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Measuring simulator sickness in VR: a guide for UX researchers
Understand and mitigate the impact of simulator sickness on VR users.
Given that up to 1 in 3 people [1, 2] experience some type of motion sickness, it’s highly likely that either you or someone you know has felt a bit queasy after using a virtual reality (VR) simulator for the first time. And this includes your users.
Although simulator sickness (SS) can occur with any variety of VR experiences, moving experiences such as high-speed rollercoasters and driving simulators tend to be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon, especially in the absence of haptic feedback. Your eyes receive input that you are moving, but the rest of your body cannot feel that motion. This dissonance leads your body to the same physiological response as if you were poisoned, commonly referred to as the Sensory Conflict Theory.
Unfortunately, determining ahead of time which individuals are most likely to experience SS is still a subject of research and is therefore not easy to predict. However, for those researching solutions to improve their users’ experience (UX) and feel more comfortable in VR, knowing how to measure the signs is a good first step to refining recommendations for your various user groups.
VR immersion and its effect on the body is still a relatively new area of research, especially since low-cost VR solutions have only been around for a few years as of the time of this article. As a result, much of this information is either considered taboo to talk about in industry or confined solely to dense academic literature.
The goal of this article is to help summarize my learnings from academic literature reviews and my industry UX research experience alike.
If you would like to a more general overview of design considerations to avoid simulator sickness, that is the subject of a future article. This post is focused on recognizing the symptoms in your users and systematically correcting for it from a usability testing perspective. Be sure to give me a follow if you want to see more content like this!
