Cybersickness: Is scrolling to infinity making you ill?

The term is cybersickness, a condition that first began to be studied as a side-effect of virtual reality (VR). Some VR experiences, particularly those that involve flying, spinning or falling, cause feelings in users that are similar to those caused by motion sickness. The symptoms typically persist for at least a few minutes after the VR headset had been taken off. It was to help VR headset and experience providers figure out how to get around this that Amitabh Varshney first began to study cybersickness.

Varshney is co-director of the Maryland Blended Reality Center, founded in 2017 at the University of Maryland (UMD) with the mission of developing augmented reality (AR) and VR technologies for medical application. He is also dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.

What’s interesting is the physiological nature of what causes the symptoms he is studying. In a truly meta clash between real and virtual, cybersickness is most widely believed to be the result of a mismatch in information received by the parts of the body that regulate vision and those that regulate balance. So your brain can verify, for instance, that your body isn’t moving, but your eyes are registering data that suggests you are, and forwarding that to the brain too.

“This dissonance between visual perception and tactile experience, between what the eyes see (the visual cues) and what the body is feeling (the vestibular cues), is believed to cause cybersickness,” Varshney says.

Like Zoom fatigue (the term for that almost existential exhaustion at the end of a long day of virtual meetings) and telephobia (the sense of distress associated with phone conversations), cybersickness has become more widespread amid the heightened use of screens for work and leisure in the pandemic.

The term cybersickness, incidentally, was coined by researchers Michael McCauley and Thomas Sharkey as far back as 1992, to describe the motion-sickness-like symptoms associated with VR and the illusion of self-motion.

REAL VS VIRTUAL

In May, Varshney and his research team at UMD published findings from a study that used electroencephalogram or EEG recordings of brain waves to measure what kinds of VR experiences cause the most severe cybersickness. Their study, Quantifying VR Cybersickness using EEG, was published in May in the Springer academic journal Virtual Reality.

It showed that even a minute-long virtual flythrough of a futuristic spaceport, in a simulation that included quick drops and gyrating turns, could cause cybersickness. “This is closely related to the kind of motion sickness caused by the visual and vestibular sensation mismatch of being on a boat or on an amusement ride,” says Varshney.

Because cybersickness does not include any physical movement, it is technically distinct from motion sickness. However, the end result is similar. Screen-based experiences do not typically trigger severe forms of cybersickness, Varshney adds.

On smartphones and other such screen devices, the scroll of options while shopping online or browsing through a social media feed have the power to cause cybersickness too, when moved at too fast a pace, for too long. To offset the symptoms, take a break from the screen as soon as you feel the symptoms coming on. Let your eyes rest on the horizon (or on any stationery object) so that the brain can register that the body is, in fact, not moving.

“A greater field of view (where the screen envelopes the user) leads to increased levels of reported cybersickness,” says Varshney. “Therefore, techniques to mitigate cybersickness have relied on adjusting the field of view.”