VR still makes 40-70% of players want to throw up, and that's a huge problem for the companies behind it

Let me tell you why Apple’s £3,500 VR headset announcement made my heart sink. I know this is a PC site, but when an industry player that big tries to make VR a part of everyday life it affects everyone. PC gaming doesn’t exist in a bubble.

It’s not because the idea of seeing my iPhone menu buttons everywhere I look, all day, forever, is so nightmarish, or because £3,500 for a toy was presented like a perfectly rational purchasing decision. Me and VR, we’ve just never hit it off.

My first experience of it was about as bad as you could possibly engineer, if you were deliberately trying to make someone nauseous. An Oculus DK2, a PC that couldn’t quite run a rollercoaster demo at a high-enough framerate, and a slightly-too-hot office full of people watching me as I put on the headset. Before I’d completed the second loop-de-loop, it was clear that VR and I were not going to be good friends.

Like a great many people, virtual reality makes me feel pretty sick. It’s not that I haven’t tried to push past it, either. There’s a lot of talk about getting your sea legs in VR, acclimating to the strange sensation of perceiving motion with your eyes and expecting to feel it with your body but getting nothing. I saw the potential VR had for sim racing. I bravely soldiered through three stages in Dirt Rally, my stomach tying itself into a balloon animal every time I put two wheels up onto a verge and my cockpit view went diagonal. But the nausea never went away.

Steel horses

Before the days of steel horses and piston-powered locomotion, the likely explanation for feeling like you’re whizzing around while stationary was that you ate, drank or rubbed up against something you shouldn’t have. You’ve taken on toxins that are impeding your perception, and your body needs to get those toxins out. Fast.

It’s just a theory. And in fact, a theory from 1977. But it’s the science world’s best guess so far. What’s more, we don’t know why some people are so much more susceptible to it than others, but we know that there are numerous markers that make us more likely to experience it. Women, as mentioned previously, are more likely than men to get VR sick. Asian people are more likely than other ethnicities to experience motion sickness in general. Age is another factor—we’re more likely to experience it between the ages of 12 and 21 than in our adulthood... until we reach our 50s, upon which the likelihood increases again.

Apple forgot to mention that in its announcement though, didn’t they? Just like Facebook did when they launched various Oculus and Meta Quest products that can, did, and will make most of us feel sick. They’ve invested billions into making the platform happen, and they’ll be damned if eight years of lukewarm consumer reception is going to change their plans.

What are the solutions? Since we’re not sure of the cause, that’s a tricky one. But there are promising developments that all endeavour to ground us in our surroundings and give our vestibular system the context it needs not to go into purge mode. The hope is that if VR does become more mainstream, the need to address this issue becomes more urgent and both big tech funding and market demand brings about a solution. In the meantime, if you want me I’ll be in a dark room with my head between my knees.