications, such as therapy or training.

LISTEN| Researcher Michael Barnett-Cowan explains importance of knowing whyvirtual reality can make you feel sick:

Research into why some people get sick

Barnett-Cowan isan associate professor in the university'sdepartment of kinesiology and health sciences, and director of theMultisensory Brain and Cognition Lab. For their research, heand his team collected data from 31 participants, andassessed how the subjects perceived the orientation of vertical lines or the subjective visual vertical.

"What we basically found in our research was that after being exposed to a fairly nauseating game in VR, people change the way that they process sensory information," Barnett-Cowan said.

The participants were given a task before playing VR to test how they use different cues for their sense of orientation in the world. Then they'd play a game in virtual reality for 30 minutes and be retested.

"Those that change the way that they process sensory information those were the ones that didn't get as sick," Barnett-Cowan said.

"Those that were really stubborn so the way that they do this task before VRis the same as the way they do it after VR, those guys got fairly sick."

Barnett-Cowan saidthe researchers were "pretty excited" to make that discovery, because the findings of this study, which has been published in the journal Virtual Reality, could prove to be "invaluable" for developers and designers of VR experiences.

William Chung isco-author of the study and a former UW doctoral student who isnow a postdoctoral fellow at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.

Chungsaid their test significantly predicted the severity of cybersickness symptoms.

"By understanding the relationship between sensory reweighting and cybersickness susceptibility, we can potentially develop personalized cybersickness mitigation strategies and VR experiences that take into account individual differences in sensory processing and hopefully lower the occurrence of cybersickness."

But Chung also cautioned this finding is only a first step and "there is still much to be explained."

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Marc Lanovaz, a professor at the Universit de Montral's school of psychoeducation, helped develop a virtual reality app to convey some of the day-to-day experiences people with autism face.

People worry VR will make them sick

Such research is good news for Robert Bruski, chief executive officerand co-founder of Ctrl V, a virtual reality arcade that was started in Waterloo and has grown to include locations in Ontario, Alberta, Delaware and Texas.

It concerns Bruskiwhen some people tell him they won't even try VR because they're afraid of getting sick.

"The vast majority of our content doesn't induce nausea," he said, noting staff put the games through a "very rigid 26-step vetting process" before people use them.

It means most people can feel confident putting on a headset to shoot orcs in Elven Assassin, slice up watermelon in Fruit Ninja or mess up an office in Job Simulator, he said.

For Bruski, research that will help everyone feel more comfortable entering a virtual reality environment is great, becausealong with the gamers who use his arcade, companies bring in workers to learn how to operate heavy equipment, schools have students use VR to learn chemistry or astronomy, and seniors use the technology to visit with gorillas or take a walk in Paris.

But even as researchers work on determining why some people experience cybersickness, Bruski said,that shouldn't keep anyone from trying VR now.

"The motion sickness is determined by the game itself and specifically the locomotion in the game. So if you have a good virtual reality provider or if you are aware of what causes it, then you can completely eliminate that possibility."

Khan saidit's pretty simple if you start to feel sick, take off the headset and wait a bit, but don't give up.

When his friends take off the VR headset, "I'll put it back on, and then they'll watch me play, and then I'll be having fun and we'll try it again."